Property

by Lionel Shriver

  That night, at her wit’s end and having ruined yet another sandpaper belt within sixty seconds, Helen Rutledge drew the kind of conclusion that the more self-possessed rendition of her character would have found preposterous. The floor was obviously growing nails. It was growing nails as surely as her fingers did. As a demented experiment, she meticulously traced a little patch at one corner, then turned her back. By now, she wasn’t even surprised. When she returned to the patch, it sported six or seven raised, snag-headed tacks, which had popped up like toadstools.

  “Have it your way, then,” she told the floor. Sanded fitfully in disconnected sections, the surface had a mangy quality, like a diseased urban fox. So she was at a loss to comprehend how it still managed to look smug.

  When choosing a replacement carpet, she erred on the side of caution, selecting a sample of nubbled beige. The whole tedious operation dispatched, the bedroom looked exactly the same. So far, after much expense and effort, Helen the new homeowner had made no impact on this property whatsoever.

  “Say, aren’t you brave!”

  Helen was on the pavement keeping an eye on the removal men, making sure they didn’t scratch her mother-of-pearl inlaid antique sideboard. An older woman had leaned over the picket fence between their adjoining properties. She had the stout build and burst-capillary complexion of this “up and coming” area’s pregentrification residents. Before she could stop herself, Helen thought reflexively, On benefits.

  “I don’t know how ‘brave’ I am when they’re doing all the work,” Helen said, trying to sound friendly to cover for her uncharitable assumptions.

  “I mean taking that place on,” she said. “Has quite the reputation round here, that house.”

  “Oh?” Helen’s tone cooled. She’d nursed an aggressive lack of interest in her property’s history, especially in whatever loser had lived there who was feckless enough to have faced foreclosure.

  “Your last owner, Judith. Determined to go down with the ship, she was!”

  “Except the ship”—Helen nodded at her front door—“is still afloat.”

  The woman mistakenly imagined that the new owner was desperate to hear the story. “There’s not many what realize it, but Judith weren’t all that far from paying off the mortgage free and clear. But her husband had died a ways back—something with the kidneys—and Ron’d brung in the bacon. Bus driver, if I recall rightly. Your bereavement payment is a one-off, your bereavement allowance lasts only a year, and Judith weren’t old enough to draw a pension. So money got well tight. Kids were wasters. Which didn’t keep her from slipping them two boys the odd tenner when she had it to spare. Only reason they ever called round, if you ask me. Judith was a generous soul. Just had her limits. She’d a long fuse on her, but she did have one fearsome temper once she was riled. All that dosh pitched to the bank for donkey’s, she weren’t about to let ’em take that house off her.”

  “But apparently they did.” With every new scrap of superfluous information, Helen’s heart had steadily sunk. The last thing you wanted was a motormouth for a next-door neighbor. This woman could make simply getting out the door for the smallest trip to the shops take forty minutes. But Helen was under the misimpression that keeping her own comments to a minimum would discourage chat, when in truth her terseness simply left her neighbor all the more conversational leeway to let fly.

  “Not without a fight! Soon as Judith get that summons, she start hammering. A proper racket for me, you can imagine, and I come out to see she’s banging up big plywood sheets over the windows, like you do for rough weather—but these boards is on the inside. They say she padlock the doors from the inside as well, top and bottom, front and back. She’d a great towering stack of food and drink in the cellar, the way them religious nutters ready for the end of the world. Might not be much to look at to some—no offense intended—but to Judith it were her house, where she spend most of her marriage, where she raise her boys.”

  “Sounds a pity, then,” Helen said, powerfully disapproving of any such illegal sit-in. If you owed a payment, you raised the money from somewhere or accepted the consequences. Irked that her curiosity about how the story ended had been piqued despite herself, she apologized that she had to mind the removal men and fled inside.

  That night, surrounded by cartons, Helen flopped into bed without having flossed. Nothing was more exhausting than moving house, and before dropping off she made the commonplace vow (as commonly broken) that she’d never pull up stakes again.

