Ourhouse...our...house...ourhouse...OUR HOUSE is of a place in time and to get there you must remember the path. If you know where you are going it takes half the time it would if you only half knew where you were going.
You must pass Mrs Dale’s Dairy and Albert and Archie the barbering ginger-haired son and father; outside, a bleeding, bandaged pole pointing priapically to the sky. You can come from Larkfield Garage where buses rev and race and turn on a skid patch, with the smell of remoulded rubber tyres and the hissing lavatories with the signs, PLEASE DO NOT STAND ON THE SEAT! the word wogs inserted at the end in fading blue marker.
But you come from the east, you see the church hunched surly at the corner, eyes stained, blotted green, red, blue, black and yellow surveying scraps of litter on the ground in front. There stands the co-op, selling fresh pats of Danish butter and Spanish onions (“None o’ ye’r foreign muck here,” my father jokes in passing) twisted on a string; then turn left into a dark close, green painted lintels and a fleur-de-lise tile-work border that moves you up in the world, the wally close, up three flights of stairs with a landing and a window at each one watching the tilting landscape of the stable below as you ascend; and the door is at the top, black and grained with a blowtorch and combed, steel scraper.
Old Mrs Crawford spies you through her opened door, barely ajar, watching for intruders.
Into the house, presses and cupboards abound. Deadly fifteen amp sockets in the strangest of places and at varying heights.
A cupboard at the back of the house, a coal press with a waist high bunker in which the coal man noisily dumps his coal. The light bulb in this cupboard, “Eighty-five years old, you are told, burning with a brown Edisonesque glow. You gaze at the bamboo filament burning steadily and the after image prints cascade negatives on the wallpaper as you turn your head.
A black grate almost the full length of one wall. You can boil a kettle on a iron hob and spit into the fire, watch the saliva bubble and dance and evaporate. Above the grate a pulley with socks and vests and pants hanging shapelessly on the wooden spars. Pictures of your grandfather and your grandmother atop Hebrew writing and a drawing of a yortsite eight-day memorial candle at the foot hanging at the side of the grate, grandfather above grandmother.
There’s your aproned mother, pot in hand, tasting the soup from a silver ladle, “Hallmarked, you know,” and your father at the table in his flannel suit and the tie with the man-drunk-pissing-against-a-lamppost pattern. Your sister sits at the table, wild hair a dense bird’s nest, dark rings suspended under hazel eyes.
A knock on the black door. You look around the kitchen and count the people in the room. One, two, three and...you.
The knock again...
Is it more or less insistent this time?
You don’t want to go to the door. Your father smiles unnaturally and your sister holds her head in her naked arms on the table, matted hair falling feral over her bare, white arms as she lets out a low moan.
Your mother, pot in hand, leans towards you and tells you not to be silly but to go and answer the door. The smile on her face is a cringe; you have a deep sense of foreboding but you tear yourself away from the kitchen. You can’t feel your feet on the ground.
She knows...she knows...she knows...she knows. EVERYONE KNOWS!
That’s why she’s sending you to the door.
And you remember...a fragile memory bubbles up, a dark red and violet, creeping image, the smell of sulphur, the taste of copper and the electric rush at the base of the skull.
Through the hallway, over a square of labyrinthine-patterned carpet, by the telephone sitting polished black acrylic atop the creaking bamboo table, the silver dial flashing under the camel skin shade that swings with the breeze of a wind spiralling up through the stairwell as you open the door-and the first green glimpse of that skin, oleaginous, mottled black and runneled , the hair snaking, coiling and twining around her head, the sharp, sickle nose, the frenzied maelstrom of her eyes drawing you deeper and away into a silent abyss...
As you turn you glimpse her, pot still in hand and ladle raised to that grinning mouth, you between them, they are the same...
...and that dream again where you weren’t you and all the time asleep.
Now you’re awake...now you’re awake...now you’re awake...NOW YOU ARE AWAKE!
Hunched before you, your mother stands at the door, silhouetted, arms akimbo, bat-like, and tells you it’s time to wake up. Her cackle echoes and diminishes. Across your torso, serpentine, a tight wave ripples and your throat contracts.
It is that dream again where you weren’t you and all the time asleep.
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