In My House

by Alex Hourston

  I got home from the airport late afternoon. The police had known the man. He was arrested and Anja – that was her name – taken somewhere safe. There were others, too, other girls. The thing seemed fleeting and exciting, and it felt empty at home without the dog. I walked down the road to buy the basics. Put on a wash. And moved around the house softly, unable to settle.

  The kitchen is a rectangle with a doorway in from the hall bottom left, as I looked at it on the details. The units are a synthetic something in vivid blue that makes me think of Greece and which I have learnt, over time, to appreciate. One oddity – or feature, as I think it was described – is the small square of space growing out from the top right-hand corner; an extension, perhaps. An afterthought, certainly. It was sold to me as a diner, so I measured up and bought a fold-out table from IKEA. Once established, it blocked the route out to the garden. This now lives flat up against the wall. I tried a sofa – too cramped – and next a chair and a pouffe, but when I sat and tried to read there I felt observed. So I can’t find the room a purpose. Its function remains oblique. And, to be frank, there is no sense of flow. Still I prefer the layout to the prevailing style of open plan. I feel marooned in those big spaces and also bored by them. Why live your life in one huge room?

  The floorboards throughout are orangey yellow, too much so, like cheap pine. Once, long ago, I had plans to sand them, but that moment has passed.

  There is a bedroom in the attic which I’d thought would be mine, but hadn’t factored in the trip down to the loo in the dark. Now it is my office. Full of books and my desk and just the two Velux windows in the roof, so no distractions. I sleep in the second bedroom; the third is functionally furnished but barely used. The bathroom is white and was modern when I moved in.

  I live here with the dog. A boy. My second. The first was killed by a car. His name is Buster and he is a chocolate Lab. A bit smelly but much loved. I like my house and never plan to leave.

  I thought of ringing someone, but no one seemed quite right.

  It is not that I don’t have friends. There is Maureen, and Peter and Paul, who I walk with. Paul, I met that very first day out with the old dog, Ernie; right after his jabs. He approached us – that puppy was irresistible – and offered me the number of a socialisation class. I didn’t use it, but things moved on from there. These are my favourite people. I would certainly tell them when I saw them, but to phone specifically? That would change the rules. Come across as self-aggrandising, even, and I wouldn’t want that. We know when each of us walks and the routes that we take, so simply turn up and match stride. Paul and Maureen I see several times a week, most weeks.

  We, as a group, are not at the centre of things. Our territory is the fringes; we are observers, commentators on others’ excitements. This is what drew us together. A touch world-weary perhaps, wry even sometimes, but we don’t judge. It is just our way, although there is no need to acknowledge it. Even when something really does happen – Peter and Paul were married, I was there, a London wedding in a register office and, after, a pub – we act like it is not much really.

  There is also Nancy, who gets me my work. We have a wine sometimes when I go up to the agency, and I have two cousins who I could call if I had to, but haven’t and couldn’t imagine what kind of disaster would make that an idea.

  I am not a restless person. My ability to absorb myself is acute. I like crosswords, books, the television and my work. They fill my time. I can do silence and the solitary. I have chosen these things. But that day, my environment felt changed. A sense of space as in emptiness, void, a thing to be filled. An unwelcome adjustment.

  What happened earlier just bubbled away. It hung about me in a fashion that, I must admit, life rarely does. I felt a rattly annoyance and then gave up, gave in. I thought of her face, of Anja. That girl. That poor girl. And her plan. The nerve of it. And the fact that it worked. I felt exhilarated, and yes, if I’m honest, a bit of pride; a pleasure in my part.

  I imagined her resting in a narrow bedroom, waking at a sound, drenched in dread, and remembering she was safe. A house of rescued girls with shining faces. I knew enough to recognise that as a dream.

  I wondered what had made her break ranks? I had seen a documentary once about how a man like Goran keeps a woman in line – the psychology of subjugation. It is a delicate art. She must be made to feel worthless, dependent, but on no account tip into hopelessness. When there is nothing left to lose, she becomes dangerous. All she has to do is step out of line, speak up and the whole thing crumbles. In this sense, bizarrely, the trafficker is dependent on her. So what changed for Anja? I couldn’t know.

