by Sam Taylor
The door opened without being pushed. Daylight made a path through the dark, cold hallway. James took a step forward and unthinkingly called out ‘Hello?’ He listened: no sound but that telephone, still stubbornly ringing. He wondered which house it was coming from. One of his next-door neighbours, he guessed; it sounded quite close.
He removed the key from the lock but left the front door open. The hallway smelled of dust and damp. The first thing he needed to do was unboard the windows, to let in some light and air, but for some reason that was not what he did. As though hypnotised, he touched the powdery wallpaper with his fingertips and walked, dream-slow, through the gloom. When he reached the end of the hallway, he pushed open the door of the sitting room and stared in shocked silence at the sofa, the coffee table, the armchair, the television. Instinctively he stroked the warm leather back of the armchair and began to hum a familiar tune, and then he stopped. It was all exactly as he remembered it, even though, until that moment, he’d had absolutely no memory of it at all. The same furniture, the same wallpaper; nothing moved or altered. In its shadowed corners the room looked sepia, like an old photograph, but through the partially boarded rear window came a shaft of sun, so that closer to where he stood the light was golden, illuminating vast old spiderwebs that hung from the ceiling like veils. James had the sensation that he had stepped into the past; as though, in this room, time had been preserved in aspic. Memories came to him as he stood there - vivid images, almost physical in their intensity - but they were too brief and fragmentary to tell him anything other than what he already knew: that he had been here before; that the house was a clue.
It was then that he noticed something peculiar: the telephone was still ringing. It was not a modern ringtone, but an old-fashioned, bell-like drone; a melancholy sound that made James think of empty corridors in government buildings, closed hotels in winter, lost Sundays in the 1970s . . . the unanswerable call of the past. But why didn’t it stop? Didn’t his neighbours have answer machines?
Puzzled, he walked back down the hallway and looked at the place where his memory told him that the telephone used to be: on the wall, a couple of metres from the front door. What he saw was a padlocked wooden box, the size of a child’s coffin. This was new. James touched the wood: it was roughly made, unvarnished but solid. He put his ear to the join and quickly pulled it away. It was this phone that was ringing. He looked around for a key that would fit the padlock, but could find nothing.
The ringing made him anxious. Why couldn’t whoever was calling understand that there was nobody home? Why didn’t they just hang up? Unless, he thought . . . unless it was someone who knew he was here. He went out to the doorstep again and looked closely at the other houses. No curtains twitched. There was a phone box twenty metres down the road. James ran towards it, but it was empty. He walked back to the house, staring wildly around. By the time he got back, the phone had stopped ringing.
It took James most of the morning to pull the boards from the ground-floor windows and move his things into the house. Now that he looked more closely, he could see that there had been changes, after all. The sofa’s stuffing was all over the floor and there were patches of mould on the walls. James couldn’t imagine what Malcolm Trewvey had been doing in the house, but he certainly hadn’t been cleaning it.
He had already decided to attack the house one floor at a time. It was a large place, and he didn’t want to daunt himself by exposing all the work that needed doing before he’d even started. And for some reason, the thought of going upstairs gave him vertigo. Besides, a quick investigation of the ground floor revealed that there was everything here that he would need to live.
There were two bedrooms, each with a window looking out on the street, and the large sitting room, with a window looking out on the back garden. There was a small cupboard under the stairs: James found a little door inside this cupboard, and when he opened it he saw blackness, smelled damp and cold ashes. The cellar, he thought, closing the little door. Adjoining the sitting room was a small windowless bathroom with a sloped ceiling, and the long kitchen, which was a single-floor extension to the house, running alongside part of the back garden. The kitchen had a clear plastic roof - yellowed and dirty now, of course - which made it both the lightest and coldest room in the house.
