In My House Read online

  IN MY HOUSE

  Alex Hourston

  For Neil, Archie and Martha, in no particular order.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  1

  First the plane was delayed; I could see that in the uniformed huddle at the gate. I went up and asked, and the way the woman reset her face as she turned to reply gave me the brief idea of slapping it. So yes, you could say I was in a bad mood. Plus something had gone in my back. Not conclusively, but in a number of sharp little suggestions.

  It had happened the day before, halfway up a mountain in Spain. It was hot, I was the only native English speaker in the group and of just above median age. Pieter and Anna were mid-sixties, I’d estimate. Their calves matched; huge, hairless and tight but for the odd pop of vein. Efficient too, and a key feature of my landscape as they pulled away up yet another hill, and I do a lot of walking myself. It was those legs, plus the splat of pigment on their shoulders that put them five, maybe ten years ahead of me. They were nice people, considerate people. Dutch.

  When I broke stride, Pieter was the first to reach me. He was walking ahead but must have heard something in the abruptness of my halt and was by my side before even Laura and Fab, who needed only to catch up. He crouched in imitation; laid a careful hand on my shoulder.

  The pain was of the sort you’d expect in a tooth, bright and brief. I held my breath, stripped of belief in my spine’s capacity to hold me, awaiting collapse in a ghastly suspense. Pieter saw in my face not to speak but then I had flapped my hand at him and he knew I was OK.

  ‘Just a twinge,’ I said.

  He nodded and rejoined his wife at a small distance.

  Carlos took over; did what he was paid for. Made me sit, take a drink, stand again carefully. He moved behind me and ran his thumbs either side of my spine, quite hard. It seemed incautious and my muscles felt braced, resistant. But it didn’t hurt, and he continued to work, up and down. To soothe, perhaps, or merely to accompany the story that he had started to tell, over my head, about the time they’d had to carry a man back down the Tramuntana on a makeshift stretcher fashioned from bandages and foraged sticks. This person had been bitten by a snake. He was fat, his ankle swelling all the time. We listened; it was part of what we’d paid for.

  I had seen straight away the incongruity of a young man touching an older woman, and imagined a range of plausible responses on my part. An uncomfortable awareness of the sweat on my shirt or the unseemly give of my flesh under his hands; a moment of unbidden arousal or emotion – tears even – which I’d seen a few times in yoga classes among the infrequently touched. Each scenario loaded with shame and I felt none of them. Instead I watched the others. The men and the German woman who travelled alone had looked away. In Anna, Pieter’s wife, I saw pity; in Laura, who was beautiful, and still young, amusement. Then the story was done, and so was the massage. Carlos clenched both my shoulders hard and peered round at me.

  ‘You OK, Maggie?’

  I said yes, and we continued. Susan asked me if I wanted to borrow her stick. She loved that stick. I told her no.

  A pinch, next morning, as I got up fast, straight out of a dream, but I showered and dressed, and packed my case with no further problems. At breakfast it was not mentioned, we had our eggs and thin-sliced bacon and said our goodbyes. I was the first to leave. Nothing until I stepped from the cab at Palma and then a pain that made me shout out loud. The driver bore the brunt; took a glare, missed his tip. And then the delay, confirmed in Spanish and barely more comprehensible English.

  The news got people moving but I stayed where I was, leant against a wall of huge textured plastic tiles. An hour more in the airport then forty minutes on the tarmac in a steadily warming plane. Finally in the air, and the cabin seemed noisy and fragile; that oppressive hum and the sudden plasticky clatter that sent a ribbon of panic through me. I picked up my book, read ten pages that failed to stick, and just sat, for a while; static, oblivious. Somewhere across the sky, I suppose, she sped towards me.

  I like these walking breaks, they suit me well. I do two or three a year; one in the UK, perhaps, the Moors or Lakes; a Mediterranean island, and somewhere North African, or similar, at the season’s end. I go at the popular times – that can’t be helped, it is a question of weather – but book last minute, when the mood takes me, and as my job permits. My only mandate is progress. That you get somewhere. I can’t bear those circular routes where you end up right where you started, exhausted and stiffening and facing last night’s menu. So the holidays that I choose always move on, and include someone behind the scenes who drives your bags to the next destination. I like a guide, too, to tell me what I am seeing.

  As for the other walkers, you take your chances, but it is less of an issue than you might think. There is a solidarity in walking that overrides all but the most strident differences. You start out as a snaggly crowd and very soon an order is established – a good guide knows to let this happen. Injury aside, I have never seen that initial order break, and in knowing your place most social difficulties fall away. There is a focus on the task of simply getting there, and no obligation beyond it.

