The House Swap

by Rebecca Fleet

  I check on Eddie first, finding him sleeping serenely, tucked up in bed. I stroke his hair softly, feeling guilt surging through me. It feels as if I’ve barely seen him this week. Tomorrow, I’ll come home early and spend some time with him, maybe take him to the playground. Quietly, I back out of the room, then close the door.

  Tiptoeing into the lounge, I peer at Francis where he lies sprawled on the sofa. With a shock, I see that he’s left a pill packet out, tossed next to him carelessly. I can’t remember how many there were last time I looked, but the foil is torn all the way along now and there’s nothing left. The sight of it lights a bright flare of anger inside me, white hot and hopeless. I reach out and shake him roughly by the shoulder, redoubling the pressure when he barely stirs. He makes a noise, something that might be a greeting or a command to leave him alone. His eyelids peel open for a fraction of a second, then droop closed again.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Francis,’ I say, hearing the hysterical rise in my voice and knowing I’m on the path to losing it. ‘What the hell are you doing to yourself? Do you even understand what’s happening here? Have you got a fucking clue?’

  His eyes open again, a slow, painful movement, as if he’s wrenching them up with pliers. There’s little recognition in the glazed look he gives me, and even less acknowledgement of what I’m saying. I stand there in the middle of the room, my arms wrapped around myself, and I can still feel and smell Carl all over my body, and all at once my heart lurches sickeningly and I have no idea how we’ve got here. Tears are pushing themselves out of my eyes, choking my throat. ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ I hear myself saying. ‘You’re supposed to be looking after our child, for God’s sake. What if he woke up and needed you? How can I trust that you wouldn’t just ignore him?’ It’s my own hypocrisy as much as the fear that’s driving the tears. I have no idea what trust means now, between my husband and me.

  Francis struggles aimlessly in his seat, wiping a hand across his face and trying to collect himself. ‘I wouldn’t do that,’ he says. ‘I know my responsibilities. I look after him.’ The words are placatory, but there’s a bite behind them and his frown is thunderous. It’s all I can see.

  ‘Well, that’s good to know,’ I spit back. ‘It’s good to know that you’ll do it for him, but—’ I pause for a second, unsure if I really want to say the words that are trembling on my lips. ‘But not for me,’ I force out.

  He frowns again, as if confused, thrown off base. Perhaps it’s the emotion implicit behind what I have said – an emotion that seems to have no place between us these days. I don’t even know myself why I care any more. His mouth opens briefly, then snaps shut, and he leans his head back against the sofa cushions, closing his eyes again.

  Anger is still burning through me, making it hard to breathe. ‘I don’t want to do this,’ I say, loudly and clearly, spacing the words out. When there is no response, I grit my teeth, hug my arms tighter around myself. ‘I don’t want to be married to you any more,’ I say. ‘I think I’m done here.’

  His eyelids flicker minutely, but still there is no response. I stare at his dark eyelashes, the mouldings of his face that remind me of Eddie’s, the shadow of the bones that I once used to trace with my fingertips while he slept, trying to transmit my love for him secretly through his skin.

  ‘I’m leaving you,’ I finish. The words are simple and strong, but I can hear the tremor of uncertainty in my voice and I know that, on some level, he will hear and understand it, too. Now that I’ve said it, we both know that I don’t quite mean it yet. But I will, I tell myself. Sometime soon, I will.

  They’re back. This time, I’m ready for them. As soon as I see them pause outside the building, I’m pulling on my shoes and running down the staircase to the ground floor. I fumble with something in my coat pocket as I push my way out of the front doors, feigning self-absorption, then I let myself glance in their direction and do a double-take, smiling in surprised recognition.

