Like nervous guests, unsure of themselves after crossing the threshold of a stranger’s home, Tom and Fiona fidget to a standstill inside the front door. And immediately, deep from the throat, the mouth of the old house breathes upon them, gusting a miasma from its mouldering innards. Damp-darkened wood and moisture-softened plaster. A chemical and custard aroma of paint. Nose-tingling spices from grey pelts of dust. A peach and ammonia tang of animal urine, probably cat. A gassy whiff of sewage; an underlying trace that is there, then not there. And too much of the outdoors indoors. Cold, composted, autumnal odours; the last spirits to slope from buildings that have lain empty.
Anxious glances flit between them as they peer up at the long white cable and empty light socket above their heads.
Fiona touches her throat, swallows, shuffles from standing directly beneath the fitting. ‘I wonder if we’ll ever come in. Come home. And not think of…’
Tom winces. ‘We’ll get a nice light.’
‘Yeah. That’ll take our minds off it.’
The previous owner’s suicide has affected Fiona more than him. Gracey doesn’t know anything about it and never can.
Making peace with the house’s history was always going to be hard but relegating the former owner’s tragedy to the bottom of his thoughts, while enduring the exhausting process of buying a property, was effortless. How he would feel after taking possession of a building in which the previous owner strung himself up in the reception and choked to death, he’d also managed to never fully consider. But an abrupt and enforced intimacy with the very space in which a stranger’s heart stopped beating takes his breath away.
‘It knocked at least twenty grand off the price,’ Tom offers, more softly than intended, which makes his voice sound weak. ‘There’s always that to remember. Instead.’
Fiona looks at Tom as if she can’t believe he just said that, then grins and punches his arm. ‘It being nowhere near a school and having a sieve for a roof also helped. Can’t believe I let you talk me into this.’
Tom smiles. ‘What. Was. I. Thinking?’
They’re suddenly laughing like children in the face of something terrible that contains an irresistible thread of the absurd. Fiona folds herself under his arm. Guilty giggles subsiding, they kiss, then turn to peer beyond the gallows of a simple light-fitting.
A dark gullet of bare floorboards and plain walls gapes, the sight of it settling like a cold shadow. For Tom, the walls seemed to support a heavy object that must be picked up and moved a long distance.
Gracey’s feet scuff and boom against hollow wood as she excitedly bangs along the entire length of the hallway. ‘Old room! New room!’
Near them, magnolia’s smooth infiltration and the restored skirting are evidence of the previous owner’s intentions. In the brief time he owned the property, their predecessor attempted to erase former eras but never got far, only managing to plaster and paint the stairwell, first-floor landing, living room at the rear and half of the hallway. Tools were downed when he stepped off the ladder.
‘House of halves,’ Fiona mutters.
‘Old room. Old room,’ Gracey announces.
Many earlier episodes of the building’s long life still haunt the dim shell. Wallpaper patterned with orange and brown squares, a design near psychedelic in its boldness, has hung on inside the drawing room beside the front reception. Tom peers inside, at the scuffed skirting, thickly painted the colour of vanilla ice-cream; the woodwork also moustached with black grime as if the cone was dropped in dirt. A frosted-glass light switch resembles a butter dish. The kitchen, bathroom and bedrooms upstairs are no more palatable or inviting.
Everything Tom glances at stirs cyclic thoughts, his mind compulsively listing the work he must do with his own hands, at the same time as looking for freelance work that uncannily dried up the moment they laid down the deposit – their life savings, no less. To raise his spirits, he imagines laying linoleum on these bare floors, redecorating the remaining half of the ground floor and all of the bedrooms, tiling the bathroom. The bits he can definitely do. Rising damp on some ground-floor walls he’ll also have to address by employing what he has learned about plastering on YouTube. He thinks he can manage.
The precious money Fiona’s mum gifted them as a housewarming gift, and more than they believed she had tucked away, is just enough to pay a plumber to fit a new boiler and replace the pipes in the kitchen and bathroom that make the sounds of a submarine running aground.
A home-improvement loan, through the bank where Fiona works, must cover the roof’s repair, or replacement, a new fuse-box and wiring. New windows will have to wait until they can afford them. When he’s got work coming in again.
To remain buoyant, to keep his nose and mouth above the choppy surface of the deepest, most precarious waters he’s ever swum – the mortgage he can’t really afford on a house that needs everything doing to it – his focus must remain upon one task at a time. One room and then another. Or he will be consumed, will drown. He knows this and tells himself this fact over and over. Early days.
‘There’s a few long days here. Almost relieved the freelance stuff’s gone quiet.’
Fiona nods an acknowledgement but looks away, troubled by the spectre of money, of only one income trickling in. She goes and fills the mouth of the kitchen, her back to Tom. ‘You can see where he ran out of cash. Or gave up.’ She winces, turns to Tom. ‘You think he … it was about money?’
Tom and Fiona exchange glances. Tom raises his eyebrow in warning. Fiona returns the expression as a challenge because she objects to being warned about Gracey overhearing bad things about the house. She’s hardly the one who’ll let something like that slip.
Gracey thumps out of the living room. ‘I’m going to my room. Come on, Waddles. I’ll show you where you gonna sleep.’ Down the hallway she races, pounding out wisps of dust from between floorboards.
‘Steady as you go, kiddo,’ Tom says. ‘Don’t want any accidents.’
Gracey clambers up the stairs, her little legs pistons, knees rising high to propel her upwards. Waddles, her toy penguin, flaps about her hand. Archie, Gracey’s other constant companion, overtakes her on the stairs.
Tom smiles. ‘At least Gracey can see the potential.’
Fiona snorts. ‘Gracey would be happy living in that knackered caravan if Daddy called it a castle.’
At the idea of the caravan out front, the house’s damp atmosphere intrudes afresh into Tom’s thoughts and only the stomp of Gracey’s feet upstairs returns his eyes to the ceiling. Her small voice carries down, muffled by masonry and timber but the excitement isn’t tempered. ‘This is where we have bath-time.’
Fiona reappears beside Tom. They grip as much as hug each other. Looking into each other’s eyes, they rest their foreheads together.
‘We can do it, Fi.’
‘If nothing goes wrong.’