When I strip the wallpaper in the new flat, I find, underneath it, strange scratches in the plasterwork, lines and curves like an unknown alphabet, finger marks covering the wall behind my bed. I’m anxious to get rid of the wallpaper, though there are countless more urgent things; faced with the splintered floorboards and rotting window frames left behind by the previous owner, and a leaking pipe under the kitchen sink that drips into an old lemonade bottle, it seems easier to worry first about the bedroom walls. I have it in my head that if I can just replace the yellowed chintzy pattern with something calm, I too might feel calmer. If I can just get that done, everything else might feel more manageable.
But now there are the marks, which could perhaps be nothing, maybe something to do with the way the wallpaper glue dried, but which seem intentionally communicative somehow, ubiquitous and affronting. I do not feel calm at all, even when I cover the walls with fresh plasterboard and then with blue-green-grey paint from an expensive paint company. I sense the scratches underneath, lingering and emphatic. I convince myself I can still see them, despite everything.
I practise saying, ‘this is home,’ as I move around the space. The dog runs from room to room, tail wagging so furiously his whole body bends into parentheses, sniffing out histories in corners, catching cobwebs on the wet of his nose. I order takeaway – which I eat sitting on boxes of unpacked crockery – and buy sourdough from the bakery at the bottom of the road, crust serrated against my hard palate. In the garden, I assemble a wooden table and chairs amongst overgrown, straggly rose plants that should have been pruned years ago and, having not been, now seem untouchable.
‘This is home,’ I say to the roses.
‘This is home,’ I say to the boiler, whose buttons and dials I am too scared to adjust.
It is natural enough to feel uneasy, I think. Everything is so new. Natural enough not to want to sleep beneath a wall covered in half-realised hieroglyphics, to find my changed circumstances, my sudden aloneness, unsettling. I fill bin liners with sheathes of torn-off wallpaper and vacuum the previous owner’s strange dust. There are ball bearings wedged between the floorboards in the hallway, an invoice from a vet taped to the inside of one of the kitchen cupboards. An eyelash curler, rusting, like a historic torture device in the dungeon of the basement bathroom. Soon, this unfamiliar rubbish will be replaced by my own rubbish, I tell myself, and I will feel calm again.
~
She has narrated me without knowing it, so perhaps it is not entirely rude to return the favour in kind. Right now she is holding a half-finished box of cornflakes and standing in the centre of the new-to-her kitchen, pivoting on the spot and pondering where best to commit to storing cereal. It says something about her, doesn’t it, that she thought it was worth packing a half-finished box of cornflakes when moving house. It certainly says something about me that I choose to dwell on this detail about her. I watch her trial the cornflakes on different heights of shelves and in different cupboards. She is talking to herself throughout this process, about the most humane way to trap moths. She had the same muttered monologue yesterday and plainly did not come to a resolution. Watching her, I have learned that she sings to herself sometimes too, but never seems to complete a tune. I wonder whether she knows that about herself, or is it entirely thoughtless? When I am able to recognise the lyrics, I pitch in and finish the songs as her own voice trails away – that is, when her interest in sustaining the song trails off, or her memory of its words trails off, or something better dislodges the song from her mind. On a bicycle made for two, I sing, once she’s finished with her Daisys as she is scrubbing the bathroom floor; Crying ‘Cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o!’, I add while she’s respooling the vacuum cleaner’s cable, having given up on her Molly Malone; at the end of a particularly dispirited rendition of half of Row Row Row Your Boat, I trill the final cheery Life is but a dream. She cannot hear me, naturally – or otherwise – but I notice that her dog wags his tail in something like recognition. The tap-swish of his tail against the floor disturbs the dust. I bend to pat the air above her dog, stirring it with my fingertips, and watch as he ducks a little, his happy tail at odds with the twinge of confusion creeping about his tongue-lolling face.
A dream, I sing again, refinishing the unfinished song to nobody. As she keeps working on the house, sweating a little, making private whinnying breaths of exertion and satisfaction, I think about why I feel compelled to supply any song’s end. For my own amusement? To imagine we are in a company, in a chorus? I suppose I can’t bear on some level to have anything else left hanging in the air, not even a nursery rhyme.
I speculate about her life, the fact that so many of the half-sung songs she knows are from childhood. Hers, or some others?
She has a good voice. I wonder whether anybody knows that about her, or maybe she only sings to herself when she thinks that she’s alone.