  And what would happen to her now? Would she go home to people who were worrying, or stay and make a new life? A sense of the chance to start again passed through me like a wish. I felt happy for her then.

  One might suppose she had a bad past, but it is rarely that simple. Things go wrong for so many reasons. I myself had a good enough childhood, at times, maybe wonderful. A seaside childhood of wind and gulls and sugar. And women, my mother and aunties, doing women’s things all day; things I took satisfaction in and thought I would turn back to, but haven’t. My cooking’s poor, I do not sew and am not fussed with keeping house.

  The door went, and it was Carol and my dog. I bent as he wagged his whole length and scratched him at the necessary places – front armpits, the folds of his ears. He nosed me, and whined up and down a few octaves.

  ‘I’ve given him a bath!’ she said.

  ‘You really didn’t have to,’ I replied, and meant it. He smelt of maiden aunt – dog shampoo is unreconstructed – but would be back to himself in a couple of walks’ time. He sat back on his haunches and lifted alternate paws. When I wouldn’t shake, he butted my thigh with his great domed head. I paid her and she left. Then I was truly home.

  4

  An odd day, the next one. A day that I could not have anticipated.

  I woke slow-headed and with the loose sense that something had changed. I remembered the excitement of the previous afternoon; felt it again briefly, and it was gone.

  The urgency to talk had drained and I started early with the dog so as not to see my friends. The sky was a promising blue and I left without a coat. No sign of autumn yet, though the children would soon return to school. Buster pulled, and I remembered my back, but a couple of roads and we were on to the grass. I loosened his lead, he dropped his nose to the ground and set off in frantic Zs.

  There is a slice of time when the function of the park is changed. It is no longer a destination but a thoroughfare, a cut-through for people to get to where they are going. It is impossible to take a person seriously who is rushing when you yourself have no place to go. We daytimers tend to retreat, step off the path and let them pass, and I like the way it makes me feel about my choices. By half past eight it is finished and the life of the park resumes. Some of us even share a smile.

  What does a woman think of as she walks alone? I find that the action can release things. The body is occupied, evenly, just enough. There is stimulus of a gentle kind; weather, whatever it may be, making itself felt against you. Sounds at a safe enough distance. And often I find that my attention hops and that is fine, although on occasion it is swamped; less good.

  I completed two circuits of the main field and stopped for coffee and one of those Portuguese pastries. Eggy custard, blistered on top, flecks of vanilla like fine blown ash. Two mouthfuls maybe. Just the thing.

  An old lady sat outside in a stiff high-collared coat despite the day’s warmth. That, and the set of her shoulders, the clutch of her hands on the handle of her bag and the way her whole body was turned in on itself – don’t look at me, don’t bother me – made me think of my mother.

  She had visited London three times to my knowledge but the idea of her here seemed impossible. It was in any literal sense – she had been dead six months – but, even so, for her to have made the trip this century, in my lifetime even, felt like a mistake. They didn�
��t hurt, these thoughts, but they surprised me.

  The woman seemed exposed, and I wondered why she wasn’t inside. She was the only person without a dog or child, and dressed in something other than jeans. She looked as though she should be waiting at a station for an old-fashioned train. My coffee was done and the sun had gone in, but still she sat, the cross of her leather gloves contrived and inhuman. I made a friendly shape of my face at her and her eyes rested on me briefly and moved on. That pissed me off.

  I flicked through an abandoned Metro but nothing caught my eye, and I got up to leave. But a wind caught at the upper pages and I saw that if it bust its seams, it would become my problem. I pinned the paper down with someone else’s mug and reached to unhook Buster from my chair leg. A sharp gust lifted the flap of my coat and there was the noise of breaking china. I looked up to find the cup smashed and the paper flipped onto its back. The front page was yanked off the staples and gone in an instant. I tended lamely to the breakage and spotted the lost sheet wrapped dramatically around another walker’s leg.