  This bunch was fairly typical. The German woman barely spoke a word; ate and drank what was offered, and read at the table at night. She used her eyebrows and shoulders to tell us that she didn’t understand but I followed her once, on a break for postcards in Deia, and caught her speaking perfectly good English to a tourist who had stopped her for directions. She didn’t see me, and I felt nothing but respect for her decision to stay silent. The other couple, Laura and Fabien, were in their late twenties. They talked at meals but leaked condescension and laughed at the rest of us in Spanish. Susan, my age, single, childless and robustly cheerful. This was the third time we had walked together and she pestered me by email in between. Then there was Anna, and Pieter, who loved to talk. He was the sort who would say that travel is really all about people, not places.

  I enjoy the tone of these evenings, the loose easy companionship, the sour red wine, served chilled. Always lots of stories, though I myself prefer to listen. It’s hard to find the equivalent in everyday life.

  I began to feel a touch maudlin on the plane but recognised the feeling for what it was. Distance doing its bit; the whole thing assuming a value I hadn’t felt in the living of it. The irritations smoothed away, the moments of boredom erased, or recast as ‘down time’ and the better parts buffed up – most often when the booze began to work. And just as certain was the episode’s forgettability. Go back to it a few weeks on and the memory will be loose, benign. Maybe it’s me, but I know it is not my age. I’ve always been like it. And never one for photos.

  2

  The flight went on, a long two hours. There was somebody famou
s a few rows back I should have recognised, but didn’t. I bought a small bottle of white and a tube of Pringles and enjoyed them despite the hour. Chose a pack of sample-sized perfumes for the woman watching my dog and looked at all the places the airline flew to in the last pages of the magazine. I remembered my back and thought of the moment I’d have to stand.

  Then we were there, and the descent into Gatwick was bumpy but so close to home that disaster seemed implausible. I looked down and noticed the same things as always: England cut up into tidy squares, the occasional blue of a Home Counties pool, the car parks that appeared about now, each vehicle a tab of blistering colour, curved and reflective like a beetle’s back. I wondered if my own was down there; a Volvo, ten years old. More likely somewhere dodgier, tucked away on cheaper land. I’d left the mileage written on a strip of paper Sellotaped to the dash; a warning or deterrent against advantage not yet taken. A sense of aggravation took root, and I knew from experience that it would be hard to shift.

  It was still there as I waited to get off. Aimed briefly at those people who stood too early and were left in a low squat above their chairs; nowhere to go. Then a thick slot of day at the end of the plane and we were moving. I started up the aisle but my case seemed suddenly too wide. It caught and tipped, forcing me to attend to it. My chest and neck were hot and the wool of my jumper itched where it met my skin. I was stomping, no doubt, by the time I hit the body of the airport, overtaking the more leisured passenger idling by on one of those stupid flat escalators. Slamming around in an inherited response that I hated but had never tried to change. I stood out, that’s for sure, trying to put distance between me and something back there, most likely my earlier self.

  I wondered, later, if it was then that she saw me. Assuming she had planned her move. She would have known that the whole thing hinged upon one person, a stranger. What a punt. And how best to choose? When I’d huffed into view, at odds, out of step, I might have looked like her best chance. But at this point I was headed for customs. That was no good.

  I walked down the final ramp and saw the passport desks stretched out on my right. Already people were backed up before the three manned stations, the rest digitised; my own passport yet to be chipped. I took my place in the line and reached for my phone to let the car people know that I’d landed. Or the loo first? I looked up and down the stretch of queue, the very picture of indecision.

  Maybe it was this gesture she read. Held her breath. Felt it as her first piece of luck in a long time. But I am overstating my role. I headed for the Ladies.

  The sight of my face in a public-lavatory mirror is always a surprise, something I put down to the lighting, but a distraction nonetheless. There was a moment or two spent glancing at myself in each new panel as the line moved forwards. Still ten or so people ahead. I watched the other women look at themselves, pull special faces for their own reflections. Their lack of self-consciousness startled me, their absorption in the task. They couldn’t all have someone meeting them off their planes. Some, surely, would merely return to whoever it was they’d left outside, an everyday person holding their spot. I wondered if the effort would be noticed, warrant a mention. I felt my own dislocation from that, and was fine with it.

  Then my attention was free and almost instantly I had a sense of the person behind me. It was her breathing; short, hard and pulsed. She was panting almost, giving off an animal panic that I felt in an answering surge of adrenalin. My first thought was some kind of anxiety attack, and then that she’d done something bad. Left a bomb. I looked back to the mirror and found her there.

  It was clear that she meant to tell me something. Her face was locked, its lack of response in breach of every protocol of civility. It was like standing in front of a painting knowing that there is meaning, hidden but suggested, if you only knew the language of the thing. A few seconds of this blank exchange and she turned, the girl, twisted her upper body round, deliberate eyes on me till the last, and whispered close and brief behind her. The woman she spoke to gave a flick of a nod. The girl left the line and walked past me, close enough that I smelt new sweat.

  She went to a sink, bent deep at the waist and looked up at her face. She viewed herself differently from the previous women. Up close and frank, something brutal in it. She filled cupped hands with cold water and threw it at herself, darkening the roots of her hair, somehow shocking. Behind me the older woman watched.