The outside door of the kitchen gave on to the garden, which was almost as big as James remembered it. In contrast to the inside of the house, the garden had been carefully maintained: the grass was no more than a few centimetres high, and the lawn’s sole occupant - an old apple tree - was in good health. Golden-green, nearly ripe apples weighed down its branches. The garden was bordered on three sides by tall wooden fences; at the far end was a shed, in which he found a lawnmower and an axe, and next to the shed was a gate which opened into an alley lined with lock-up garages, from where, James knew, you could cut through to the surrounding streets.
He was surprised by how well he knew the house, how perfectly it fitted the hole in his memory. It was almost as if he had lived here. But could that be true? He closed his eyes and tried to think back, but there was a blank, a hole, that made him reel when he got too close. With relief, James gave up trying to remember. And then, as if to prove that it was still functioning, his memory flashed up a fragment of information that he had once heard or read somewhere: that the metaphor Freud had used to describe memories was objects placed in the rooms of a house.
James looked around again at the sofa, the coffee table, the armchair, the television. Don’t worry, he told himself, your past is somewhere in this house. Now that you’re here, it will all come back.
James worked hard that day. First he drove the van out to an industrial estate on the edge of the city, where, Harrison had informed him, there was a ParaDIYse store. James bought a generator, an industrial vacuum cleaner, a hurricane lamp, overalls, a facemask, gloves, workboots, rat poison, disinfectant, buckets, sponges, and an oil heater. Then he went to Harrison Lettings, filled in an expenses form, handed over his receipts, and watched as Mr Crabtree unsmilingly counted out the £50 notes. Back at the house he started up the generator and vacuumed the bedroom, the sitting room and the entrance hall. When he’d finished he was covered with sweat and dust. There was no hot water in the house, so James cycled to the municipal swimming pool and used the showers there.
Refreshed, he bought a takeaway pizza and some refrigerated beer. It was a bright evening. He ate the pizza in the garden, sitting with his back to the apple tree. When he’d finished, he drank a bottle of beer and watched the clouds on the western horizon turn a delicate, unearthly shade of pink. Above him the half-moon was clearly visible in the pale blue sky. It was so peaceful, James began to wonder if he was living in a ghost road, but when he listened closely he could hear children laughing, music playing. Again he felt that strange mixture of hope and fear: what was he doing here, alone in a derelict house, in a city where he knew no one? He didn’t have a clue where his life was leading. And yet, at that moment, he felt fine. The beer was cold, the sky clear, the air fresh and warm. It was comfortable, leaning against the apple tree.
It was such a beautiful moment that James wished he could stop time, pin it down, fix it immutably in his memory. He worried that if he did not record the moment, it would quickly vanish into the depths of his mind, like a floating pollen seed drowned in a river. And yet, if he went now to fetch his black notebook and wrote a description of the cloud patterns in the sky, the tree shadows on the grass, the warm air, the sweet calm he felt, the moment itself would escape him, he knew, and he would be left with nothing but a few scribbled, inadequate words.
Paralysed by uncertainty, James sat there, in the shade of the apple tree, wondering what he should do. Perhaps if he memorised the scene now, he would be able to write it down later, before it fogged over in his mind. He looked up at the sky. The cloud resembled an elephant, he thought, or perhaps a domed building. Yet even now it was changing, mutating, thin wisps of translucent steam peeling off a
nd creating a sort of long tail, the edges of which seemed to vanish before James’s eyes. He was mesmerised for a moment by these little disappearings - where did the cloud-edges go? - and when he looked again, the elephant-cloud no longer existed. It had altered, vanished, entered the past. Fucking hell, thought James, time is so relentless! It’s always now, and yet . . . what is now? In French the word was maintenant - literally, ‘hand-holding’. In other words, the present was the time that you held in your hand: here, solid, graspable. But this was a lie, James thought: you could no more hold the present than you could grasp the moving water in a river. Give the present the briefest thought or reflection and it eludes you. The only way to live in the present is to forget trying to grasp it, to float in its current, not to think at all . . .
