That summer worked on everyone around me like water and white vinegar. Each of my friends had been washed out of a hometown that we thought we would stain permanently. Now they were scattered across the country, working jobs or winding down their savings. What remained after the flood was my parents’ house. It was a solid white slab, neither new nor especially old. Returning to it was like encountering a piece of driftwood. It sat on the street alien and unfamiliar, without colour or texture. The house was detached and my mother had favoured its silence, spaced out as it was. “We’ll finally be able to hear ourselves, hear ourselves think!” she’d say.
Since then, my parents had ruthlessly emended its faults. The kitchen, clad in late twentieth century wood-impression linoleum, had needed gutting and refitting in grey acrylic and white marble. You could see your face in each surface. The floorboards had been carpeted in plush cream and the walls coated in white. On the day we moved in, I found my new bedroom in the jumble of boxes. It was red, the kind of burgundy that had been popular earlier in the decade. It took my mother several coats of Absolute White to overcome the colour. With each layer of paint the wall progressed through gradually lightening stages of sickly salmon, the disappointing non-pink that comes from mixing red and white. Home improvement continued practically year-round, only seeming to stop after I left home. Standing in the gleaming hallway, I realised the house had been white for nearly as long as I could remember. But it had never been still, as it was then.
“Now that you’re home – home for a while, you think? – we’ll have to have everyone round”. My mother bubbled at me over tea at the kitchen table. Everyone was my three grandparents and my brother. “Oh, yes, that would be nice.” Across the room I could see the old Pope, the dead one, tacked onto the fridge with a letter B alphabet magnet. As my mother talked, he waved at me, and I examined his slip-of-paper-body for the first time since we’d brought him home from Rome. He was printed on shimmer-paper which gave his image a hazy detachment. He presided over a prayer. I blinked, refocused my eyes, and strained to read the classically Catholic decorative font from across the room. Trust in the Lord, because the Lord will not disappoint you! The prayer continued in a font too small for me to read before triumphantly concluding: Dear Families, live life with faith and simplicity, like the Holy Family of Nazareth. Whoever had been hawking the slip had reproduced the Pope’s signature; Franciscus was scribbled feebly at the bottom. He and his message were suspended on the chrome sea of the fridge. We had no other magnets. “Oh. Sure, next Saturday. That would be nice,” I replied.
The town was made of pebbledash, whitewash, pebbledash. I spent the long summer hours wandering the suburbs just to get out of the house, disrupting the silence of the streets with the slap of trainers against hot tarmac. The uniformed houses seemed to glide past me as I walked, as if I were standing still. I was like Steamboat Mickey, who drove his black and white boat nowhere, static on a moving backdrop. Staring into strangers’ front rooms was the best entertainment. That summer’s heat rendered them mostly dark and empty, a series of tableaux populated by the rigid silhouettes of dining chairs and large, tawdry vases. Movement came in the dark flashes of domestic animals, stealing through their still life backdrops, and the soft ghosting of sheer chiffon curtains. The lives lived in these houses were alien, too. I saw the relics of young families, pensioners: the stacked work-books of school children and lifeless hanging mobiles; wizened cats staring frozen and sphinx-like and reclining leather armchairs.
The town centre emerged, bluntly, from the suburbs . Flashy range-rovers looped a one-way road, endlessly circling a mesh of shops selling things to everybody but me. On display were: the kitchen my parents owned but I couldn’t hope to; sweat-wicking, butt-lifting, maternity-friendly leggings; hard, expensive pastries; bamboo dog leads; Omegas, Rolexes, TAGs, Breitlings, Tudors; extravagant children’s birthday cakes; services in recruitment, psychology, real estate, asset management, cosmetic dentistry; the Quooker tap, available to be plumbed in the same day. Some teenagers in high-viz glowed from the entrance of an alleyway, hunched around the wall. As I passed them, I saw they were jet-washing graffiti. The multi-coloured text liquefied and converged into a single dark stream that ran down into the gutter.
As I lapped round the town centre, the summer sun — at last — began to fall. It caught the glass shopfronts and the street briefly blazed. The sun cast a stronger reflection in the glass than my image and I could not see myself in the windows. They’d become blank walls of light, with redundant door handles and letterboxes that went nowhere. Over the tops of the shopfronts, I could see the sharpest point of the jagged shape of the town, the church steeple, needling into the flushed sky.
