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Six months later

‘Daddy! Daddy! Your turn!’

Gracey’s head hovers, a pale orb radiating impatience at the edge of Tom’s vision. Behind the tiny features of his daughter’s face, a four-year-old mind is committed to this game of I Spy. A distraction initiated by his wife to counter Gracey’s fidgeting.

It’s Tom’s turn. Again. Part of being Dad. Taking it for the team. But Tom can’t think of a clue because of a preoccupation with other matters. His wife and daughter are present inside the van, sitting alongside him. But they are akin to passengers standing on a station platform, blurred into the background by a train of fast-moving thoughts, divided into multiple carriages. His attention is split between driving the unfamiliar van, glancing at the satnav to avoid missing the turning to the village, and a mental squall of memories. Recollections threaded with imagined disasters and joyous scenarios of his family’s future in their new home; all blooming, racing, fading, blooming.

Nor can he explain his distraction to Gracey. His disbelief. His failure to acknowledge the enormity of this moment in their new life that is soon to start in their own home. One they own. Theirs. Home. The word has not carried such power since his own childhood.

Tom doesn’t feel like himself today and imagines a new persona is required to match his newly acquired status of home-owner. Only he doesn’t know what the role demands.

Now he has the keys and deeds to the house, he feels as if he has stepped out of a murky room, in which his anxiety obscured every feature and detail. A room he was waiting to leave for a long time. A confined space he’d rented that belonged to someone else. A landlord who might tell him to leave at any time, or charge him even more for occupying the room’s dismal confines. And yet the restless, impatient feeling of waiting to leave that room has also continued into this morning, as if he has only succeeded in stepping into another similar room, in which his anxiety will obscure every feature and detail. All over again.

Surely, he’ll adjust in time. But, right now, the title of home-owner is incongruous. Comparisons with other life-changing experiences of his past are a poor fit but are all he has to go on. Like meeting Fiona, his wife, whom he’d desired for so long, from afar, before they courted. After he’d finally summoned the courage to ask her out, there had been a long wait for her to contact him and he’d ached with a ghost of abdominal pain. During their first date, when her hand folded into his unselfconsciously, he’d recognised that they were together. She’d charted a new course in his life; one much better than the route he’d floundered upon alone.

Gracey. A miracle preceded by two years of futile attempts to create a child. Almost giving up and then, nine months later, she was swaddled in white towels and nestled within his arms, blinking milky eyes at him for the first time. He’d never entirely believed he’d ever be a father.

Dreams coming true. Longing requited.

But this…

Somehow, owning a home and no longer renting from the negligent and unscrupulous while living in a state of perpetual compromise and dissatisfaction, had been the hardest thing of all to achieve. Because, money .

‘Daddeee! Come! On! Your! Go!’

‘How about I go.’ Conciliatory, from Fiona.

‘No. It’s Daddy’s go!’

There was an order to things, rules. Many not written down but existing. Even a four-year-old could tell you that. And in the order of things, he was never destined to be a home-owner. What he’d been through to become one had made him older and more tired than he imagined he could ever be. Just to get here, maybe he’d burned through wires that can never be replaced.

Now, with the keys in his pocket, so hot and uncomfortable against his thigh, he obsesses about what he must earn to pay tradesmen; and earn to cover the repairs and improvements that he needs to fashion with his own hands to make their home habitable. And he suspects that more of his fusebox is destined to blacken in the year ahead.

One thing at a time, mate. We’re in.

Tom distracts himself from himself to make a half-hearted attempt at giving Gracey a clue. ‘Something beginning with…’ He has nothing. His eyes dart behind the windscreen, side window, searching. ‘Beginning with…’

Gracey tenses, gripped by the desperate importance of guessing before her mum.

Outside the van a vast, open spread of farmland glides by. But there’s little to provide reasonable clues for his daughter to swipe at. Grass . Fence . Cow . House . Tree . Gate . Road . All of it has already been suggested and guessed. There is nothing else.

I’ve never seen a soul here. No one shows themselves in the dismal wet fields, patchworked into sections by wire fences. No one toils behind the tufted vestiges of hedgerow. Few birds mark the sky beside the desultory spectre of a crow. As for trees, only spindly copses sprout on higher ground, shorn or shattered into piteous last stands; the woods have been whittled skeletal behind the wire of internment camps, to make room for more empty fields. And cement barns. Telegraph poles. Litter in the roadside ditches. Burst animals on tarmac, smeared, further compressed. Denatured land. Denuded. Scrub grubbed out, scraped away. Ugly and too neat. Empty. Industrial even. Blasted. Nowhere for anything to nest, take root, hide. Green but made desolate by the impact of the nearest settlement’s conquest. These are factory-farmed lowlands orbiting a city. A ring of ice encircling a blackened planet.

‘Daddy! Your go!’

And then they cross the border. To their bit.

