I can’t forget the smell. It still hits me sometimes. Like it’s stuck in my nostrils.
I clambered through the garden, wrestling with trees and bushes, easing my way past rusty obstacles. I pushed through the final overhanging branches and almost fell into the front door. With a sense of victory I knocked and waited but nobody came. I knocked again, a bit louder, hoping the decrepit door would withstand the contact and the vibrations wouldn’t shake any roof slates into a slide but there was still no response. I pushed my way round to the back of the house and tried again on the back door. There was no sound of feet approaching, no sound of anyone being home at all. I looked up again to check that I hadn’t imagined the smoke, and sure enough there it was, still lazily drifting out of the chimney and out into the hot fell air.
Eventually, reluctantly, I gave up. I resigned myself to the long hot climb, and started to force my way back through the tangle of shrubbery. Halfway down the path, just as I was negotiating my way past a vicious-looking exhaust pipe, I heard the front door pull open. I got my balance and turned to see a worried Jon peering out from behind the door. He saw it was me and his shoulders dropped a little. I smiled. I shouted, ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Can I come in?’
‘I don’t know.’
I laughed. ‘Why not?’
He looked unsure but then he waved me back towards the house.
He pulled the door back a couple of inches and I asked what the problem was.
‘They don’t like visitors … they don’t like strangers.’
‘Well, I’m not a stranger, am I? And I’m dying for a drink, I think I’m about to pass out.’
‘OK, but I’ll have to show you to them, they heard you knocking.’
He pulled the door back further so I could just about squeeze in and I pushed myself through the gap. Jon closed the door behind and we were engulfed in darkness. My eyes adjusted and I could that see we were in a cluttered, dirty hallway. We were stood very close; there was nowhere else to stand, junk piled everywhere. I could feel his breath on my neck as we stood still behind the closed door. And then I was hit by the smell. It was like the house had taken a deep breath and exhaled. It stank. A mixture of mould and damp and decay. I covered my nose and started to breathe through my mouth. Jon gave me a second to compose myself, pushed past me and led me halfway down the hall and through a door on the left.
I followed him into the room and nearly fell over a heap of newspapers. They weren’t just covering the windows, they were piled high in paper mountains throughout the room and scattered across the floor. Most had turned yellow but some were new: fresh white backgrounds with inky black print. The room was bursting with headlines: ‘Violent Crime Doubles’; ‘Street Knife Attack Terror’; ‘Karaoke Granddad Wins Top Prize’. And then I saw the cats. They glared at me and scurried into corners. I could see at least four straight away and it smelt like there must be more and it smelt like they used the room as a toilet.
It was a few seconds before I noticed the reason Jon had brought me into the room in the first place and I hope I didn’t gasp when I clocked them sat there but I can’t be sure that I didn’t. Just below my eyeline, right in the middle of the room, sat two small old people. Hunched over in chairs, dressed in bedclothes, with bright eyes, clear and staring. Jon coughed and shuffled his feet and said, ‘These are my grandparents.’