I knew it was open, so I turned down an alley and found the front entrance, behind the steaming backlots of the shops. It was the only building the town had allowed to age. Lichen scrawled across the limestone. The stained-glass windows were hatched over by the iron bars protecting them. I stood in front of the large wooden double doors where I assumed couples had posed, like the photos of my mother and father in the silver frames at home. I hung my hand from the large iron ring on the door’s bolt. The metal was warm; the ring was old. I tugged on it, but the bolt didn’t shift, so I went round the side to the second, smaller entrance. It was cracked open, and I could see a sliver of the dim church. Pushing in, the stale, incensed air coated my throat. The empty crooked pews hunkered in the dark like placid animals. The grain of the wood was glossy like hide. The anteroom was open and the priest’s vestments hung from a hook opposite the doorway. They made a human shape. Red damask glinted in the last of the sunlight. The same shade of velvet hid the sanctuary. Even after my long absence from the church, I was still unable to pass through. Instead, I dropped my head back and looked up at the suspended crucifix that forbade entry to the secret space.
From the side, in the semi-darkness of the church, Christ’s body hung with the heaviness of real flesh. The colour of his skin in the twilight was a greyish purple. His stretched arms revealed the soft ripple of his ribs and hip. I had come in from the right side of the church, so I couldn’t see where he’d been speared at the bottom of the left of his ribcage. Unsatisfied, I circled round beneath him, determined not to let him keep that secret from me. But from this new angle what he revealed instead was his woodenness. Each limb was too emphatically articulated. He was scrunched into rigor mortis, not half-alive and holding onto the ghost. In a patch of light, the paint strokes that comprised the wound were visible: bright stripes of red like a child’s lipstick. He gave me no point of entry.
I walked meanderingly through the evening’s purpling streets to stretch out the minutes, but the house waited steadfast at the end of the road. The multicoloured banner strung across the door that plainly read ‘GRADUATION’ did little to invite me back in. I rapped the knocker a couple of times; I didn’t have a key. Figures approached behind the door’s small, frosted glass window. I prepared a grin, to counterbalance my mother’s welcome. She beamed and kissed me with lips that were already wine-stained. I was led into the kitchen and handed a glass of wine. Everyone was there. My grandparents and father each hugged and beamed at me, and then my mother did so again, saying she felt left out. My brother had not been persuaded to come down, apparently. We drank and I answered all their questions as prettily as I could: well, I’m going to miss it very much, but its lovely to be home; no, I’m not sure yet, but I am sure I’ll think of something!; no, no, it didn’t work out – I know, but sometimes that’s for the best – and the right person will come along some day. My mother had cut cheese cubes. I watched them sweat under the white kitchen lights.
After a while it was clear that no one had anything to say. There were no more questions to be asked about me. My mother broke the silence, asking if anybody wanted to watch a bit of TV. As I sat down on the sofa next to her, I felt no eyes. They were all watching her flick through the channel list. I let my knees clunk together and hunched over my wine glass. It was late and no one had bothered with the lights. The walls pulsed blue with the spectral light of the TV. She couldn’t decide on a program and no one offered to help. As she scrolled, we watched the preview display of the channel catalogue quickly change. Image after image flashed by. We saw a smartly dressed newsreader then a body shrouded in blue on the operating table then a woman with heavy brows shouting then a woman in a wedding dress then a uniformed policeman speaking into a radio then a naked couple embracing, and then a blank white screen.
The channel numbers ticked up. In the luminous blue light of the television, my eyes began to ache. I let them close and listened to the voices of the TV. When I opened them again, I was staring out into the darkness behind the blue lights. In that darkness I realised that there had been eyes. A medieval figure gazed down from a small golden frame. Christ was drawn in thick curving strokes, robed and arrayed in a halo. His golden tones were dark and earthy in the gloom. He squatted and stared behind the shifting images. But the placidity of his smile and the flatness of his gaze told me that I was not watched after all.
Unwatched, I pass from the living room into the bathroom. I vomit, gut contracting, throat pulsing like a fish, caught. It’s red on the sink from the wine. I don’t clean it. I pass from the house. My trainers slap against cold tarmac.