Alison Moore - The Pre-War House and Other Stories

There are no curtains at the window. I turn on my side and close my eyes. When I open them again, I am aching with hunger, and the moon is a huge, bright hole in the vast, black night, in the sky full of stars and comets and meteors, and the aliens my father always thought were coming.

I drifted through the long summer, through the unbroken stretch of eventless days. There was no school until September, no holiday by the sea. There was no rain for weeks on end, and the dry grass turned yellow in the parched garden. I slept badly at night; it was close.

There were men resurfacing the road in front of our house. For weeks the screaming noise of their machinery and their shouting over the noise and the thick smell of hot tarmac filled the still air. They moved slowly up the road in their heavy boots, with their heavy machines, and the road they left behind them was immaculate.

One morning, when my sister was not at home and my father was out at work, I went to his shed. I touched the tools hanging from nails on the walls, leaving prints on the cleaned and polished metal. I looked at his magazines, at the naked women with their legs wide open. I unscrewed the tops of the half-full and empty bottles and smelt the poisonous fumes which escaped from their necks. The sun beat through the little plastic window into the airless shed, and I felt grubby, my pores full of heat and filth.

I took the sheet off the bicycle and wheeled it out onto the path. It was a sad thing, a sit-up-and-beg bike with a little bell. I cleaned its dirty frame and inflated its flat tyres and oiled its rusty chain. And then I put it back in the shed, under the sheet.

Susan was often out of the house, with her friends. Mostly she came home for the dinners our grandmother made, but sometimes she stayed out all night while my father waited for her downstairs.

And sometimes, Susan stayed home all day with me. We sunbathed on the lawn like two hot cats. We lay on our backs, with the grass and the daisies pressing into our bare skin, and the hot sun pushing down on the lids of our closed eyes.

‘ Nosema ocularum ,’ she said. ‘Lives underground, in the earth, and in hot weather it tunnels up to the surface and jumps in your ear and wriggles into your brain and eats its way out through your eyeballs.’ She poked a blade of grass into my earhole and tickled the little hairs, making me shudder.

‘ Wohlfahrtia magnifica ,’ she said. ‘Lives in your underwear drawer, in your gussets, and when you pull up your pants it crawls up your bumhole and you fart yourself to death.’

I stand up, and feel the bulging pressure in my abdomen, the weight of the nesting baby and the tensing of my body readying itself. I go to the bathroom, and then lie awake in the small hours listening to the tired pulsing of the old pipes.

I once flew over Russia, and through the window I thought I saw an endless cloudscape far below, its white streaked with grey, and then realised that it was land, the bleak sprawl of Siberia.

Sometimes, now, I have trouble sleeping.

Cerebrum vermiculus . Lives in your brain, and crawls through your eyes, and eats its way through your heart.

We were sitting on the front wall, baking in the midday sun. We had been there all morning with nothing else to do. The bricks were hot under the palms of my hands and through the seat of my shorts and against my bare heels, which I bounced against the wall, marking time. It was the longest day.

Susan lit a cigarette, and I imagined the tarry heat filling her mouth, her throat, her lungs. She had another love-bite on her neck, a bruise blooming under her skin.

I said, ‘I found Mum’s old bike in the shed.’

Susan said nothing, glanced down at the cigarette burning between her fingers.

‘I fixed it up.’

She shrugged. She turned and looked down the road, gazing into the empty day, into the heat haze which hovered over the road, buckling the clean lines, shimmering like a desert horizon in a film just before a mirage appears. She sucked at her cigarette, her cheeks hollowing.

I hopped off the wall and went down by the side of the house into the back garden, over the bone-dry lawn and down the hot brick path to the airless shed, and fetched out my mother’s old bicycle. I wheeled it up to the front of the house and stood it on its stand, the soles of my bare feet cooking on the oily driveway.

‘Let’s go for a ride,’ I said. ‘I’ll pedal.’

Susan looked at the bicycle. I rang the bell and she smiled. She stubbed out her cigarette on the wall, flicked the dog-end into the flower bed behind her, and dropped her feet down onto the pavement. ‘Okay,’ she said.

I held the handlebars and straddled the bike, and she climbed on behind me and held on. I could feel her weight, and wobbled at first, unbalanced. We weaved out of the driveway, the handlebars scraping against the front wall. We bumped down the kerb and onto the melting road. We rode up and down, getting steadier and faster, up and down and turning at each end of the street, arcing through the shimmering horizon, like we were the mirage in the desert, Susan’s summer dress catching the wind we made, baring her pale legs.

I saw our father’s car turning into the street, the sun’s dazzling glint on its clean bodywork. We were cycling towards the house, unsteadily but still fast enough to make wind, and he was driving towards us, into the sun, which was beating through his shiny windscreen, beating into his red-rimmed eyes, and empty bottles were clinking, rolling around, on the vacuum-cleaned floor of his car.

For a moment, there was nothing, just the slow, hot day, and the almost empty road, and the sun touching the gleaming bonnet of my father’s car and bouncing off, and then there was a dreadful sound, like something snapping, and the heavy, burnt smell of tar.

Standing slowly, standing in the middle of the road, in the middle of that endless day, in the middle of that sprawling summer, I saw my sister, lying on her side on the pavement, on the slabs, the swell of blood beneath her skin, her cold, blue eyes turned to the wall.

My father, out of the car, stood back, his sweat turning cold. The stink of burnt rubber hung in the air. The dark streaks of his tyres stained the brand-new road.

I touch the scars on the insides of my arms and on my legs, where the tarmac took the skin off, where scabs formed and then peeled away, brown and brittle like dead leaves in the autumn.

At night, I still find myself frozen in that long moment, that timeless limbo. I still hear that silence, such a silence, and then the snap, the damage.

I wash my face in the bathroom sink, splashing cold water against my tired skin.

Every last thing is now packed in the boxes, which are marked up and sealed and ready to go. The cupboards and wardrobes and drawers are empty. The walls are bare. The fridge is switched off, the door ajar. Nothing has been left behind under the dark-wood furniture or the bare-mattressed beds. Everything is clean.

The things I brought with me are out in my car, ready to go home.

It is early. Peter won’t be up yet. He will be in our bed, and our bed will be warm, even though it is cold outside.

There is knocking at the front door, knocking and ringing and voices. From the top of the stairs I can see a figure on the doorstep, the shape fractured by the glass, a head pressing close, hands cupped around the eyes, trying to see through into the naked hallway. The men are here.

While they empty the house, I take one last walk through the garden, down to the end wall, to the barberry bush.

I have put in my bag the half-finished knitting I found on my grandmother’s night-stand, the beginnings of a very small jumper made out of the blue wool she unravelled that day in Lent, which I wound into a small, tight ball while she talked.