  I felt ashamed on my way to the bin; eyes down, the shards wrapped loosely. Around my grip, I read fragments of page 4. A slim column, ‘In Brief’. A stack of stories: a celebrity who planned to pen his tale, accompanied by a stamp-sized photo, blurred somehow in its production, the layers of colour just missing. Next: Pensioner Dies in Blazing Flat. I shifted the damp package in my hand. Police Charge Trafficking Suspect.

  A 32-year-old Albanian man was arrested yesterday at Gatwick Airport and charged with Trafficking into the UK for Sexual Exploitation, after one of his alleged victims, Anja Maric, made a dash for freedom. It is believed that Maric, 19, also an Albanian national, was assisted by a stranger, Margaret Benson, 57, of Queen’s Park. Ms Maric approached Ms Benson in the Ladies toilets and the two fled to safety.

  It was the strangest thing to see my name in print, my actions described. It felt like a trick.

  I read through again, more slowly this time.

  It was definitely me. Name, yes. Benson is the name I was born with. Age. Fifty-seven. Correct. And I had been there, of course. Done these things. Yet I could not quite connect with the woman on the page. A separation had occurred, like Peter Pan and his shadow. I had the sense that the person that I read about could step up and away; do things on her own, or be made to do them. I felt the sudden pull of vertigo that is my stress response. I held on to the top of the bin, the paper scrunched in my palm, fingers among the fag butts, and tried to breath.

  Imagine you are driving on a motorway. One minute it is all about propulsion, your car moving hard in response to your foot. Now look at the lines on the road. Your perspective flips. They are streaming off behind you, backwards, and in that second of awareness there is a dizzying reversal; you feel that you must tip, be sucked under. That is the best way I can describe it. It is an intensely physical feeling, a shift in the properties of the universe. If an episode is particularly strong or unexpected, I can actually fall down.

  Not today, though. I opened my eyes and the world reassembled.

  I ripped off the page, grabbed the dog and walked.

  There was a newsagent at the end of the road; I was there in ten minutes. I pushed open the door, the bell went ting, and the man looked up. We exchanged the usual good-mornings.

  I moved straight to the rack and picked the top copy from each pile. I paid with a silly grin and the feeling that I was about to be recognised. (‘Hey. Are you? You must be …’) But there wasn’t a picture in the Metro, and the people here who knew me knew me only as Maggie.

  He made no comment, the man in the shop, as I handed him big armfuls of print and for this I was grateful. There were ten papers in total, which he packed for me into two striped bags whose handles narrowed to ribbon with the weight, and cut into my skin.

  At home I went upstairs and laid them on the beige wool of the carpet. Three by three and one spare, though that didn’t seem enough. I had arranged the broadsheets first, but saw that this was wrong and began at the end.

  I leant forward onto hands and knees. Immediately my attention jumped, the layouts busy and incoherent. I steadied myself and worked through carefully, using a finger to track my progress. There was nothing in the Mirror, or the Sun. In the Mail I read, ‘Police Nab Paedo’, and my stomach dropped, but it was something else. Then I was finished and had the fleeting thought that I had dreamt the whole thing. I found the scrap in the bottom of my bag, one line of words already lost to a fold.

  Margaret Benson. I stroked my name to ease out the pleats and the paper began to dissolve under my touch. I’d spoken it many times the day before; that was where each of them had started.

  ‘Your name please, madam, if you wouldn’t mind?’

  The officer at the scene. Duly noted in his book.

  An admin sort, later, ‘for processing’, she told me, and confirmed once more for the sake of the camera.

  ‘Maggie. I mean Margaret,’ I said, again and again, angry at myself for the repetition.

  ‘Here. I’ve got my passport,’ in the end, as if to prove it. It rested on the top of my bag, ready for customs. They took it from me briefly.

  My name, proliferating in pads and files. It had sounded a bit old-fashioned in all those mouths. Unused. A little dusty. It didn’t stand up.

  How had it got to the papers? I couldn’t know. Perhaps it sat, from the moment of my action, legitimate and visible, in some open-access place. Or travelled a murkier route? Offered in exchange for something. Notes in an envelope? A pint? Not these days, surely. Reciprocal information, or a future favour, shadowy for now, shapeless until someone else’s need called it into being. I had no idea of its worth.