  I address the little boy directly. ‘You’re Eddie, aren’t you?’ He half smiles back, then puts a fist to his mouth and sucks on it, shy. His eyes slide up towards his grandmother, who is eyeing me with polite suspicion. ‘I’m house-sitting for Caroline and Francis,’ I explain. ‘Eddie’s photos are all over the flat.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ Caroline’s mother sounds relieved to be presented with such a pat explanation. ‘We’re not really lurking,’ she explains. ‘The flat’s on our route back from school, and—’

  ‘Paddy,’ says Eddie suddenly and clearly, his silence temporarily broken. His wide grey eyes are filled with expectancy. For a moment, I have to stop and think, but then I remember the little silvery hamster that occasionally reminds me of its presence by scuttling around its wheel like a creature deranged. Caroline left painstakingly detailed instructions on its care, but I’ve simply thrown a handful of food into the cage every so often and nothing catastrophic has occurred. Most things take less effort than you think to keep alive.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Caroline’s mother says gaily. ‘He’s been talking about him a lot. We could have had him this week, only I’m allergic.’

  ‘Well,’ I find myself saying, ‘you must come up and see him. Would you like that, Eddie?’ The child nods, his face brightening with anticipation. Even as he does so, I realize that I can’t let them into the flat now. Not with the possessions slung haphazardly all over the floors, the mutilated photographs in the hallway. ‘I have to go out now,’ I add, ‘but maybe tomorrow, on your way back from school?’

  Eddie jumps up and down, letting loose an excited volley of approval. Caroline’s mother smiles, a little tightly. ‘Well, that’s very kind of you,’ she says. ‘We’ll see how we go tomorrow. Anyway, we won’t keep you any longer. Nice to meet you, um …’

  She pauses, expecting me to fill the gap, but I simply smile and head off down the street, giving a quick wave of farewell. My footsteps are echoing in my head like gunshots. I’m not sure what I’ve just done, but it’s flooding me with exhilaration and my head is light and giddy. I was stupid to think that the way to get close to someone was through the place they lived, the things they owned. It’s the people they love that tell you the most about who they are.

  Away

  Caroline, May 2015

  I’M LYING WIDE awake in the darkened bedroom, watching the rise and fall of the duvet next to me as Francis sleeps soundly, the furnishings gradually emerging from blackness and taking shape as my eyes grow accustomed to the dark. There’s a kind of unreality to being here at night. Anything seems possible, and as my thoughts churn I’m seized by restlessness. I want to get up, search the house yet again in the hope of finding some new clue.

  Looking around at the stark, minimal lines of the bedroom, I know there’s nothing more to find. But there’s no way that this is the sum total of all you own. It can’t be. The wardrobes and cupboards are practically empty, and you can’t have taken an entire house’s worth of stuff away with you this week. Even the display cabinets are the kind no one has in real life – hollow wooden cubes studded sparsely here and there with a candle or decorative sculpture. You were never messy, but I can’t think of you as this stripped back. There must be more. So where is it? As I lie there a thought suddenly strikes me. Galvanized, I push the duvet quietly aside and slip out of bed, reaching for my phone and stepping out on to the darkened landing. A shiver racks me, part cold, part fear.

  Looking up, I see the answer staring me in the face. There’s a neat whitewashed square in the ceiling with a small brass loop embedded at one side, the entrance to a loft. Now that I see it, I remember noticing a long metal pole standing in the hallway cupboard, and quickly I go and fetch it, hooking it up to the ceiling panel. Its wings open and I see that there is a ladder attached, one which unfolds as I tug on it. There’s no light on in the loft, but as I peer up I think I can make out an array of shapes in the darkness below the cross-hatched beams, faintly illuminated by the streetlights shining through the skylight window. The t
hought of climbing into the dark is terrifying, but I set my teeth, telling myself that there is nothing and no one up there. It’s only my own thoughts that are scaring me.

  Grasping the ladder with both hands, I climb carefully up, mindful not to make too much noise, in case I wake Francis, my heart pumping with adrenaline. I scramble through the opening at the top, landing on my hands and knees on the loft’s wooden floorboards. Shining the light from my phone across them, I can see they’re heavy with dust, but when I squint across the darkened space I see that it has been recently disturbed. There are clear tracks, the kind that could have been made by dragging heavy objects across the floor. As I cautiously stand up, I notice a light switch on the nearby wall and flick it; a dim orange bulb glows nakedly in the centre of the room and, although it still strains my eyes, I can now see that there are several large white bin bags piled up in the corner of the room, at least a dozen. Stacked beside them are a few cardboard boxes – they’re brand new, untouched by dust or mildew.