~
I wake up expecting someone to be here. I imagine my name is being called, that I am being summoned to tie shoelaces, to scramble eggs, that I am about to rush headlong into a morning full of school bags and spilled drinks and late-for-the-bus-can-you-give-me-a-lifts. How long has it been since anyone needed me to tie their shoelaces? And yet, still, that is what the silence suggests to me, and I jump up from bed and start towards the door before I realise, no, no, nobody needs me.
The dog’s claws on the floorboards. His paw against the back door, asking to be let out. His breath, ragged in my ear. The click of his tongue in his mouth when he pants. Sometimes he barks at nothing at all and I love it and wish he’d do it more, wish he’d startle me or be more unexpected, because one of the things, one of the most weighty, alarming things about my life now, is the feeling that I am the only thing that can change other things. But he is a creature of strong rhythms, and once he has overcome the shock of his new environs, he reverts to predictability. Kibble between his teeth. His tail thumping against my leg. The way that, when he drinks water from the bowl, the sound is somehow crunchy and small droplets scatter across the tiles.
I try out different ways of living in silence. First: drowning it out with radio dramas, or by playing true crime Netflix shows on my laptop, but I sense the quiet of the flat beneath the ominous sound effects and the voiceovers. It is like sweeping dust under a rug: the silence is still there, lurking. Next I try to expand into it, dragging my feet across the floorboards to make a louder shuffle than is necessary. Coughing, clearing my throat as though about to make a speech. And then, with increasing frequency, what happens is that I sing. I sing whatever I can think of, though I can never think of much more than the opening lines of things: nursery rhymes, silly childhood ditties, national anthems (British, American, and my favourite, French). The dog watches me sceptically, cocking his head to one side, half-whining and then, without warning, urinating in the middle of the floor of what is going to be my study, which is absolutely not the kind of startling thing I’d wanted him to do.
Row, row, row your boat, I sing, as I mop and disinfect. Gently down the stream.
When I look up I notice there are orange damp stains on the ceiling, blossoming across the white paintwork like flowers, and for a moment I feel as though everything is upside down, as though what I am looking at is not the ceiling but the patch where the dog pissed on the floor, and I am suspended above my life, detached from it all, and nothing makes sense anymore. It was not supposed to look like this, I think. Where has everyone gone? Where have I gone?
~
I introduce myself to the dog when her back is turned and she is stripping the wallpaper in the bedroom. In my limited experience and according to my limited observation, dogs can usually smell the difference when I’m in a room. As evidenced by his reaction to my singing, it seems clear that dogs can hear me, or detect some rearrangement of air or pressure in a way that is similar to hearing. Letting the dog see me might be fairer on this sweet little spaniel – allow him to know that I am keeping his mistress company. It feels cruel otherwise to let him catch drifts of me in this piecemeal way, scurrying with his nose pressed to the skirting boards and wainscotting with such a busy and bemused expression, as he tracks me from room to room without seeing anyone there. No need for fruitless snuffle-inquisition, little one.
Here I am, I say, and I reveal myself to the dog. We are in the doorway of what used to be my parlour, but since my time in this house came to its own kind of end it has since been used as a dressing room, a bachelor’s room, a guest room, a child’s (Merrily merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream!) playroom, a bedroom once more. Now she plans to use it as a ‘study’. Hence all the books. I approve; a study is a good choice for a room with these dimensions and aspect. There is excellent light there in the evenings. I used to look out from its window, down at my garden as it was. I used to dream about the roses I could plant there one day. She might have the same idea; we might share something in that way.
The dog does not take well to seeing me. He relieves himself and runs from the room and I vanish, embarrassed, and will feel guilty for weeks. I must force myself not to stroke his ears in apology, to keep my distance so he is not too alarmed. I stop singing the end of the new homeowner’s abandoned sentences in case the disembodied sound of it causes him distress.
~
I bought the flat and moved in within a month of first viewing it. The previous owner was anxious to sell, the estate agent said, without giving me a reason why, and I said I was anxious to buy, without giving a reason why either.
The place is, compared to others I viewed, large, the ground floor of an austere-looking Victorian house: a bedroom, open-plan kitchen-living room and a smaller reception room with doors that open out onto a scrappy back garden. The smaller room, I imagine, will be my study. The bathroom is downstairs in the basement and smells damp. Walking around on that first visit, the estate agent said, ‘I can really see you living here,’ which was reassuring, as though in some alternate world I was already living here, as though the decision was already made and all I had to do was simply succumb to it. ‘Garden could be nice,’ he said, ‘with a little sprucing up. South-facing.’ The garden is west-facing but I didn’t correct him.
He stepped out to take a phone call, and I heard him saying, ‘I’m just with a lady at Mayfield Road. Yes. Yes, keen. No, alone. Yes.’