James frowned. Without his noticing, and contrary to the normal laws of time, the air seemed to have grown warmer, the sky bluer. He looked at the back wall of the house and saw that the bricks were glowing, the window panes a dazzle of silverish gold. The skin of his legs and arms was now bare and warm in the sunlight, and there were voices around him, laughing, whispering. A blanket on the grass before him; the shape of his own black shadow. He leaned back, smiled, and then . . . a silence, another shadow. He looked up and the hairs on his forearm stood erect, his heart plunged. What was happening to him? What was it he was feeling? The grass and the tree and the sun and the sky and the bricks of the house all blurred and merged together, close to his face, the green, brown, yellow, blue and red mixing until they were black.
James opened his eyes and shivered with cold. His mouth was dry and his hands clammy. I must have fallen asleep, he thought. I must have been dreaming. He looked around, at the darkening garden, and felt a familiar despair. The sun had set. The beautiful moment had passed. It had slipped through his fingers just as he knew it would.
Sighing, he finished his beer and walked back to the house. On the way, he felt something hard underfoot. He looked down and saw a flat rectangular stone. There were lines carved into it: a symbol of some kind, or a word. James couldn’t make it out in the darkness, so he traced the letters with his fingertips, reading blindly. It said, ID.
He thought of Freud’s unconscious: if memories were objects placed in the rooms of a house, he wondered, then where was the id located - down in the cellar? He thought of the word ‘identity’ and its strange double meaning: the quality of one thing being uniquely one thing; the quality of two or more things being the same as each other. Only after thinking all this did James remember the story he had read in the newspaper: of the student who had fallen to his death in this garden. And the student’s name: Ian Dayton.
In the bedroom he lay in his sleeping-bag, on the futon mattress, and read through the client’s instructions again. The most unusual demand concerned the colour of the house: the client had specified that everything - floorboards, walls, windowframes, doors, ceilings - was to be painted white. James didn’t care about the aesthetics, but he objected on practical grounds: he knew from experience that it was almost impossible to keep white things white. Still, he thought, the client is always right.
He yawned and scanned the small print. It was then that he noticed something which had slipped his attention the first time. The ‘telephone box’, as it was called, was to be left intact (and painted white, of course). It was not to be opened or damaged in any way. Under no circumstances is the telephone to be answered. This struck James as rather a strange rule - why not simply disconnect the line? - but he knew there was no point complaining. He had signed the contract; he would have to live with the consequences.
Before going to sleep, James took the hurricane lamp to the bathroom. He tried the tap. Water came out in violent spurts. It was yellowish and lukewarm, but it didn’t taste too bad, and James was able to brush his teeth, wash his face and swallow his anti-allergy pill. He was meant to take these pills once a week, but James couldn’t remember the last time he had taken one; perhaps in Amsterdam? The thought that he had missed his medication made James feel guilty, but it was, he reasoned, a long time since he had suffered an allergic reaction. In fact, he couldn’t even remember what it was he was supposed to be allergic to. In any case the bottle of pills was nearly empty, and he had lost the address to which he was meant to write in order to renew his supply. Never mind, James told himself; if you get ill you can always go and see a doctor.
Back in the bedroom, he turned off the lamp. A feeling of loneliness engulfed him. Outside the wind was moaning. He stood at the window and gazed out into the street. He could see his van, at the other side of the road, and he wondered if, those days when he had sat in the van, watching the house, the man in the dark coat - the man he called Malcolm Trewvey - had stood here in the bedroom and watched him. If only there were someone in the van watching me now, he thought, I wouldn’t feel so alone. Somewhere upstairs a loose windowframe banged in the wind. James tried not to think of the gravestone he had found in the garden.
He got in his sleeping-bag. The bedroom had no curtains so the walls were stained orange by the sodium lamps outside. He thought of Ingrid and wished she were here, if only for tonight. He imagined her inside the sleeping-bag, her skin warm against his, and masturbated. Just before he came, the hallway phone started ringing, and then, after five minutes or so, it stopped.
For the first time since moving to the house, he was not woken by daylight. As he opened his eyes, James saw the white curtains he had hung the day before and sighed with relief. His body ached, but he had given himself the weekend off; he had worked hard for the past five days and he deserved it.
