James walks through the door of an unhomely home and dumps his backpack on top of a cardboard box that’s bursting at its parcel-taped seams. James had a lot of boxes to choose from but he slid his grey backpack from his shoulders down his back and onto the nearest, marked ‘Air -> Leonard Cohen’. Dark terracotta rectangles and circles on the walls tell tales of where pictures and plates once hung; a paler, sun-bleached hue envelops the rest of the room on a light summer’s evening as rays pour through dusty wooden blinds. The room is dominated by brown. The two-tone terracotta walls, the heart-wrenchingly dull boxes, the thin veil of beige dust on each slat of the pale brown blinds, all underscored by a dark brown carpet that highlights flecks in need of a vacuum. James makes a mental note to ask the landlord if they can paint the walls before autumn, so he and Kitty don’t feel like they’re living in a molehill.
Clearing the boxes would be a good place to start.
The boxes mostly contain books, vinyl and photo albums. Mementoes that punctuate their journey to this point.
‘It all takes up so much space,’ Kitty complained yesterday. ‘Why don’t you go digital?’
It’s a question Kitty often asks and James just doesn’t answer. He silently plods on. The sentimental collector, even though it is quite difficult for him to open the front door amid his boxes of things. But this is his life, laid out before him in a small front room.
James pushes his glasses back up the bridge of his smooth straight nose and looks at the shapes on the walls. He wonders what artwork might have watched the lives of others, then he sees the mantelpiece above the fireplace and realises that along with all the other brown cardboard in the room, Kitty won’t notice a tube lying along it until he’s ready to tell her about it.
James can’t hear any noise from inside the house, just the sound, via televisions, of tennis balls bouncing, coming through open windows along the street.
‘Kitty?’ he calls, as he walks to a middle room starved of natural light, tripping over a box marked ‘Primitives -> The Streets’ as he goes. ‘Kit?’
Still no answer.
It’s 8 p.m. James has just got home from his first commute from Charlotte Street to the suburbs on the rainy morning that turned out good. The commute home went pretty smoothly, better than this morning’s journey when James almost missed the train because the woman at the ticket desk moved at the pace of a sloth. But tonight he left his friend Dominic in the Fitzroy Tavern at 6.30 p.m. and still made it home by eight.
As James got off the train, turned right out of the station, across two roads and a park lined with copper beeches, he drank in his new surroundings. At the end of the park, he came to what felt like his neighbourhood and crossed two more roads into the quiet street of Victorian terraces. Open windows and blaring televisions revealed the state of play as James walked to 73 Sandringham Road, and the rhythmical knock of felt and rubber on polyester strings gave him a feeling of the familiar in an unfamiliar place. James even took off his headphones to see if he could gauge who was winning.
In the windowless middle room housing nothing but a dining table and two chairs, James calls up a flight of stairs. A toilet beyond the kitchen at the back has recently been flushed.
‘Oh. You’re home,’ says a tall woman with short white-blonde hair as she tiptoes barefoot down the stairs and walks past James into the kitchen. Her limbs are almost as long as his. ‘I was in the attic room. How was the journey?’ She rummages in a box in the kitchen for food, like a hungry greyhound, and pulls out some cheese crackers.
‘It was OK. Took the same time, door to door, as it did from Tooting, I couldn’t believe it. I even had a quick pint after work.’
‘All right for some.’
Kitty takes another cracker.
‘What are we having for dinner?’ she says with a full, dry mouth.
‘I dunno. Did you make it to the shops?’
Wheaten lips tense. ‘No James, I’ve been busy unpacking upstairs. All day.’
Wide, lovely eyes react quickly to diffuse a bomb. ‘That’s OK, I saw a chip shop on the way home, I’ll get us dinner from there. Gives us a chance to check out the local catch of the day.’
‘Hazelworth is no nearer the sea than London, you know?’ Kitty says flatly.
‘It was a joke.’
James and Kitty moved to Hazelworth yesterday in time for Kitty to start her new job at Cambridge University.
‘Such a cliché!’ joked their London friends about them moving to the Shire as they approach thirty. Although a family home proved hard to find in the time they had before Kitty’s new job started, so they’re renting for now. And they can’t even think about kids until Kitty has been in her new job long enough to qualify for maternity leave. But Hazelworth would be a great place to raise kids, they could see that from the coffee shops and playparks and the market square when they did their recce and looked at some rentals. Kitty stumbled upon Hazelworth before she knew it was family-friendly. When she dropped a pin in an old road atlas to work out which town was equidistant from London and Cambridge, Hazelworth was slap bang in the middle. The decision was made. And the nice estate agent who showed them five Victorian terraces that day said that Hazelworth is full of London and Cambridge commuters, so that seemed perfect for them. It’s just a coincidence that Hazelworth might also be a nice place to raise kids.
‘I bought you a present,’ says James proudly, hoping for complete disarmament.
‘Why did you do that?’ she snaps.
‘As a good luck for next week – come here.’
James takes Kitty by the hand and into the front room and presents her with the tube sitting on the mantelpiece.
‘Ta-da!’ he says quietly.
Kitty can’t remember the last time her hand was in his. It feels strange, even though it’s a hand she first held when she was sixteen and she knows its shape, its contours, its smoothness better than she knows her own. This evening James’s hand feels strange, but it is soft and comforting because Kitty has been using her hands to unpack boxes, remove dust, hang clothes, and pull out rusty nails from crumbling walls. She is surprised by how nice it feels. Kitty is a scientist and works in a lab, where her dry hands infect mice with viruses to see if three days later they will wilt or rise from the ashes. She has just won a post in Cambridge and starts next week. Another lab. Further research into the genetics of memory T cells. Hoping to save the world thanks to mutant mice.
Her hands needed some tenderness, but the unfamiliarity of someone so familiar makes her let go.
‘I need some cream,’ she says. ‘I hope you bought me hand cream.’
‘No, it’s this. Here.’
James hands Kitty the cardboard tube. Her face flushes with self-consciousness. She doesn’t like being put on the spot. She pops open a white disc at one end and pulls out a poster, then starts to unravel it. As paper unfurls, it reveals monochromatic dystopian chaos in lino cut. Cars sink into waves under a shower of meteors under the Hollywood hills. She examines it with an unmoved gaze in her cement-grey eyes. She doesn’t like it.
‘We don’t need any more artwork, this house won’t have enough walls.’
‘It’s Stanley Donwood.’
‘It’s hideous, James, it makes me feel really stressed,’ Kitty says, dropping the print on the floor and walking out of the room and back upstairs.
James listens to the thud of footsteps overhead and looks down as the ends scroll back together, leaving a little bit of chaos peeping out from the living-room floor.