This piece was first published in issue twenty-eight. You can buy the issue here or subscribe here.

We moved house recently. I passed by last Saturday with nothing better to do than walk the dog. Stood on the front step, as if to walk in. And the dog in her happy ignorance thought we’d do just that. She wagged her tail in apprehension.

I wanted to shout, “I could walk right in!” Because I saw that the front window was unlocked and I knew the trick of how to climb in. I’d done that plenty of times before: forgotten my keys and sneaked through, a thief in my own home.

Later that night at the new place I saw my father slouch for the first time. You might think you’ve seen someone slouch, as much as you think you’ve seen them stand straight. But you’ve not seen them do anything until all the usual gestures that makes them them, crumble. With sickness comes a foreign language. It’s so not them. And it was so wasn’t him, when he sat on the side of his bed, head stooped and arms flopping, taken over by the medicine. Downstairs my mother whispered, “Now he is sick.”

It was fifteen years ago that she told us at the kitchen table, “Your father has cancer.” With the postscript, “but he’s going to be okay.” There’s no health without sickness. Houses that are empty, they used to be lived in.

No one was living at the old place now. The curtains were wide open. The house was black inside. Dead, I thought, as I considered the ease with which I might return to those corners and nooks we’d left so hastily. Touch the place on the skirting board that I’d covered up with a cigarette paper, filling gaps in the woodwork. The height chart where I’d recorded my growth from nine to fifteen.

Familiarity is our comfort and so is our body. The mole under my arm. A scar on my knuckle. This catalogue of quiet marks, death will pass over. A great intimacy of places that won’t prosper.

This house always scared me. It was an old Victorian thing, and it creaked and crackled at night. It taught me to become terrified of the dark. I imagined us as small creatures: travellers in the belly of a whale, the grumble of her tummy holding us in. She would belch us up in the morning leaving a glistening patina of saliva, dreams dripping off us. Lying in bed, too cold to get up.

No one was living here now. Because outside, unmistakable, was the sink and the loo and our old post. A mixture of all three. A complaint of pipes. An unopened catalogue. Stuff ripped out of the system.

After death, there’s a corpse. And when you move house, someone will pull out the sink. Turn out the insides of your home and put them on the front doorstep where geraniums used to grow.

read more stories