  Her slumber might have been deep and dreamless, were it not for the persistent strains of “Jerusalem” chorusing over and over from the direction of the party wall. She’d once found the tune rousing, until a workmate at Manson & Ross had started using the first three bars as a ringtone, after which she’d found its pompous strains unbearable. She didn’t want to make enemies of this woman when their properties were attached at the hip, but some laying down of ground rules was in order.

  The following Sunday morning, Helen relished the Christmas sensation of unwrapping treasured keepsakes from their newsprint swaddling. Unpacking was like being given everything you owned all over again. When she arranged her trove of CowParade figurines and smaller “mini-moos” atop the antique sideboard, the familiar bovine art reproductions made a declaration of sorts: my house! (Helen wasn’t a natural collector, but a single gift of a brightly striped resin cow had triggered a cascade of presents from the same series. It seems one’s personality wasn’t always of one’s own making, but could be a joint effort.) Maybe the previous owner had been on to something, too, and defacement was the ultimate form of possession, since pounding picture hooks into the plasterboard was strangely exhilarating; Helen would never have dared to drive holes into the walls of her rental flat in Dulwich. The framed photo of the whitewashed cottage where her family had always holidayed in the Cotswolds pleasingly linked where she had been to where she was now. Even if she hadn’t exactly read them, her embossed classics from the Folio Society marked her new digs as a household of taste, education, and refinement.

  Contented by festooning her first proper home with the dozens of touches that turned mere quadrants into rooms—rooms with character, rooms that had been mastered—she managed for most of the morning to ignore the insistent smell. A piercing odor of ammonia suggested that whoever had tarted up the house for sale had gone overboard with violent cleaning products, although the ammonia was contaminated with an undersmell of diesel, and laced with a burnt singe. Residual wafts of detergent should have begun to dissipate; this pong was growing stronger.

  If only to escape the mysterious reek, Helen took a break and headed out to her local Sainsbury’s; switched on for a full day, the fridge should be cold by now. But of course she didn’t make it to her front gate before the busybody next door popped out to ask how she was getting on, and to finally introduce herself as Gertrude.

  “So you’re a fan of ‘Jerusalem,’ I gather.” Helen had to force herself to bring it up.

  Gertrude reared back. “Quite the opposite! Had to hear it again, I might top myself.”

  Helen frowned. “But I heard quite distinctly—”

  “Judith, now. Couldn’t tell if she specially fancied it or specially despised it, but either way that carry-on made for a fiendish weapon. Once the authorities get heavy—no surprise the bank bring in the council, and the council the police—Judith blast that recording on her stereo nonstop, all hours. Never sure what she mean by it, but for me, by the end, you could shove your ‘green and pleasant land’ right up England’s arse.”

  It wasn’t clear what Gertrude’s game was, but at least the woman had been put on notice about her sound system.

  Helen returned from the supermarket with an enormous shop, from which she immediately extracted the honeysuckle air freshener and sprayed the kitchen until the aerosol was half exhausted. But poorly masking the stench with artificial scent just made the room smell like a petrol station toilet. After hastily stocking the fridge-freezer,
she retreated to the sitting room with chamomile tea to settle her stomach.

  The photo of the Cotswolds: it was turned to the wall. The Folio Society hardbacks as well were now facing backwards, presenting a bank of blank deckle-edged pages. The cows on the sideboard had vanished. On a hunch—British burglars weren’t known for eccentric reshelvings of Moby-Dick—she opened the sideboard’s top drawer, and there were her kaleidoscope cows—seemingly unharmed, but on their sides, shoved out of sight.

  Sheer mischief! Might that Judith woman have provided Gertrude a spare key for emergencies? Yet if so, why would her neighbor sneak inside when Helen was out shopping and mess with her things? Nothing seemed to have been taken, so the lady might simply have been nosey parkering, but didn’t most snoops make a point of leaving everything as they found it?

  Still, the ploy, whatever it was for, was oddly effective. As Helen righted the photo, reversed the Folio books, and restored the resin cows to their rightful place on the sideboard, she felt more unnerved than she had been by the hostile front lock, the boiling paint job, the nail-sprouting floorboards, the bombasts of William Blake, or even that awful smell—although as she recited it, she realized that there was a list, and that it kept getting longer.