  I find that I am holding my breath, my throat tight, and automatically softening the sound of my footsteps as I approach. Wild pictures form in my head: bags full of mangled severed limbs, leaking blood. I can’t suppress a shiver as I reach for the first bag and rip open the string tied at the top.

  A jumble of kitchenware, tea towels and crockery, bundled together carelessly. The next few bags are similar: hastily assembled collections of utensils and ornaments that don’t seem to have any personal value or significance. There’s no reason to hide these things, none other than wanting to keep the mundanities of your life entirely secret and removed from me. I tear open bag after bag, finding nothing much of interest. A few of the boxes are stacked with books, and I linger for a while, sifting through the titles. Various classics, a few biographies, even some pop psychology that it’s hard to imagine you ever reading.

  There are a few extra bags bundled behind the boxes, much lighter and softer than the others, and I feel a surge of nausea when I realize they must be clothes. This feels more intimate. If I close my eyes, I can still remember the way your clothes used to feel against my hands, and the scent of your aftershave that clung to them. My heart is beating a quick tattoo against my ribs as I open the nearest bag, but when I reach inside something feels instinctively wrong. I pull out a few items, studying them in the dim light. They’re jumpers, in soft pastel colours. I reach further down into the bag, shake its contents out on to the floor. These are all women’s clothes, not yours at all. They’re all in a size ten, and some of the brands are expensive. With a shiver, I realize they must belong to Amber. I sift through the other bags, and it’s more of the same. It’s as if practically her entire wardrobe has been transported up here.

  My mind buzzing with confusion, I sit back. Why are there so many of these clothes, and why are they up here? I turn out the final bag and, amid the soft slide of fabric, something clatters, hard metal striking the floor. I snatch the object up. It’s a pale pewter locket, and as I ease open the catch I feel something familiar yet unexpected grazing my fingertips. It’s a lock of hair, frayed at the ends.

  Instinctively, I draw my fingers away, dropping the locket. The hair is too dark to belong to Amber, unless her current shade is heavily dyed. Is it yours? I peer at it again and realize it’s possible. It’s a similar colour, and I think a similar thickness. I stretch a fingertip out to it again and close my eyes, trying to remember the way your hair felt against my skin. I can’t quite catch on to the memory, but something shifts inside me and the murky orange light blurs and fuzzes before my eyes and my head swims. I push the locket back into the bag, along with Amber’s clothes, feeling like an intruder.

  Hunched on the attic floor in my vest and knickers, I’m shivering, and thoughts are racing around my head, demanding attention. I force myself to slow them down, and something rises to the surface – something that’s been nagging at the back of my mind for days. I’m remembering her that day in the coffee shop, the reserve that swept over her face when I asked her if she knew who lived here. Not really. You see people around, but that’s about it. Why would she lie? Did she suspect who I was even then, and want to hide the truth from me? But the more I turn over the possibility, the less right it feels. She hasn’t behaved like someone who wants to hide herself or her lover away; she’s sought out my friendship, gone beyond the call of duty. And then I remember something else: the way she prowled around this house the evening she came round, the intentness of her expression. I know on some visceral level that it wasn’t the way you would behave in a house you knew well. It was as if she wanted to soak it up – as if she didn’t belong here at all.

  A quick, decisive shudder rocks my body, and I wrap myself up more tightly, clutching my knees to my chest, trying to think. Is it possible that Amber isn’t your girlfriend at all? That she’s developed some crazy obsession with you, is stalking you at close range from across the street? But then I remember the photograph on the fridge, and the women’s clothes in front of me, and the idea slips through my fingers again and I’m no better off than I was before.

  I press my fingers to my aching temples, my breath hissing with frustration. Impulsively, I snatch up my phone and tap out a text message. I’m sorry I haven’t answered your calls. I will soon, I promise. Just tell me, if you didn’t know who I was, then why did you hide it from me that Carl lived here? Please. Just be straight with me and we can talk.

