Guest

by SJ Bradley

  Only one, in the corner, was not taken: his.

  He sat down, and got started.

  There was an email from Frankie:

  Hey man I’m in Utrecht. Writing you this messgae from a cafe a few streets awa yfrom the squat.

  Look Sam, I’m sorry. Ive been going over it and over it in my mind and I know I did wrong. Not that its an excuse but I found out by accident and when I got in touch with Charley she made me swear to keep it a secret. She said she was going to tell you herself and I kept on thinking she would but I never saw her to ask. Girl seems to have disappeared from the secne totally man. I thought it wasn’t really my place to say anything. She said she would tell you herself. I feel such a dick about it now. You should have known earlier and Im sorry.

  Were best friends, aren’t we? I want to make it up to you, anyway I can. What do you want me to do? Whatever it is, I’ll do it. I miss you already Sam. Can’t stand the thought of us falling out for good over this.

  We’ve canselled the rest of our gigs and are playing Patrick Stewart The Band’s dates instead, with us hopping on their bill. Ned;s arm is pretty beat up so I’m playing guitar for them and their bassist is doing their best to play guitar for us, not that the guitar parts are that hard anyway haha. The only thing is, we haven’t got contact information for the promoter in Cologne. Romey can’t find it anywhere on the sheet. Can you sort it out please?

  Frankie

  That explained the second email:

  Hi Samhain, it is Freidrich from Freitag Hus in Koln. We are concerned that your band did not make it here last night. Did you have trouble finding it? Please get in touch to let us know you are all O.K.

  F.

  Then, from Flores.

  My little bug,

  What a break we’ve had! Sorry I’ve been a long time out of contact. Badger and I went to a hippy music festival somewhere in Bedford, then onto the retreat in Wales.

  The retreat has the most amazing garden. Huge roses and bushes, and raspberry canes and strawberries everywhere. It has the most heavenly smell. We went out into the garden every day to pick fresh berries for breakfast. You can’t imagine how great it tastes to eat something only a moment after picking it fresh from the plant. It made me want to take up gardening again!

  All the rest of the cooking was done by this one woman, Rosetta, who made the tastiest vegan food EVER. The first night she did this mushroom risotto and honestly, Sam, I thought I was in heaven. I’ve never tasted anything like it before and I don’t think I will again. Another night she made these broccoli and beetroot burgers – I didn’t even know you could make burgers with broccoli, did you?!

  Anyway, she was amazing, better than any professional, and everybody there was so LOVELY. We met this amazing woman who spends six months of every year running radio projects in West Africa to help villagers learn how to set up and run their own radio stations, so they can communicate with one another across the Savannah. Isn’t that amazing? Anyway I took her email address so we’re going to stay in contact afterwards. The world is really full of amazing people. Sometimes you forget, or I do anyway.

  So, what’s this big news you were talking about? I can’t believe you’d say ‘I’ve got news’ and not tell me what it is. That’s just cruel, little bug!

  We’re travelling around a bit more this week, me and Badger, and I’m not sure when I’ll be home exactly. So, you can try to ring, but I can’t be sure when I’ll be back.

  Kisses

  Flores

  Flores would be pleased to find out Graeme Stokes was dead, he thought. The man she’d worked so hard to keep out of their lives – not that the old dickhead had ever made any attempt to see them. He’d done his business then gone, leaving the two of them to struggle their way through life.

  Graeme Stokes’ other family, who didn’t even know Flores or Samhain existed, had no doubt lived a mortgage-free life in a huge detached house, with a garden, and karate lessons. They’d got off to a good start – they’d lived a life like the Tomlinsons. That was how he imagined their lives, against a template of Emmy Tomlinson’s family, a girl at his primary school who, for some reason he’d never understood, had invited him to her seventh birthday. The sort of family who smiled a lot, who never forgot to return library books, who never forgot when it was Comic Relief day or Sports Day. Emmy Tomlinson’s mother kept a stash of blank birthday cards in a drawer, just in case, and her father lived with them all the time, and always came home when he said he would. Emmy always had on neat, pretty clothes, and always said please and thank you; they were a marmalade on toast, pass the butter, would you like one sugar or two kind of family. Only Emmy Tomlinson’s father wasn’t the type of person who would have a second secret family that he never saw.