Exactly when they pass from the bleak to the fecund isn’t clear. The B road narrows and some oak branches drape the road for a stretch, darkening the interior of the cab. The route then dips, veers west. A turn, a steep ascent later and the outlook changes. Even Gracey is distracted by the carousel of shadow and sunlight upon a wilder earth and upon the windscreen.

Not so flat here either. Hills ruffle the skyline and contour the land with smooth undulations. Patches of trees extend into actual woods that you can’t see the far side of from the nearest edge. A buzzard hovers. Then another. Wood pigeons flap for cover beneath them. Tonal shifts emerge. Varieties of cereal crops occult the liverish earth, combed by giants. Odd hay meadows are pebble-dashed with pastel. Hedgerows thicken to spike outwards and suggest internal hoppings and buzzings of minute life. Ancient trees instil repose, austere sentinels drowsing in the corner of fields. Below their muscular branches mooch caramel cows patched with chocolate. Above the vista, the dusty sheets of ashen cloud break apart into cumulus, plump like white cotton.

The distinction between back there and here startles Tom. As it did when he came here for the viewings. The last of his preoccupation seeps away on a cloud shadow retreating over a steep hill. And look over there! A village’s church spire needling between ash trees, spiking the blue heavens, evoking a sense of fire-lit interiors, citrusy hops, roast pork, smoke-cured beams, owls, bats, leaping deer, chattering streams, green paths, mill wheels, rope swings and bluebells. That must be the village of Eadric.

This is practically another country and he’s an immigrant, gazing over the railings of a big white ship; his mind one big eye sucking at the light, the dreamy details picked out and cherished.

‘Here we are,’ Fiona says, wearily, breaking her husband’s reverie. ‘End of the line, folks.’

Beyond the dirt-speckled glass of the windscreen, an old house darkens a narrow lane. Home.

The pale blur of Gracey’s face closes and she pushes at Tom’s shoulder to return her father to her need.

‘Something beginning with H,’ Tom finally says.

An inhalation from Gracey, a breathless pause. Her head swivels about. ‘Hair? Hedge!’

‘Haunted house?’ Fiona offers.

Since leaving the flat they’ve rented for eight years, and all that Gracey has ever known as home, Fiona has said little beyond attending to her daughter’s needs; snacks, amusements, distractions. Taking their daughter on a journey longer than thirty minutes requires a steeling of the nerves, deep breaths and moments alone with closed eyes. But Tom’s wife is smiling now. Sort of.

The van slows. Tom laughs. ‘Home!’

Gracey’s outraged. ‘Didn’t gimme no clues!’

‘Dufuses!’ Tom rolls the van across the end of the drive and their front garden is unveiled. A rectangle of spiky weeds and unruly grasses with unkempt borders, mopping broken tarmac.

Blotched by verdigris and speckled with moss, the roof might be a moth-eaten hat atop the head of a vagrant. Its dimensions score uneven lines against the sky, as if drawn by a child as the ruler slipped. The spine of the roof is further serrated like the teeth of an old saw and corrodes into the pillar of an oddly solid chimney.

Below, two storeys of exterior wall are coated in greening stucco, holed in places to reveal the reddish bricks of the building’s muscle. Windowpanes, smeared by cataracts of dust, appear indifferent to the afternoon light. Not even the sun can pierce the glass and relieve an interior of perpetual night. Bristling the ground and only parting at the porch, an ungroomed beard of shrubs extends wildly for the sun.

Directly ahead of the van’s bonnet, before the lane curves and cascades down the hill and into the village, a caravan slumps at the kerb, its grubby rear panels spoiling Tom’s outlook. The state of the vehicle suggests it’s been abandoned in the same spot for decades. But the old caravan wasn’t there when he came for the viewings and to measure up.

The cranking hand-brake functions as a starting pistol. Seatbelt clasps snap open. Fiona shifts her position and moves Gracey’s snatching hand to unclip her daughter’s belt from the bottom of the child seat; Gracey can’t reach the buckle but never stops striving for it.

At least Fiona is smiling. He’s pleased to see that, even if it’s nothing more than her determination to support him and be happy for her family. ‘There go the next five hundred weekends,’ she says.

‘What else were we going to do?’

‘Something fun.’

‘This will be. Transforming it. Making our future.’

Still inside her car-seat but loose and wriggling, Gracey holds up her toy penguin to see the house.

Relieved the terrible shaking of the van has come to an end, Archie, the spaniel pup, stirs from his basket in the footwell. Immediately, he channels Gracey’s joy and energy and climbs into Fiona’s lap as if to see outside. But then glances from one occupant inside the van to another, struggling to comprehend the suspense that lies thick about him, yet satisfied that his people are in better spirits.

‘Did a witch live here?’ Gracey asks now that she and Waddles the penguin can subject home to closer scrutiny.