Later that same day, I emailed an offer at the top of my budget, considerably below the asking price, and was a bit alarmed to get a call, minutes later, saying it had been accepted. How quickly could I proceed, they wanted to know. I told them I could proceed quickly.
~
There are parallels between us in many ways, of course. If I revealed myself to her, maybe it’s such things that we have in common that might form a basis for any kind of understanding? Woman to once-woman? Homeowner to previous tenant; dust to dust. I find it useful to think of myself as the dust itself, sometimes. Why would that be? Better to be a sweepable presence than an inhabited absence? Moted and moping and unmopped in the corners. Maybe it’s comforting to think that people, alive and vivid and blundering and beat-hearted are pre-dust. Maybe it is comforting to think that I might swirl.
To think dust could ever be so fanciful.
~
People tried not to look shocked when I told them about the move; they smiled and nodded and said how invigorating it would be to have a change. Nobody said anything tactless, though I knew they were thinking tactless things. I suppose you don’t need all that space anymore. Well, at least you’ve got the dog for company. I try to frame it as a good thing. A new phase of life. I’d have a little study, somewhere to keep my books. Perhaps I’d finally have a chance to read them all.
And it’s true that it feels momentous, it does, as I layer on coats of new paint, as I run cloths along skirting boards rippled with grime, as I watch a Youtube video explaining how to turn on this particular kind of oven. It is momentous to commit, fixedly and determinedly, to being alone – to being so alone that I have bought a place for nobody other than me to live in. What was the word I feel tempted to use? Empowering. I can’t quite bring myself to use it. I stack the books in piles against the walls, where they tilt, teeter, threaten to fall.
Because I am as shocked as anyone else to find myself here. To have lived, it turns out, many lives in this one life: to have shared houses with parents, with friends, with partners, with children, and now to find myself nonetheless alone, with nobody to bear witness to whatever comes next. I did not foresee that it would be like this, somehow, did not anticipate aloneness; I spent so long not being alone it seemed impossible that might ever change. Waking up thinking: oh, they need me, and now waking up thinking: oh, there is nobody here.
I buy cheap shelves and begin the process of organising the books. I start, ambitious, alphabetising, singing the ABC song – won’t you sing along with me? – and then, quite quickly, give up and settle for genres: poetry, plays, children’s, non-fiction, fiction. The air in the boxes smells like my old house when I open them, my old life and the people who used to live in it with me. Sometimes, when I slide a book out, it throws up a little splutter of dust. I breathe it in, and out, and in again, and it mixes with the air of the new flat.
‘This is home,’ I say, to the dog.
‘This is home,’ I say, to the air between me and the doorway.
‘This is home,’ I say, to the dust.
~
She is coughing a little now, and rubbing her eyes. I inch closer, concerned for her but also thrilled to see a body doing what it does best, what I did once: reacting without conscious effort, without consciousness.
She is looking something up on her phone. How pleasing – I see she is reading about dust; we are clearly on the same wavelength. She reads aloud to her dog what is on her screen.
‘Dead skin cells, dust mites, dead insect particles, soil, pollen, tiny plastic particles, bacteria, hair—’ she lists. She looks satisfied by this explanation.
I’ve no right to, but I am affronted, to have someone claim they can know anything about dust in this way. Such certainty about so uncertain a presence. I point at the bookshelves lining the room around us (Isn’t it interesting that one of the first things she unpacked was all these boxes of books? I remember thinking. I read all the poetry there in a single glance last night as she slept, and committed all their pages to memory) and draw up right alongside her.
I will show you fear in a handful of dust, I imagine intoning.
For everything exists and not one sigh nor smile nor tear, one hair nor particle of dust, not one can pass away! I imagine hissing by her pillow that night, glowering through the gloom.
The dog’s ears twitch.
Or some Shelley, a personal favourite of mine. Methought, I imagine quoting loftily at her some future July evening, settling quite quite close to her ear as I might lean forward and break our companionable silence, daring my breath to meet her cheek to read, I sate beside a public way thick strewn with summer dust…
She swats at the side of her head as if annoyed by a fly and coughs again. For his part, the dog is looking right through me and softly brewing a bark in his throat.
‘What’s up?’ she asks him, tenderly.
I withdraw to the shadows of the wall.
‘Gently down the stream—’ she sings beneath her breath, giving the dog’s head a fondle, and I press something like my back against and through the wall amongst my mites and particles once more, biding something like time, merrily merrily merrily merrily.
***
‘Merrily Merrily Merrily Merrily’ was commissioned by Tom Conaghan for Duets, a collection of eight co-authored short stories, that will be published later this month by Scratch Books.
***