  As soon as I’ve pressed send I’m unsure if it was the right thing to do, but it’s too late and I watch the screen, waiting tensely for a response. Some instinct tells me she’s as awake as I am and, sure enough, it’s barely a minute before the phone buzzes and the new-message icon flashes.

  Caroline, we need to talk about all this face to face. I haven’t come over there, because I know this must be a difficult situation for you, and I don’t want to involve Francis, but I’m not going to wait for ever. The warning is lightly veiled, but tangible. There is nothing incongruous in the idea of Amber hammering on the front door in the middle of the night, demanding an immediate conference. I know she would do it, just as I would.

  My fingers move slowly across the screen. I’ll come over. Five minutes. Then I climb down the ladder and go softly back into the bedroom, reach for the clothes that I slung across the back of the armchair an hour or two earlier and wriggle back into them. Combing my fingers roughly through my hair, I think about putting on some make-up, but I don’t want to switch any lights on, and perhaps it doesn’t matter what I look like now. I want her to see me as I am. Thirty-five, with the evidence of the past few years written all over my face. Giving Francis a final glance, I slip out of the bedroom and pad softly down the stairs, then ease open the front door and step out on to the street.

  It’s so still outside I feel like the only moving point in a static world. The regimented rows of windows are dark and blank, flanked by the lines of carefully coiffured trees, tips pointing motionless to the sky. Streetlamps glow along the road at measured intervals, small beacons of muted orange light that cast their surroundings dimly in their aura. As I walk towards number 14, my shadow catches me out several times. I tell myself fiercely that there are few places safer than a suburban cul-de-sac. It would take only one burst of noise, one scream into the silence, for the windows to light up in a chain reaction like dominoes, and for the watchmen to appear from behind their curtains. The thought isn’t as comforting as I’d hoped. Now, of all times, I need to stay quiet. I don’t want to be seen.

  I have barely raised my hand to the doorbell before I see her shadow through the frosted glass, reaching forward to let me in. There’s a single lamplight burning in the back of the house, in the little room I now realize must be your study. She moves aside silently so that I can pass, her expression unreadable. When she’s followed me into the back room, I can see that her face, too, is free of make-up; she has the look of a marble madonna, stripped back and unsettlingly pure. Her blonde hair is swept back and plastered against her scalp,
as if with sweat.

  ‘I don’t really know what to say,’ she says at last. Neither of us has sat down; we’re standing facing each other, a foot or so apart, our bodies mirroring each other’s tension. We’re the same height, the same build. More clearly than ever before, the thought flicks through me that I’ve been replaced. Replaced with a younger, prettier version of myself, without my sins and scars.

  I open my mouth to reply, in search of some smooth social nicety that will carry us through the strangeness of this moment, but nothing comes out.

  ‘How long have you been together?’ I ask. It’s a question pulled at random from all those swirling in my head, but it’s one I most need the answer to.

  Amber thinks, wanting to get it right. ‘Eighteen months,’ she says eventually. I work it out. November 2013; four months after I last saw you. Too fast. Implausibly fast, for you. You used to tell me that no one had ever got to the heart of you like I had, that nothing had ever really seemed worth pursuing.

  She’s watching me, her head tilted slightly upwards with what could be defiance. ‘We moved in together here after seven months,’ she says, and now there is a definite challenge in her tone. ‘It was quick, but when it’s right, it’s right, isn’t it.’ She speaks with efficient, dispassionate fierceness, as if daring me to disagree.

  ‘I suppose so,’ I find myself saying.

  Now she knows I’m not out to attack her, her posture softens slightly and she moves forward into the light, letting me see the shadows in her face, her pupils almost pinpricks in her dark green eyes. I try to put myself in her position – myself as the current occupant, threatened by a woman from the past – but I can’t do it. She still doesn’t feel quite real to me, not as your girlfriend. Her skin is luminous and the lamplight is shining through her blonde hair, and under the thin fabric of her white T-shirt I can see the curve of her breasts, her nipples faintly outlined. A vision comes to me, a little mental ripple – you pushing the fabric up with your hands, over her head.