“You’re here,” he said, and Mum said, “Yes.”
“Good,” he said. “Welcome. I’ve been waiting.”
Surrounded by all that sober wood, the dust thick and dancing in pockets of sunlight, Mum introduced herself, and I scowled and waved like some dumb teenager from central casting, and Henry Lake smiled. At least I think he did. Something moved under that beard anyway. I could hear him chewing, the regular, elastic squelch of his gum, the pulse in his forehead going like a metronome. He made a break-ice comment about the weather, and it was obvious he’d rehearsed it, for something to say, and that he had nothing else to follow it with, nothing prepared. It’s a terrible thing when some people make small talk—like seeing a wild animal in a sweater. Mum said something back, something optimistic about the quality of the light, and when that died a death, we just stood there in silence and it was pure tumbleweed—pure, undiluted awkward. I felt sick. My hangover was a stealth one. The kind that wakes you up fine, lulls you into a false sense of security, and then waits till you’re fully immersed in your day before it decides to pin you down and kick you in the teeth. I wanted to go to my room and get into bed, but neither of those things existed anymore, not in the same way, and that just made me want them even more.
Look at us in that Now. Mum and Henry Lake radiating strangeness and dashed hopes, trying to dredge up something to say to each other, and me with the sudden homesick cold sweats, malfunction-malfunction.
A bell rang upstairs somewhere, and Henry said, “Must go,” and I was like, Where? as he bowed to both of us, shallow and quick, like a butler, and went back up the stairs. I heard his door open and shut and Mum closed her eyes and breathed out.
“Well, that went well,” she said, and I said, “Yeah. I don’t know what I’ve been worrying about all this time,” and I went outside and sat on the doorstep, hoping someone from my old life would drive by and save me.
Across the road, an ambulance arrived, sirens off, no great hurry, and a nurse came out of the house opposite and stood on the doorstep in the swaying shade of a rose and ushered the paramedics in.
“Mrs. Midler,” Henry said from his place at the window above me, leaning, elbows on the sill. “She’s the last of them.”
I looked up. “Last of who?” I said.
The nurse shut the front door and Henry said, “The old guard. All new here now. All change,” and he was already moving back in, already pulling on the sash window with his stick-thin arms, the skin on them rippled and half-see-through like a forgotten balloon.
Not long after that, the moving van rumbled up to meet our car nose to nose. “Mum,” I said. “The Freak Brothers are here,” and the men who’d stripped our apartment like locusts the day before dropped onto the tarmac in their matching red T-shirts and caps, trailing fat clouds of weed. They opened the back and it made this gunshot noise in the quiet street that ricocheted off the housefronts and upset the seagulls.
“Welcome to our Family Museum,” I told them as they wheeled and cawed in the blue, watching the men unload. “Roll up, roll up for a show of our worldly goods.”
Exhibits included one scrubbed table and four stained chairs. An old pavement-colored meat cupboard and the top, non-business half of an old pinball machine. Our dented fridge, ink-black with mold in certain places and still stuck somehow with a sea of alphabet magnets that pooled together to spell jUDe!*?! and BY m0Re M1Lk FfS and then broke apart again into chaos. Two cheap flattened beds and Mum’s high-backed armchair, a plan chest, an invasion of trash bags (clothes, basically), boxes of books, and some stuff in bubble wrap—that one mirror, that one canvas, that one I couldn’t even remember anymore. The men in red walked everything up the path, tendons straining, teeth gritted, and in through the stale, narrow mouth of our new front door. It wasn’t nearly enough to make a dent on a house that size. The things we owned sat marooned in each sea of room, washed up and adrift, just like wreckage. Just like us.
Out on the street, the movers climbed back into the truck and slammed the doors, and after that the paramedics wheeled Mrs. Midler out of the house opposite on a gurney with the blanket pulled up over her head. Everything was dead quiet, apart from the blunt sound of her rattling down the front path and off the curb. It took them three tries to get the ambulance doors shut, and the noise spun the gulls off the roofs, kick-started a dog-barking relay two streets away, woke up a couple of babies in their strollers somewhere, and life began again, just like that.
Henry Lake dropped something upstairs and it broke and he swore, and the scrape and rustle of him clearing it up above me was like a haunting. Less sitting tenant somehow, more housebound ghost. I wondered how long he had lived there, and what he’d meant, exactly, by the old guard, and how he felt about us just moving right in, and how many other people he’d watched come and go from his place in the middle of that house. The way of things, I know, the ebb and flow, but still, relentless.
SIX
Later, my arms were full and I was trying to navigate the landing when I went backward through the wrong door into Henry’s private territory. Two airless rooms divided by frosted glass doors, the shapes of unmade bed and heaped-up chair on one side, and when I turned, a skeletal chandelier listing from the ceiling, a table that looked like someone had emptied a filing cabinet and about a month’s worth of dishes onto it. A portrait of a dark-haired woman, just her naked back and her long neck, her face about to turn to show her profile, but just out of reach, and that forever-not-quite caught my attention. At the other end, a half-assed kind of kitchen, an antique fridge the color of old custard, and an angry, worn-out straw-yellow parakeet in a cage. Things that might have enjoyed some spread in the rest of the house were sardined into this one cramped, chaotic space. I had this sense of Henry and all his stuff gathered there, in the center, the way the pupil of your eye retracts in bright light. Three huge wardrobes stood side by side, giants waiting for a bus. A sofa suffocated under piles of old maps and notebooks, no space left on it to sit, a lidless pen bleeding ink into its grubby cushions. Above that was the biggest map of the world I’ve ever seen, stuck with hundreds of tiny pins. The paintwork was a lumpy, tobacco-stain kind of white, and the floorboards were covered with newspaper and boot prints and bird shit. Something on the stove top smelled like boiled chicken, rich and strong and kind of everywhere. I wondered how the caged bird felt about that. It stared at me, and so did Henry Lake. Two pairs of eyes. One quick-black bird-lacquer, the other, without sunglasses this time, mind-bendingly tired. I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone look more exhausted. I didn’t want to look at him for too long, in case it was catching.
“Sorry,” I said. “Wrong door,” and the parakeet twitched.
Henry Lake smiled and wiped his hands on a stained tea towel. He moved to sweep half the contents of the sofa straight onto the floor. “No, come in. Excuse the mess. It’s been ages since I had a visitor.”