  It was time they faced up to the useless old baboon, and flicked two fingers to his grave.

  Mum,

  Just back off tour! It didn’t go well. Ended up coming home early (long story) because I’ve got a lot of shit to sort out. There is a lot of news to be honest, not all of it good, or not all things that you’ll like, anyway.

  My friend Marta sent me a news story about undercover cops infiltrating eco-activist groups in the UK and Europe in the 70s & 80s. Did you ever know a man called Graham Porter (‘Fields’)?

  I know this is not easy for you but I have always wondered about my dad and all I want, is to know. He is dead now so it’s not like I can see him, this guy’s real name was Graeme Stokes and I think he might have been my dad. Please can you get in touch and tell me what you remember. This guy had another wife and kids who probably never even knew we existed.

  Just typing it turned his whole self to ice. Hands, arms, the back of his neck, all felt as though they were being pressed against a sheet of snow.

  Mum I don’t blame you, for not telling me, or for the way you dealt with it when I was a kid. He was a bastard and it wasn’t your fault.

  Anyway the old fucker

  He paused for a minute: typed, deleted.

  Somebody in the library helped me find out a bit about him, and I’ve got a newspaper clipping about him that I can show you if you want. It’s got a picture of him but you can see the likeness. Between him and me I mean, and his two other sons. I am going to try to meet them if I can. I can’t stand the idea of not knowing.

  Also the other thing is that I’ve just found out I’ve got a little girl, with Charley. I had no idea that she even existed until about a month ago. She’s about two years old and her name’s Astrid. It’s all a bit complicated but I’m going to try and find a place of my own so that I can have her to come and stay with me sometimes.

  I did want to tell you all of this face to face but it’s a bit hard with you being away all the time. Message me back when you get this.

  Congratulations, Flores! You’re a grandmother.

  Grandmother. He wasn’t sure whether she’d like that.

  Samhain spent a while staring at the screen, until the letters began to wobble. He stared, eyes fixed, until he perceived a woody smell somewhere behind the chair: the faint scent of a farmer’s field and new, wet lambswool.

  ‘I’m afraid there are others waiting.’ A gentle touch on his shoulder. ‘You’ll have to finish what you’re doing and log out.’

  All this, and he hadn’t even had time to post a bulletin on MySpace asking about flats to rent.

  ‘Right,’ Samhain said.

  3.

  ‘This is what we call the house of a burrowing man. Your first one.’ Kebby’s grin showed sparkling incisors, sharp as a cat’s. ‘This will be a baptism of fire.’

  Simon moaned, leaning against the van window. ‘If you ask me, Peter should leave these jobs to the council,’ he said. ‘Let environmental health deal with it.’

  ‘They won’t do it, that’s the trouble.’ Kebby peered out of the window at the house. Window frames rotten and splintering. Guttering and pipes hung loose like straws in a drink. ‘Too many of them in the union.’

  ‘The
smell inside some of these places,’ Simon went on. ‘If you imagine a sad old man who’s lived by himself for twenty years – never throwing anything away – not even taking the rubbish out half the time... and if he’s had a dog – or cats – which crap inside the house...’

  ‘In a minute, he won’t have to imagine it.’ Kebby put on a horror-movie narration voice. ‘The removal men never suspected, for a second, what they were about to find behind the doorway of...’ he squinted at the number: ‘38 Woodville Place.’

  ‘The pets won’t still be in there,’ Samhain said, ‘will they?’

  He imagined piteous poor things, loose skin, drought bones.

  ‘Oh no, don’t worry,’ Kebby said. ‘The council will have already been for those.’

  ‘Good.’

  Back home, Mama Cat had brought her young a live mouse to play with: he had found them all gathering like a crowd at the gallows. Each took a slicing claw to it, taunting the poor thing, batting it around the circle, until at last the black kitten pounced and did for it by biting its neck in two. Samhain hadn’t been able to get the mouse away.

