Conrad Williams - Decay Inevitable

“What’s he doing now?” Emma asked.

Sean shook his head. “I have absolutely no idea. Isn’t that the saddest thing? You grow up with these people and you think it’ll be you and them for ever. It should be you and them for ever, you get on so well. But something drives you apart. You lose touch. It’s criminal.”

Emma rubbed his hand. “It would be easy enough to find him, you know? Do an Internet search. Or he’s probably still in the book.”

“Maybe,” Sean said. “Come on.”

Outside, Emma ribbed him about the deliberate way in which he was walking. A huge articulated lorry thundered past, its logo in bright orange against a green background, a phone number two feet tall imploring customers to call now .

“I don’t seem to have a hangover any more,” he said, “but my legs are shot.”

Emma laughed. “They’ll be worse tomorrow. That’s what happens when you get older .”

Sean mock-chased her up Myddleton Lane, breaking off his pursuit when the uniformity of the buildings impinged upon him.

“He lived along here somewhere,” he said.

“Did he build the house himself?”

“I thought he would have done, but look, they’re all the same.”

Semi-detached blocks stretched away on either side of the street. Occasionally there were differences in taste represented by cladding or pebbledash or adornments, such as the metal butterflies stuck to the roof of one house, or the garish green used to paint the windowframes of another. Not one stood out. Nothing that said de Fleche .

“Have a nosey inside, then,” Emma suggested. “Maybe that’s what’s different.”

“It’ll take for ever,” Sean complained. “Do you know how many houses are on this street?”

“Ooh, I don’t know,” Emma said. “Twenty-six thousand?”

Sean stopped walking and stared at her. “What made you come out with that number?”

Emma shrugged. “I was kidding. Hyperbole, dear boy.”

“Something’s not quite right here,” Sean said.

“It’s raining, if that’s what you mean.”

“No, it’s numbers is what it is.” Sean grabbed Emma’s hand and led her across the road. “In the pub, what table were we on?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Then I’ll remind you. Twenty-six. It was table twenty-six.”

“So?”

“So you just said twenty-six thousand.”

“ So? ”

“So. The wagon that just went by. The phone number was two-six-two-six-two-six.”

“Sean. Don’t be so–”

“I’m not being so. The Bowie song in the pub. The guy keyed in A-twenty-six.”

“Ah. Well then, if you mention that, then it must –”

They came to a halt outside a house that looked much like any other they had scrutinised.

“Number twenty-six,” Emma said. “I didn’t know you were superstitious.”

“I’ve got nothing else to rely on,” Sean answered.

The garden was a riot of weeds. The bones of an ancient BSA motorbike leaned against the front wall, beneath the windows. There were no curtains in the windows at the front of the house but the view inside was hampered by a series of screens that reached from floor to ceiling. Two off-white buckets filled with cleaning rags and rusting screws, bolts and washers stood sentinel at the front door, comprised of a badly painted black frame that encased a single opaque pane, the view through which was further confused by an elaborate dimpling of the glass.

Sean rapped his knuckles against it and rang the doorbell. A few minutes’ wait brought nobody to answer it. He turned to Emma, who was standing by the gate, her arms crossed. He winked at her. “Let’s try round the back.”

A narrow archway punched between the semis allowed access to the rear of the house. Passing through a wobbly wooden gate that filled its intended space as well as a square peg in a triangular hole, Sean and Emma struggled across a tiny patch of thigh-high grass to a back window that was as miserly with its view as the front had been.

“What would you say to me if I told you that I think we should break in here?”

Emma closed her eyes and groaned. “I’d say, ‘What’s with this we shit?’”

“Good answer,” Sean said, and sent his elbow through the glass. They stood in silence, listening for movement, before Sean reached through the hole and unfastened the window.

“Cosy, isn’t it?” he said when they were standing inside, gingerly picking the larger shards of glass from his leather jacket.

“It’s bloody freezing,” Emma said, rubbing her arms and looking around the plain white room, which was unadorned by anything as simple as even a lampshade.

“It’s not been lived in for some time,” Sean guessed. There were two main rooms on the ground floor, of equal size, and a hallway, the floor of which was a mosaic of blue tiles that travelled from the front door to the back and gradually shifted through every conceivable shade from ice to navy as they did so.

“I think this is the place,” Sean said. “Let’s have a look at his kitchen.”

The kitchen was a bright, welcoming room with a large wooden table and a fireplace. The floor here was also tiled, in all shades of orange: a sun radiating spirals of energy reached out to the walls.

“Nice idea,” Emma said.

“Isn’t it?” Sean agreed, moving the toe of his boot along one of the spinning arms of colour. “Do you think it means anything?”

“There doesn’t have to be a signal in everything you see, does there?”

Sean looked at her. “I wonder, sometimes.”

Emma said, “Funny though, I feel I know this place. Maybe it was featured in one of those décor magazines once.”

Back towards the stairs, Sean held up his hand. The shadow of a man was on the glass of the front door. As long as they were frozen, studying the figure for a clue as to what action to follow, they could see that the man wasn’t doing anything. He was just standing there.

“Now that ,” Emma said, when she realised it was an illusion, “is creepy.”

“Look at how he did it,” Sean said, pointing to a series of mirrors up the stairs that, when sunshine hit them, projected the shadow of a doll onto the glass of the door.

“What kind of a man wants to piss around like that?”

Sean started up the stairs, his boots thumping dully on the bare wood. “Maybe he liked to feel less alone,” he said. “Figures at the door, maybe they made him feel popular, as if he was getting lots of visitors.”

“Yeah, right,” Emma said, trudging after him.

On the top floor, the bathroom was an ice cavern, but without any shades of white whatsoever. It glowed in colours that could have been blue or green or both or neither. The two bedrooms were as spartan as the rooms on the ground floor. The tiles on the floor in the back room depicted a green island in the centre of a sea of aquamarine. Along the hallway to the front room, the colours suddenly disintegrated – soft reds meeting an ash-grey mess that took over until the threshold. Beyond it, the tiles created a perfect black limbo without anything to arrest the eye.

They were about to return to the ground floor when Emma stopped Sean. She had the look of someone trying to root around in her mind for the key to recognition of a face so weathered by time and experience that there could be no hope of success.

She was looking at a map of Pangaea stitched into heavy fabric hanging on the wall, the continents when they were all part of the same land mass. A breeze from somewhere was causing the bottom edge to move slightly.

She reached out and tugged one edge of the map away from the wall.

There was a door, a tiny wooden door with a loop of string for a handle, behind it.