  The two were dressed the same. Clothes near to typical if you squinted – blue jeans, bright tops with zips and hoods – but look again and you could spot the differences. Colour and cut slightly off; I surprised myself with that acknowledgement. No branding or logos. Cheap. Not high-street cheap. Cheaper than that.

  There was a similarity in their colouring. A thin milky paleness of skin. A shared ethnicity perhaps. Their hair was dyed a matching red. Family even? Surely not friends. Behind me the woman’s phone pinged and the girl’s eyes were back to mine. In that second they flared and I saw her fear, unmistakable.

  The keys of the woman’s mobile clicked and she hissed as she typed, the noise of air sucked hard through her teeth. She was still tapping when the phone rang in her hand and she answered in a language I didn’t recognise. In the mirror, the girl mouthed: ‘Help.’

  She moved from the sink and slotted back in behind me and it took everything not to respond, to give her some sign that I had seen. There were three people to go; two, one, and the pressure to act grew huge and it was time to either take my turn or not, and I didn’t; instead I said behind me: ‘Sorry, I’ve just got to. Sorry. You go,’ with a sort of smile.

  I felt she knew I had understood. She stepped forward and shut the door behind her, eyes low. I left the queue, fumbled in my handbag, trying to explain away my actions with a show of fluster, but no one cared. For what seemed like ages, nothing happened and we all watched the front of the toilets.

  There was a rustle of resentment up and down but at last a door opened, a good way along, and a mother and child came out. The other woman, the older woman, went inside.

  Straight away I moved to the young girl’s door. While I was waiting I’d been thinking of her age. Maybe eighteen? Early twenties? And that a best guess. I tapped gently with the pads of my fingers, tried to listen, and whispered: ‘I’m here, be quick.’

  The lock went and she was out, grabbed a handful of my jacket, and we were moving. She pushed open the first heavy door into a short corridor studded with vending machines selling condoms, tampons and toothbrushes in balls. We were alone, the exit sign was green ahead but she stopped and pushed me back against the wall. It wasn’t rough, more intimate. She didn’t speak, but looked that long look at me and I saw a change in the aspect of her face. The stress dropped out of it and I tried to do the same. She took my arm.

  We walked back into the hall, and its noise and movement flipped my stomach. I started, unthinking, towards the desks, but she applied a gentle pressure and we banked smoothly.

  We had got maybe six or ten paces and he was there. Slim and still, violence pouring off him. He stood in front of us and let his physical presence do its work. I simply started to scream. No, that sounds too defenceless. There was nothing womanly about it. Yell. Shout. I’m not sure what. Generic abuse that a woman can use against a man. And lunge at him too.

  At first they thought it was me. The airport police, or whoever, were there instantly; took the top of my arms, tried to move me away. But anger was pounding in my head and I couldn’t claw back control enough to explain. The girl stood apart, like an onlooker, saying nothing. He started to back away, hands up in surrender, suggesting I was mad, I think. It seemed he was willing to let her go. But she began to move, stealthily; circling the rim of the drama. Then stepped in, and it was when she spoke that her story began to assume its true shape. I may have looked like a crumpled old crazy but there was authority in her words, although we couldn’t understand them. She was cold and focused and undeniable as she spoke into his face. I was frightened b
y her, and at what it was he had done. We were all moved off into a room.

  3

  My name is Margaret Benson. I live in London and have done for over thirty years, always in the NWs. Queen’s Park, if I’m asked, though I’ve heard it called Kensal Rise, Town and Green, West Kilburn and North Kensington. The house I’m in now was sold out of a Notting Hill estate agent’s, but that seems like a push.

  I’ve always liked the area for its relative understatement, without being a dump of course, although it has changed – hasn’t everywhere? – and largely for the better. I have found that I’m as susceptible as the next woman to good things to eat and have come to prefer coffee with provenance, and organic this and that.

  I’m closer to the park in this latest place. It has exerted some sort of pull across the years; each move has brought me closer. There is a permanence to it that I suppose is a quality of the land, and perhaps why people like it. I’ve seen several dogs grow old here, though the human families are more temporary. The pattern is the same; they appear in the early months, new mother and child, then she is gone, replaced by someone younger and accented, and one day they all vanish, off to bigger houses further out, I suppose. But the core of the walkers remain.

  My house is a three-bedroom in the conservation area. Victorian I think, they must have told me once, though I don’t recall; certainly it has those sort of features, sash windows, cornicing and so on, although I realise these can be installed later, to similar effect.

  It was the best of the five I saw in terms of light and layout. I was the second person to view and put in a cash offer on the spot. That was seven years ago.

  It is as large as can be expected for the money – I don’t need to be near a Tube, which helps – and its best feature is the small garden which you can look out across while washing up and access through a set of white-painted French doors. I’ve surprised myself by coming to enjoy the gardening. A gin and tonic in a chair when the wisteria is out.