  After its death, each kitten tore a strip loose. They all gnawed and tore at its greasy skin, its red quivering innards, until there was nothing left. Mama Cat had watched them do it with her glittering, agate eyes, a mother cat with the look of an Egyptian Goddess.

  ‘The man from the council will be here any minute,’ Kebby said. ‘To let us in – and that’s as much as he’ll do. After that, it’s up to us.’

  Their boss had a subcontract for places like these, the houses of burrowing men. Places where lonely, hoarding old men had lived alone, slowly closing themselves in behind a rising mountain of daily newspapers, takeaway cartons, cut hair, and blunt razors, like an animal building itself a nest. There never was any family to clear it.

  ‘How do you think you get like that?’ Simon asked. ‘How do you get to the stage where you think: I won’t bother throwing away all these old papers, I’ll hold onto ‘em. How come they never think, hold on, I don’t really need the football results from six months back – maybe I should have a clear out?’

  ‘What would happen if you started keeping newspapers like that?’ Kebby asked.

  ‘You’re joking, aren’t you? My mum would kill me. She doesn’t even let me wear my work boots in the house. She makes me take ‘em off in the front porch.’

  ‘Exactly. A woman keeps you in line.’ Kebby leaned forward.

  A small council van was entering the street. It was being driven by a bloke who looked like he’d rather be somewhere else.

  ‘Let’s get to work, men,’ Kebby said.

  Samhain reached for his gloves.

  The dead man – whose post gave his name as Joe – had left a narrow path from the door to a rotting red sofa, and another from there to the kitchen at the back of the house.

  In this path they all stood, looking at the stacks of things.

  ‘Well.’ The man from the council leaned in from the front doorway, his feet remaining firmly where they were, on the step outside. ‘Good luck.’ He left the keys on a hook by the door. A minute later, they heard his van engine start.

  ‘Sooner we get started, the sooner it’s done.’ Kebby produced rolls of bin liners, and gave them one each. ‘Bag everything up. These are extra strength, but they’re not invincible.’ He waved a roll threateningly in Samhain’s direction. ‘So you be careful. I don’t want to be driving a van around with bin juice rolling around in the back. Don’t overfill the bags. You understand?’ Samhain nodded. ‘Now, go and see whether there’s anything worth eating in the fridge.’

  Simon laughed, gurglingly. ‘Oh, snap!’

  Samhain took the hint: he was lucky to have been taken on for this job, lucky to have been given any work at all. Kebby was testing him out, to see whether he’d disappear again.

  The kitchen smelled of sour milk. On the cooker top, milk blue with spores settled between the rings in a textured map. Here was a lake, it seemed to say; and here are all of its tributaries. ‘How clean do we have to leave it?’ he called through to the living room, where Kebby was throwing old takeaway cartons into bags.

  ‘Not very,’ his workmate replied. ‘Just tidy – tidy. We have to bin up all the crap so the cleaners can get in. We don’t have to clean it ourselves.’

  ‘Good,’ Samhain muttered.

  The sink was filmed with stagnant water, its surface textured by a junkyard of forks and knives.

  ‘And by the way, you can take whatever you want,’ Kebby called. ‘It’s not as if he’s going to want it. Only all going to go to the dump otherwise.’

  ‘I know. Peter said.’

  A dead man’s things.

  Peter had also said there was enough work to keep him busy all week. This today, then house moves on Wednesday and Thursday; then on Friday, Simon was going on holiday, and there was a piano to move.

  Samhain ran the tap, and the water came rusty and cold, splashing everything with a fine brown grit.

  He would need forks. He started to lift them free of the greasy water.

  There was usually a will, Peter had said, when there was something worth sharing out. What Joe Belling had left behind was a kingdom of nothing. Cheap cutlery, chipped mugs, wobbly-handed pans, bent baking trays. It would all be thrown away, Peter said, unless they wanted any of it. ‘Perk of the job,’ he’d said.

  Still, Samhain felt strange about putting cutlery aside to take for his new place.

  ‘Christ.’ Simon shouted from upstairs. ‘You guys want to come and have a look at this.’

