Something banged my living room wall, hard. I turned to see the mirror I had hung, just a couple of days before, rocking on its wire. Another blow, and the mirror rocked and knocked against the wall.
“Hey.”
My whole flat trembled as blow after blow rained down on the wall. “Hey!”
Next door was normally so quiet, I had almost forgotten its existence. The feeling of splendid isolation I had enjoyed since moving in here fell away: I couldn’t figure out who it could be, hammering with such force. Were they moving furniture in there? Fixing cupboards?
The next blow was stronger still. A crack ran up the wall from floor to ceiling. I leapt up. “Stop it. Stop.” Another blow, and the crack widened. I stepped back and the backs of my knees touched the edge of the sofa and I sat down, nerveless, too disorientated to feel afraid. A second, diagonal crack opened up, met a hidden obstacle, and ran vertically up to the ceiling.
The room’s plaster coving, leaves and acorns and roses, snapped and crazed. A piece of stucco fell to the floor.
I didn’t understand what was happening. The wall was brick, I knew it was brick because I’d hung a mirror on it not two days before. But chunks of plasterboard were peeling back under repeated blows, revealing a wall made of balled-up sheets of newspaper. They flowed into the room on top of the plasterboard. Dan put his arms around me. I was afraid to look at him: to see him as helpless as I was. Anyway, I couldn’t tear my gaze from the wall.
Behind the newspaper was a wooden panel nailed over with batons. It was a door, or had been: there was no handle. The doorframe had split along its length and something was trying to force it open against the pile of plasterboard and batons already piled on the carpet. The room filled with pink-grey dust as the door swung in. The space beyond was the colour of old blood.
From out of the darkness, a grey figure emerged. It was no bigger than a child. It came through the wall, into my room. It was grey and covered in dust. Its face was a mask, strangely swollen: a bladder pulling away from the bone.
She spoke. She was very old. “What are you doing in my house?”
MY LANDLORD CAME round the same evening. By then Dan and I had gathered from his grandmother – communicating haphazardly through the fog of her dementia – that my living room and hers had once been a single, huge room. Her property. The house she grew up in. The property had been split in half years ago; long before my half had been subdivided to make flats.
The landlord said, “She must have remembered the door.”
“She certainly must have.”
He was embarrassed, and embarrassment made him aggressive. He seemed to think that because we were young, his mother’s demolition derby must have been partly our fault. “If she heard noises through the wall, it will have confused her.”
“I don’t make noises through the wall. Neither am I going to tiptoe around my own flat.”
He took her home. When they were gone Dan and I went to the pub. We drank beer (Old Speckled Hen) and Dan said, “How many years do you think they left that poor cow stranded there, getting steadily more unhinged?”
“For all I know he’s round there every day looking after her.”
“You don’t really believe that.”
“Why not?” I looked at my watch. “He probably thinks it’s the best place for her. The house she grew up in.”
“You saw what she was like.”
“Old people know their own minds.”
“While they still have them.”
Back home, Dan went to bed, exhausted. I brought a spare duvet into the living room for myself, poured myself a whisky and settled down to watch the rest of Man With a Movie Camera. (Dziga Vertov, 1929.) When it was over I turned off the television and the lamp.
The hole in my wall was a neat oblong, black against the dim grey-orange of the wall. Though the handles had been removed, the door still had its mechanism. The pin still just about caught, holding the door shut against its frame. Already I was finding it hard to imagine the wall without that door.
I went into the kitchen and dug out an old knife, its point snapped off long before. I tried the knife in the hole where the handle had been and turned. Pinching my fingertips into the gap between the door and the frame, I pulled the door towards me.
The air beyond tasted thick, like wax. The smell – it had been lingering around my flat all day – was her smell. Fusty, and speaking of decay, it was, nevertheless, not unpleasant.
A red glow suffused the room. Light from a streetlamp easily penetrated the thin red material of her curtains; I could make out their outline very easily. The red-filtered light was enough that I could navigate around the room. It was stuffed full of furniture and the air was heavy with furniture wax. A chair was drawn up in front of a heavy sideboard, filling the space created by a bay window.
I ran my hand along the top of the sideboard. It was slick and clean and my hand came away smelling of resin. In her confusion, the old woman had still managed to keep her things spotless – unless someone had been coming and cleaning around her.
How many hours had she spent in this red, resined room? How many years?
I pulled the chair out of the way – its legs dragged on the thick rug – and opened a door of the sideboard.
It was filled with jars, and when I held one up to the red light coming through the curtains, the contents admitted one tawny, diagonal blear before resolving to black.
DAD WAS ALL for clearing out the lot. He had a van, his man could drive, they’d be in and out within the night. Such were the times, after all, and what great family is not founded on the adventures of a buccaneer?
But I had a youth’s hope, and told him no: that we should play the long game. I can’t imagine what I was thinking: that they would show some generosity to me, perhaps, for not stealing their property? Ridiculous.
Still, Dad let me have my head. Still, somehow, my gamble paid off. The landlord, whose family name was Franklin, hardly showered me with riches, but he turned out friendly enough, and the following spring, at his grandmother’s funeral, I met his daughters.
The match with Belinda – what a name! – was easy enough to arrange. The dowry would be a generous one. Pear orchards and plum trees, hops and brassicas and the young men to tend them. The whole business fell through, as I have said, but the friendship of our families held. When Dan ran into political trouble he gave up his career and came home to run things for Dad. It was to him Franklin gave his youngest child, my nephews’ mum. (Melissa. What a name.)
The rest is ordinary. Dan has run our estate successfully over the years, has taken mistresses and made some of them wives, and filled the house with sons. Of them, the two eldest are my special treasure, since I’ll have no kids myself. Every once in a while a brother of ours returns to take a hand in the making of our home. They bring us strange stories; of how the world is being set to rights. By a river in the Minas Gerais somewhere, someone has reinvented the dolphin. But it is orange, and it keeps sinking.
Poor Liam’s still languishing in Dubai, but the rest of us, piling in to exploit what we collectively know of the labour market, have done better than well.
As for me: well, what with one promotion and then another, this offshore London Britannia airfield has become my private empire. Three hundred observation drones. Fifty attack quadcopters. Six strike UAVs. There are eight thousand miles of coastline to protect, a hungry neighbour to the west famining on potatoes; to the east, a continent’s-worth of peckish privateers. It is a busy time.