Darfield Road

After our unexpected diversion to Salehurst Road there wasn’t time for coffee, much to the complaining snarls of the my head which had developed a throb like a science fiction mole machine burrowing to the centre of the earth.  I couldn’t decide whether it was the wine from the night before or the sheer hopeless frustration of moving forwards only to keep going backwards.

Darfield Road was fine if somewhat dull.  It was enormous, with three double bedrooms and three reception rooms which suggested lots of opportunities into which we could etch our own image.  The garden had some sort of odd wicker maze thing going on, where you found yourself wrapped up in a cheap bamboo substitute fenced in enclosure – all of which seemed a little pointless.  A waste of space copied from a design magazine in the seventies.

The interior was ridiculously, boringly sparse.  The only hint of character – or lack thereof – were those black and white city skyline photographs you can buy pre-framed from Ikea and an electric guitar on a stand, looking distinctly unplayed with their perfectly wound strings, in every bedroom.  The whole effect, from the plastic mantelpieces to the fake wood lino, from the worn out kitchen fittings to the dull magnolia paint job was like they’d bought a property already spruced up to be as bland as possible for the sales market ten years previously and then never done anything to it themselves.  It lacked any sense of character or imagination, but perhaps that blankness could have been a template.

1995:  ‘I just can’t stand it anymore,’ Dawn shouted, but it was too late, Desmond had closed the door behind him.  She went into the living room and watched his tall silhouette disappear up the road, towards the high street.  That’s what he did every time they argued, rather than fighting back once it had turned irrational he just sighed and went out for a drink.  It was as though he thought hiding from their problems would be enough, that failing to face up to things would make it all okay in the end.

Dawn sat down with a flump on the sofa.  She couldn’t even remember what they’d been arguing about.  Not really.  They were doing okay, not well off but not short of cash.  June was back from her adventures in South America and seemed to have settled happily in Bristol with her PhD in something Dawn didn’t even pretend to understand.  Maybe she’d be able to reach Desmond - they’d always got on wonderfully - Lord knows, Dawn couldn’t.

It had been a tough few years.  His Dad dying on the same day Thatcher was out, when they should have been celebrating they were mourning and then, in quick succession, his Mum too and then hers.  They say death always comes in threes, as though it tried to condense the grief.  Maybe Desmond still missed his parents in the same way Dawn ached for her Mum – and she still had her Dad rattling that big house, getting more and more cantankerous by the day.

Pah, she should talk.  What need did the two of them have for a three bedroom house?  Okay, so one of them was nominally June’s but they all knew she’d never come home and the third was packed full of computers and wires and things Dawn didn’t get. 

She glanced up as a shadow flitted past the window, but it wouldn’t be Desmond.   Not yet.  He wouldn’t be drunk, but he would sit and quietly sup a beer until his temper evened.  And hers too.

He’d have gone to that dreadful place, the Alpha Jazz bar.  He could go to the wine bar up the road, but he claimed not to feel comfortable there.  Too light.  Instead he seemed to prefer to gloom of the Alpha.  Dawn knew the rumours about the axe.  She knew the sorts of people who drank there, in the dark.  The sorts of people who weren’t keen on you seeing their face, who slipped out after hours into big cars and didn’t care about breathalysers.  It was the sort of place with blood on the carpet.

The only reason she could think that Desmond would drink there was that he only went out when angry and maybe he wanted somewhere with customers that matched his mood.

She hadn’t meant to argue with him.  Not again.  But she couldn’t help it.  He was just so morose all the time and not talking about it, just ignoring the problem was driving her mad.  She knew he was fed up at work; that the little company in Croydon which had been so good to him in many ways had also stifled him.  He had big ideas of his own but no capital to realise them.

‘Perhaps we should sell up,’ she said under her breath.  She’d lived all her live in London, they both had.  The idea of leaving the city made her nervous, but the idea of losing Desmond to the bleakness of his head was worse.

Maybe that was the answer.  Maybe it was the city, Brockley, the scuzziness, the hard fought days, the endless struggle of life was bringing them both down.  Where was that place Meg, the new nurse, came from?  Somewhere in Devon with a ridiculous name? Combeinteignhead?  Coomingbeenhead?  Meg had grown up there and was always going on about how idyllic it was.

Dawn found an atlas under the sideboard in the dining room.  An old AA road map from when they’d briefly had a car and made their summer holidays in Dorset.  Just the three of them, out on beaches, forest walks, it had been so nice.  She looked it up, taking a guess at how it was spelt.  There.  In the middle of nowhere.  That looked like it. 

She sat and looked at the atlas, the green nothingness with tiny roads wriggling through it and then the small shaded area indicating buildings.  It was closer to Bristol.  A lot closer.  She flipped back to London which covered four pages and then back to the single square in the bottom left corner of a page.  She wasn’t sure how long she’d spent looking at that page, but when she heard the key in the door she jumped.

He was home.  Earlier than usual.   

We hummed and hahed once again.  Or to be slightly more accurate: squabbled.   My girlfriend really didn’t like it; didn’t like the cheap fakeness of it or the way the light fell in the front rooms and ignored the back.  It was another place priced at offers in excess of more than our maximum budget and it would clearly need a lot of work to make it home rather than somewhere that would serve as a set for an ITV sitcom.   I liked it as a space.  I thought it had potential.  It was in a good location – close to many of things that had made us excited by Marnock Road, even if Jam Circus was closed (and still is) following a kitchen fire.  It was big.  It was light.  Everything else we could fix and there was nothing so horrible that we couldn’t live with.

‘I don’t know about that,’ she countered and listed a load of things which she couldn’t live with, but it wasn’t as though any of them were broken or damaged or dirty, they just weren’t very nice.

As we walked home back across Hilly Fields I was felt unwell.  I was fed up with the unrelenting searching and the constant sense of failure.  It was all too much, all too dreary.  I just wanted to be able to buy somewhere to live in, if I absolutely had to, and then I could get back on with my life.  I could go back to spending my nights and Saturday morning with words rather than bricks and mortar belonging to one stranger and passing onto to another.

The following day we went for a walk along the Dawent Valley in Kent and, after much discussion, decided to put in an offer, not out of any real enthusiasm, but more just because we felt we ought to.  Because if we didn’t someone else would and by the time we’d made up our mind we’d have missed the boat once again.

By the time we called on Monday the gangplank was already up and the sail was disappearing over the horizon.  Once again it had, allegedly, gone for more than was being asked.  The idiots.  Increasingly it was feeling as though it was just too late, as though Brockley had become too desirable and too expensive for the likes of us and was instead being swamped by city workers and hipsters, all pin stripes and braces, turned up jeans and tweed hats.  Prices seemed to be rising daily and places comparable to what we’d considered three or four months previously had raced away.  Catford, it seemed, was calling and with it suburban hell, middle age spreads and then, ultimately, death was all just a mortgage offer away.