We used to live at Sawdust House. It was our home. It was yellow and white with a red roof. Mum and Dad bought Sawdust House when I was a baby. It had an upstairs, a downstairs and a cellar. At first, the upstairs was cold and old, but we gradually moved up there as well, and I got a room of my own. The heat from downstairs rose upstairs, and the cold air from upstairs flowed into the downstairs hall.
Everything in Sawdust House was a work in progress. Every time someone came to visit and Mum showed them round, she would always say either what things had been like or what they would be like one day.
‘There used to be a wall and a door here,’ she explained in the hall. ‘I’ve got the wallpaper ready for here,’ she said upstairs, where the walls were covered only by raw timbers and shreds of old yellow backing paper. ‘There used to be a balcony here, before that new extension. You could make this into two rooms if you wanted to.’
Mum didn’t even realize what the house really looked like. Sometimes, when we looked at photos that showed, say, windows with no flashings, electricity cables dangling like Christmas wreaths, old wallpaper half torn off the wall, or other unfinished things, Mum would exclaim: ‘How awful, just look at that wall! When will that get done? I do have new wallpaper ready and waiting…’
Our home was called Sawdust House because its walls were filled with sawdust. Every time Dad did some work, he was showered with sawdust. When you slammed the cellar door, out scattered a handful; when a doorway was widened, out spilled a sackful. Sawdust rested on top of the ceiling lights and on the attic floor. It even buzzed around in the cooker fan.
All the sawdust was collected. It was shovelled into sacks and poured on to the attic floor. Dad said that the attic was the woolly hat of the house and the sawdust kept us warm.
Every now and then we had renovation days. Then Mum and Dad ate their breakfast standing up and no one could spare the time to be with me. Often no one even remembered to make cocoa. On a renovation day, it was cold inside because both downstairs doors were open, and Mum and Dad walked in and out with pieces of bread in their hands.
Once, all the things in the living room were carried into the kitchen. The whole of the downstairs had suddenly shrunk and two rooms had been squeezed into one: dining table, sofa, cheese plant, fridge, armchairs, dresser and TV had all been sucked into one room, where you barely had space to walk.
By contrast, the living room had grown. It was so big it echoed. I wanted to dance, but Mum and Dad said no. Mum said I should watch TV, but the remote control had gone missing and the TV was stuck on channel five, so I was allowed to dance a bit before work started.
Only the bookcase stood in its plastic wrapping in the middle of the living-room f loor. The bookcase had always leaned against the same wall, and now it seemed as if a piece of the wall itself had been moved to the centre of the room and packaged in white plastic, making it ghostlike. Behind the bookcase, yellow wall was revealed. Elsewhere in the room, the walls were pale brown, but you could see patches of yellow where shelves, pictures and the dresser had been unscrewed and taken away, leaving sharp shadows. The shadow of a shelf, the shadow of a dresser, the shadows of three pictures. I stared in amazement: I had never realized there was so much wall behind the furniture!
Dad stroked the wall with his hand and twisted nails out of it with a hammer. The shelf screws had left big holes, as had the curtain rails and windowsills.
Then Dad unscrewed the wall sockets.
‘Dad, you’re going to die!’ I shouted, because you’re not allowed to touch electrical things, especially not with anything sharp.
‘It’s OK,’ Dad said.
He beckoned me over. We looked together at the socket cover as it came off.
You could see inside the wall underneath, where there was a secret passage for electric wires. A brown and a blue lead ran there. The socket contained a metal plate, small screws and other metal parts.
‘That’s a bit like the socket’s skeleton,’ Dad said.
I know about skeletons because I’ve read a skeleton book. An earthworm hasn’t got a skeleton, but a snake has. But an earthworm does have a ladder. And I thought, the wires are the house’s veins, because they run inside the walls, from one room to another.
Mum stroked the wall, found another nail and twisted it out with the hammer. Then she said, ‘Saara, come and stand against this wall.’
And I went and stood where the dresser had stood before. Mum took a thick felt-tip pen out of her pocket and drew a line just above my head. Next to the line, she wrote: 12.5.2007.
‘Stay there,’ Mum said. ‘Don’t move.’
She started drawing a line round me. She started next to my shoulder, drew down along my arm, tickling me in the gaps between my fingers, then curved into the armpit and down the side as far as the floor. Then up along the other side. The pen smelled; it had spirits in it. Children aren’t allowed to touch them because they won’t ever come off. Or child. I’m an only child. Finally, Mum drew round my hair. Two plaits and bobbles. When the felt tip came back to my shoulder, Mum said, ‘That’s it, now you can jump out.’
And I jumped out and looked at my picture in the middle of the living-room wall. It was like Peter Pan’s cut-out shadow in the film. Feet planted slightly apart, shirt tails swinging.
‘If someone moves in here after us and they do the house up, they’ll find this and see what kind of girl used to live here.’
‘Oh, where are we moving?’ I asked.
‘Nowhere.’ Mum laughed. ‘We’ll never move from here! We’ve got too many projects to finish.’
Dad laughed, though it didn’t sound like a laugh. Then he wrote Saara next to the picture Mum had drawn.
‘Oh, but aren’t you big?’ Mum sighed, looking at me and the picture in turn. ‘Are you really that big?’
‘You did draw round the edges,’ Dad said, but he sounded surprised himself.
I went to stand next to the picture, to prove the point.
Then I went to get my own felt tips and coloured in the picture’s clothes: turquoise tights and a stripy top. I also drew eyes, cheeks, a mouth and hair bobbles. I thought, this is what’s best about renovation days! Bread eaten standing up, sharp objects pushed into sockets, walls decorated with felt tips and space to dance in the living room.
Mum and Dad started on a panelling job. Dad sawed planks in the backyard and Mum carried them in through the porch door. Dad used a spirit level, a tape measure and a pencil; Mum just her eyes and a hammer. After three planks, they started on a renovation argument. Though Mum and Dad always did renovation work together, they always thought the other one did it wrong. This time Mum started it because she thought it was stupid to use a spirit level in an old wooden house where all the floors, walls and corners were all wonky anyway. Dad thought Mum didn’t do anything properly and never finished anything she started, leaving him to patch up all her unfinished jobs. The quarrel was always the same, because neither of them changed their way of doing things. This time Mum was annoyed just because Dad had recently bought a new spirit level.
Even so, we had new, light, wood-panelled walls by the evening. No one had the energy to look at them properly, though, because it was dark in the room by then and everyone was too tired. But in the morning, Mum came downstairs and saw Dad had tidied up before going to bed. Mum smiled at the new white walls, and inside the wall, in my tights and a stripy top, I smiled, too. Then Mum decided to make pancakes for the whole family.
MUM IN THE MORNINGS. In the mornings, Mum wears glasses and she walks straight to the coffee machine. She only goes for a wee once she’s pressed the button. Her thin dressing gown billows as she crosses the living room and opens the curtains. Mum opens the window, or, if it’s a warm summer morning, the porch door, and says, ‘Ah.’
That’s what Mum’s like in the mornings.