  Running late for work that Monday morning, still underslept from more penetrating strains of “Jerusalem,” Helen whitened the coffee that would have to suffice for breakfast, only to watch the milk resurface in bobbing curds. That semiskim wasn’t a day old! But when she checked, the fridge was warm; the frozen food was melting. Surely she’d heard the comforting hum of the appliance as she unpacked dishware the day before. But now the socket was switched to the off position, and everything she’d bought at Sainsbury’s was ruined.

  There was nothing for it but to switch the socket back to On and deal with the disaster after work. Perhaps she’d imagined the hum, and neither she nor the removal man who’d connected the white goods had remembered to activate the outlet.

  Yet when she returned from work that evening, the outlet switch was back in the off position. Chicken juice from the freezer pooled on the floor. Furiously, Helen pitched the breast fillets, venison burgers, sausage rolls, lamb chops, smoked salmon, and packets of prewashed baby lettuce into a bin liner. After dumping the bag of costly foodstuffs into her wheelie bin, she marched round the picket fence and pounded on Gertrude’s door.

  Alas, her neighbor’s expression of affable innocence looked so genuine that Helen’s consternation crumbled to embarrassment. If she accused this near stranger of barging into her property solely in order to turn off the refrigerator, she would sound unhinged. For that matter, confronted with the problem of a malicious intruder who must have a spare key, why hadn’t a capable homeowner like herself simply changed the locks right away?

  The answer was clear cut. When an inanimate CowParade collection freakishly transports itself from surface to drawer, safeguarding a rational explanation was tantamount to safeguarding one’s sanity. So long as she didn’t change the locks, she could always blame Gertrude. In the event that any further goings-on might require a logical attribution, she didn’t want to change the locks.

  “Sorry, I—forgot to switch on the outlet for the fridge, and now all my food’s spoilt. I wondered if you might have a bit of bread and cheese, to tide me over.” It was all she could think to say, though half a dozen takeaway menus had already been shoved through her letter box.

  “We can do better than that, treasure. You come right in.”

  Gertrude’s house was cluttered, laid with clashing patterned carpets and lined with cutesy ceramic pigs, whose old-lady ambience might in time worrisomely confer itself on Helen’s avant-garde cows. Still, the gas fire was lit, and it was a relief to feel welcome somewhere.

  “Sure that outlet’s being switched off was your fault?” Gertrude fished, slipping a ready-meal lasagna into the microwave.

  “Who else’s fault could it be? I’m on my own.”

  “And why would that be? Such a fine-looking girl. Don’t fancy a body to keep you warm at night?”

  “Oh, I’ve had my share of boyfriends,” Helen exaggerated. “But right now I’m concentrating on my career. Enjoying my independence.”

  Gertrude glanced at her guest askance as she delivered a glass of lager (Helen would have preferred wine). “But what about a family? Getting late for you, I wager.”

  “Oh, I’m not sure children are in the cards. But they’ve never been a priority for me, really.” The feisty assertion was undermined by a forlorn note.

  As they sat down to their meal, Helen raised tentatively, “That face-off, with Judith. When she boarded up the windows, and padlocked the doors from the inside. How did it end?”

  “Badly, of course,” Gertrude said sorrowfully. “All manner of nasty notices pile up at the door. Officers pounding to be let in. Finally, didn’t they drive up in a lorry with a battering ram, and bust through the entry. Don’t know if you notice, but that front door of yours? It’s spanking new. The old one was splintered to bits, like.”

  The old lock would have been done for as well. So much for the theory that Gertrude had a spare key. “So did they arrest her, or fine her? Say, for perverting the course of justice?”

  Gertrude sighed. “Too late for that. They found Judith collapsed in the kitchen. Probably dead a day or two. She build one of them fertilizer bombs, if you can credit it. Researched the how-to on the internet; cops found the searches on a computer she’d used down at the library. Hadn’t researched it too good, mind, since heaven be praised the contraption was duff. Poor wretch were overcome by the fumes when she try to set it off. Troubled me Judith didn’t take into account how blowing up her house might of taken me own with it, but she couldn’t of been in what you’d call a considerate state of mind.”