What had woken him was a strange noise in the hallway. He got up to see what it was. On the doormat lay a pile of post: the first James had received at this address. He picked it up and took it to the kitchen. As he walked through the hallway and the sitting room, he paused to admire the cleanness of the walls, floors and ceilings. He breathed in: no dust, no damp, no rot. And if the smell of the disinfectant was still a little strong . . . well, that would fade.
He lit the gas under the kettle and looked at the letters. There was one addressed to him, from his parents; one addressed to ‘The Resident’, which he opened and which turned out to be a telephone bill; and one addressed to Malcolm Trewvey Esq. It was identical to the envelope that James had removed from the letterbox - and which was now pinned to the kitchen wall - but this time the word URGENT was scrawled across the top. James had decided to open the first letter today, as it was still unclaimed, but when he saw this second letter, he changed his mind. He felt guilty for not having made greater efforts to pass on the first letter to its intended recipient. What had he been thinking?
He made a pot of tea and some toast, and unpinned the first letter from the wall. He would take both letters to Harrison Lettings today. Crabtree could send them on to Malcolm Trewvey. Relieved at having made this decision, James sat down to eat his breakfast and studied the phone bill: no calls made in the past three months; only the line rental to pay. He would take this bill to Harrison Lettings too. He didn’t see why he should pay for a service he was not allowed to use.
He finished the toast and read the letter from his parents. It was, as usual, full of their ‘news’, but it didn’t really say anything. The true purpose of the letter, James knew, was to express their concern for him. Why had he split up with that nice Dutch girl? Where was his life going? Was he in some kind of trouble? How could they help? None of this was explicit, but he could sense it in the tortured politeness of the phrasing, the things that were not mentioned.
Reading the letter, James felt bad. He was sorry to be such a source of anxiety for his parents, who loved him and whom he loved. But there was really nothing he could do except write back and tell them he was fine. That was what he did. It was a short letter, though, and James worried that it would not set his parents’ minds at rest. So he added a postscript: ‘What are you doing for Christmas? I was thinking of coming down . . . let me know.’ He guessed and hoped that
they would be busy - they always planned these events long in advance - but at least they would be happy to know that he wanted to see them.
After breakfast, he posted the letter to his parents and drove to the city centre. At the Harrison Lettings office he gave the envelopes marked ‘Malcolm Trewvey Esq.’ to Crabtree, who sighed wearily. ‘It’s nothing to do with us, Mr Purdew.’
‘But it says urgent.’
‘The client was perfectly clear about our duties. Anything not covered by the terms of the contract is beyond the bounds of our responsibility.’
‘So what am I supposed to do with them?’ James demanded. ‘Throw them in the bin?’
‘Calm down, Mr Purdew. What makes you think they are meant for the client, anyway? As far as I’m aware, his name is unknown to you.’
James didn’t know what to say. ‘I just feel sure they are.’
Crabtree looked at him sceptically. ‘Well, why don’t you put them in a drawer and wait for the client to collect them?’
Because they’re driving me mad with curiosity, James wanted to say. But he didn’t. He handed the phone bill and his expenses form to Crabtree and watched as he counted out the money.
Harrison saw James and walked over to shake his hand. ‘How goes it, Mr Purdew?’
James guessed he was talking about the house. ‘Well, it’s cleaner than it was. And I’ve got the gas and hot water working. ’
‘The client told me he was satisfied with your progress thus far.’
James, startled, said: ‘He’s seen it?’
Harrison hesitated. ‘I have no idea, Mr Purdew. He merely said he was satisfied with your progress.’
James thought: he’s been spying on me. The thought made him fearful and angry. At the same time, he felt strangely flattered by the attention. Malcolm Trewvey was spying on him. Malcolm Trewvey was satisfied with his progress. James remembered the face of the man he had seen reflected in the sex shop window. He had looked so sure of himself, James thought; so sure of me. How sweet my revenge if I could uncover his guilty secret.