  Kebby had already mostly cleared the living room. Samhain raced through it; there was floor space, and it seemed twice the size.

  Upstairs to a narrow hallway, with an open doorway off to its side.

  ‘Look.’

  Samhain couldn’t see Simon at first. He was hidden behind a wall of magazines, floor to ceiling, the floor curving under their weight.

  ‘This is...’ Kebby said. ‘I’ve never seen so much...’

  ‘Porn?’ Simon gestured at the mattress on the floor, the VCR in the corner. ‘Old man liked big tits. Just look at this.’ He flipped through one of the magazines.

  A rat’s nest of hardened socks on the carpet. Everything smelled of sweaty cheese and stale piss.

  ‘I wouldn’t touch that if I were you,’ Samhain said.

  Simon dropped the magazine. It fell, leaves flying, to his feet, and landed open on a picture of a blonde woman with a breast in each hand. ‘Christ,’ he said, making a noise like he was going to throw up. ‘Where’s the bathroom?’

  They had to take the mattress out to the van, and because there was no hot water in the house, none of them could scrub themselves clean enough afterwards to want to eat their sandwiches.

  ‘Never mind,’ Kebby said. ‘I know a cafe around the corner. They know me there. They’ll let us wash up in their sink.’

  Dust, years of it, when you moved somebody still living, was a clean kind of dirt. But this, grease sticking and trapped, had the weight of death on it, the shame of a life poorly lived. It made for a sombre atmosphere in the van.

  ‘Now there,’ Kebby said, ‘was a man who had nobody in life. You young lads, take that as a warning from history. Don’t you become a burrowing man, living on takeaway chips and wanking yourself dry.’ He pulled the van up to the kerb. ‘Now! Who’s ready for a bellybuster?’

  ‘So,’ Kebby said. ‘Did you take anything from Joe’s house?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Samhain had found a good pan in the back of one of the cupboards, that had looked wedding-present new. But it had felt too strange to take it. He had thrown it away, along with the plates, all mismatched and dirty, and crusted with mould. He wouldn’t want to eat from any of these, no matter how hot they could be washed. He had thrown everything away, as well as the mug Joe Belling had drunk from. ‘Well – just a couple of spoons and forks.’

  ‘That’s gross.’ Simon shuddered. ‘He might have been eating
off one of those forks when he died.’

  Kebby was covered in ketchup. ‘Simon, when you move out of your mother’s house, then you can talk.’ He licked sauce out of the corner of his mouth.

  ‘I need stuff for my house.’ Samhain was eating a plate of fried mushrooms on toast. There wasn’t much choice for vegetarians here, and even these tasted slightly of bacon. ‘I can’t buy everything new. It’s too expensive.’

  ‘Do you need plates and dishes?’ Kebby chewed heavily. ‘Because I think we’ve got an old set in our garage. Ayesha took our old set when she first moved out, and then when she got married, she brought it back again. She said, “Dad, I don’t need this old stuff anymore.” Because they’d got Debenhams vouchers to buy all new stuff when they got married, you know. And I said, “This house isn’t just a dumping ground for stuff you don’t need, Missy.” But my good lady wife said that I wasn’t to argue and to let her put her things wherever she liked. So now it’s in our garage. You want it?’

  ‘Anything to get me started.’

  ‘Yes, that’s the way.’ Kebby twisted his napkin into a boulder, and threw it onto the plate. ‘You know, you should ask Peter about this. He’s got a whole warehouse of furniture somewhere, full of all sorts of things. I bet he could get you a few bits and pieces.’ He stood up, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Well don’t just sit there, boys, we’ve got work to do.’

  4.

  When Samhain came home, the band’s t-shirt box was on the reception desk beside a scattered pile of fanzines and records, and the back door was open, sending a breeze blowing through the house. The wind brought with it a gust of dried leaves: Mama Cat came trotting in through the back door, paws and legs all lean with the hunt.

  Only Frankie could be careless enough to leave the door open like that, knowing there were kittens in the house. Kittens too young and tumbling and too un-neutered to go out yet.