Tom grins. ‘Mum, what did the due diligence say about witches?’

‘We didn’t have enough cash for a report on evidence of the supernatural.’

Frowning, Gracey glances from Dad to Mum.

Fiona kisses the side of Gracey’s warm head and dips her nose into chestnut curls. ‘No, Gracey-love. Damp, rotten eaves and fascias, corroded wall ties. Plumbing and electrics are shot. New boiler and roof on the cards. For starters. But no witches. This place hasn’t been looked after very well, so we’re going to make it happy again.’

Gracey is delighted by the idea.

Tom throws open the driver-side door. He slides out and Gracey rolls into his arms. Tom kisses her forehead.

Eager to be on her feet, she squirms free of his embrace. Racing, then slowing to wade through the thickets out front, she chatters to her penguin and swings the toy over the weeds. In her wake, Archie scrambles out, his claws timpani as he gives chase.

Fiona is last to alight from the van. Sheltered by the open door she stares at the house, her expression long, as if the mere sight of the property is adding years to her face. Tom watches his wife and how her attention immediately sweeps to the proud neighbouring property; the first storey and unblemished roof vaulting above the tall hedge that separates the front gardens of the adjoined houses.

When Fiona’s smile slips, Tom feels he is losing her in some small way that causes an anguish that is almost a chest pain.

He’s seen and coveted the neighbours’ house three times already. A property effortlessly exuding the charm of an English village idyll. A vision of a dream-home realised. A fairy tale cottage beyond the ungroomed hedge, sagging to earth on their side.

Across the leafy boundary, the crisp snip-snip-snip of steel secateurs is audible, though no gardener is visible. A patter of sprinkler water darkens the tarmac of the passing road surface, yet no one emerges to greet Tom and his family.

During his first visit, Tom had wandered next door to introduce himself to the neighbours. And though he’d sensed his new neighbours were home, no one had answered the door. Perhaps they’d been out back. But he recalls how startled he’d been by the neighbours’ front garden; the lush beauty both arresting and intimidating. He’d felt scruffy and awkward as if suddenly in a place he didn’t belong, among the wrong class of people, wearing the wrong clothes. And he’d sloped back to his side, relieved the neighbours hadn’t answered the front door and its strange piped chime.

Gracey pauses in her prancing to thrust her penguin in the direction of the neighbours’. ‘We should live in that one.’

Fiona suppresses a giggle.

Momentarily stricken by the guileless comment from a four-year old, and unable to conceal his wounded eyes, Tom forces a smile. His own daughter too. He winks at Gracey and playfully wags a finger. ‘Hey. Once I’m done with our place, it’ll be…’ Better than theirs? As good as theirs? ‘Better than theirs.’

Tom raises his smartphone. ‘Come on. Selfie. We’ll do a before . Once our place is fixed up, we’ll do an after .’

Fiona raises an eyebrow. ‘Here’s hoping Gracey’s hair won’t be grey in the second photo.’

Tom and Fiona are still laughing as Gracey slams into her parents.

Tom readies his phone. ‘On three, money pit. Ready? Okay. One. Two. Three…’ Together as a family they cry out, ‘Money pit!’

To reach the crooked porch hooding the front door, Fiona and Gracey disentangle from Tom’s arms and step around clumps of weed sprouting from the worn path.

Tom lingers out front because of the muted voices beyond the scruffy hedge. He can’t hear what is being said, so sidles towards the narrow lane; an ancient green path, furrowed by horse and cart for centuries, before the swish and glide of tyres on tarmac took ownership.

Dappled with light spots and shadows from the overhanging branches of trees, they will walk this pretty road together in the future, as a family. They’ll stroll to the village. Though no shop or pub exists any more, the buildings and front gardens of the village’s cottages are also beautiful. Likewise the row of semi-detached villas, further down the slope that flows into the village. Their house is the last building, set apart on the outskirts. The only property in disrepair.

Beside the lane, Tom’s attention transfers to the blight that is the old caravan slumped at the verge. Within the gloom of tree cover, the weathered sidings are a pond-green. Cheap orange curtains hang behind windows blown with condensation. Any exposed metal is peppered with rust spots. A wreck, an eyesore. The neighbours must own it.

‘Fi’. Have you seen this? It wasn’t here before.’ Tom hopes his voice will carry and prompt an explanation from the gardeners beyond the hedge. But no one appears; the patient snik snik of secateurs continues as if in passive defiance to his presence. Tom takes another step in the direction of next door, unsure whether to introduce himself first, or just request an explanation as to why the caravan is there.

The sound of Fiona opening the front door distracts him.

‘Daddy! Daddy! Look!’

Archie barks and won’t stop, and doesn’t seem ready to go inside with the girls. But between the puppy’s yaps, Tom is sure he hears a sharp intake of breath from beyond the hedge; the kind of sudden inhalation that is sparked by outrage.