  “It was her house,” Helen filled in. “If she couldn’t keep it, then no one else was going to get it either.”

  “Figure that’s about the sum of it.”

  Nevertheless, sensible Helen Rutledge couldn’t countenance hocus-pocus, and throughout the following several years the should continued to take precedence over a great deal of was. A washer load of whites would come out a sickly pink, having been fouled by a pair of red socks, and Helen didn’t own red socks. The dimmer switches in the breakfast room developed a constant tremble; the nervous sensation that the quavering halogen spots provided her evenings soon translated to her left eye, whose chronic twitch made clients at Manson & Ross worry that she was untrustworthy or hiding something. Electrical wiring began bulging from the plasterboard, branching in disquieting varicose veins, as if the whole house had high blood pressure.

  Over time, mildew rose in a blighting speckle beside the shower stall, and to Helen the dusty pixels always formed a face—with beady, resentful eyes, frazzled hair, and pressed lips—much as visions of the Virgin Mary will appear to the devout on a piece of burnt toast. When Helen attempted to wipe off the spores, she simply smeared the expression from grimace to smirk. Disrobing under the moldy stare made her shy, and alone at home with the shades drawn Helen would bind a towel tightly under her arms to hide her breasts.

  Trying to rejuvenate the disheveled back garden, Helen planted a row of forget-me-nots, in the hopes that the sheer helplessness and aching vulnerability of the tiny periwinkle blooms would protect the cover from harm. No such luck. The pretty little plants all withered and blackened within the week, while the garden suddenly reeked of ammonia and diesel, the smell to which she’d long before grown inured indoors.

  Other misfortunes were more ruinous. During one workday, the bath spontaneously ran for hours and soaked the sitting room ceiling, which saved its collapse of soggy plaster for the moment of her return. Following some routine masonry repairs, both sinks backed up. When she swore herself blue that she would never pour wet concrete down her own kitchen drain, the plumber asked the obvious: “So who else did it?”

  Even entertaining never went right. Guests spilled things, ate quickly, an
d left early. Perhaps the sense she’d had on first entering these quarters affected others as well. They didn’t feel welcome.

  When she finally invited a proper date round for a summer supper—Alan was a new hire, and rather dashing, for an accountant—he seemed ill at ease from the start, having been unsettled by the peculiar shelving of her Folio classics, which she’d given up standing spine-out. “She doesn’t care for Jane Austen,” Helen dismissed distractedly, basting the roast. While the two chatted awkwardly in the sitting room, the meat burnt to a cinder anyway, since somehow the oven dial got nudged up to gas-mark nine, and Alan had made a point of preferring his beef rare. But never mind the food, as once they sat down to a candlelit dinner on the little back porch the decking collapsed, breaking Alan’s collarbone and ending their romantic evening in Accident and Emergency.

  Sadly, Helen’s resolve not to be defeated by mere bricks and mortar came at a cost. She developed an anxious, jumpy disposition, and workmates began to avoid her at lunch. Her appearance suffered; weight loss was aging, and due to a phobia about the shower, which got scalding with no warning as if suffering from menopausal hot flushes, her hair was often greasy and flat. Proud independence slid without her noticing to reclusiveness. That forlorn note that had sounded at Gertrude’s about not giving “priority” to children became a dominant chord. Professionally, too, she felt increasingly perverse. Despite the smorgasbord of careers from which she might have chosen when younger, she had willingly plunged up to the eyeballs into the most odious aspect of modern life.

  In the office, she’d once been a notorious stickler, insistent that expenses be entered in precise amounts to the penny. Yet now her decimal points were wont to migrate willy-nilly two or three places. She would forget to include buy-to-let profits, or neglect investment income. Consequently, one client in arrears with HMRC seemed to qualify for a substantial refund. After the client had blown his windfall on a holiday in Seville, he returned to face an audit and then criminal prosecution. Helen was sacked.