  My name, out there, for all to see.

  It made me itch, the very idea. Where was it? Still moving? Multiplying? That name is mine, I wanted it back.

  I told myself it hardly mattered. That these things lay beyond my control. I told myself, but my pulse, if that is what it was – the beat throbbing hard in my temple – seemed not to listen.

  Later, I took the page upstairs and flattened it between two books, which took me back to Rose as a girl, pressing flowers from the garden, and her scrapbooks, her love of all things stationery.

  I found a clear wallet of the sort you clip into a lever-arch file. It was reluctant to separate and crackled with something like static. The article looked like a relic already, floating in the middle, raggedy-edged and finger-worn. Most of all, harmless.

  I put it away; opened the bottom drawer of my desk and fed the sheet under an old pile of papers. It slid into place of its own volition, nothing of it now but a brief plastic tang. And I almost shut the drawer – I did – but uppermost lay a stiff-backed envelope. Inside were photos I knew by heart; still, I reached for them. What harm?

  The first was of my mother, and I had been right, the coat that she was wearing was just like the woman’s in the park, with the same close neck and structured drop. And there was Aunty Frannie and Aunt Bet and me too; the only child.

  We were down the beach. We were always down the beach. We had taken the dog, a ratty thing, Jack. My father’s idea, before he died. He barked at the wind, jumped and snapped, twisted at the middle and got my mother smiling.

  Bet and Frannie, the double act, though Bet had a husband, a small man, who whenever I thought of him, was seated, very still, either reading or watching the radio. I couldn’t recall a word he spoke.

  Always together, Bet and Frannie, two years apart. Brighton born and bred and never left. My mother too.

  The whole story in this photo. Mum at the front in that ludicrous coat on a fold-up chair, wobbly on the pebbles. Her hair set solid, her look that said ‘I dare you’. Me, perhaps twelve, kneeling under her hand, chewing the insides of my cheeks, eyes wide – like a magazine would have told me. Wondering what I looked like, and who would notice and when. My eyes were miles from there.

  Aunty Bet lay in front of us not even on a towel, like an Egyptian que
en, head back, arm raised, a knee bent. Beckoning a servant, or pretending to feed herself a grape. It was the sort of thing she did. And Frannie, behind, the only one standing. Slim as a boy, well into middle age. And I could see that she was touching me gently, just to let me know she was there. All that showed of the dog was his tail.

  That was us. My father already long dead. Bet’s two boys elsewhere; I liked it better that way and used to think the others did too. A tight knot of women. Bound together for good or bad, and resigned to it.

  Yet now of course we are long undone. Or rather (let’s be accurate) I was cut free and in the act, the ties of the others loosened, though they held. No matter now, as they are all gone and traceless. There were other pictures in the pile but I left those. Saw to the dog.

  5

  Maureen called later, having missed us that morning. I told her, in the briefest terms, of my adventures at the airport. She responded predictably.

  ‘Christ Almighty. We looked out for you at the park today. I wondered if something was up.’

  ‘Oh, it’s not anything. I just wasn’t organised. After the holiday.’

  ‘Blimey, Mags. Are you OK?’

  ‘Yes, fine,’ I said.

  ‘Are you out again today?’

  ‘Probably. After his tea.’

  ‘Well, I look forward to hearing the whole thing. See you there.’

  ‘OK.’

  We start at Tiverton Green on Tuesdays, to give the dogs a run off the lead. Maureen and Paul were waiting for me and when I saw them I felt my face heat unaccountably.

  I knew them first by their clothes and posture. Maureen, stamping from foot to foot, a heap in a raincoat – one of her daughter’s from when she was pregnant – and Paul, his head neat as an otter rising above the turned-up collar of something navy and quilted. Then Paul shouted, ‘Is there nothin’ she cannae do?’ in a stupid accent and made some kind of hand signal. It should have made it worse, but didn’t. They were falling about when I reached them. It was what Super-gran used to say, Paul told me.