Salehurst Road

Well, I never expected this to happen, but I guess there was a degree of inevitability.

We’d been keeping an eye on the auction sites as well because, well, you never know.  My bargain focussed girlfriend thought it was an avenue worth exploring.  I was more concerned at avoiding our naivety being stung again in the way it was over Casslee Road.

One night she said:  ‘Isn’t this your old house?’

‘It can’t be.  That was only a two bedroom place.’

‘But I thought it was the one with the stone eagles outside.’

‘It was, but look there’s two houses in that picture.  It must be next door.’

After Brightling Road we had a little time before our next appointment and so were heading to the high street for coffee when we saw mass of people milling around the corner of Salehurst and Ewhurst Road.

‘It must be people viewing the house before the auction next week,’ said my girlfriend.  ‘Shall we take a look?’

It was, of course, where I used to live with my ex.

As I’ve already said, in my memory that house was huge, but as we went through the door I was surprised at how titchy it seemed.  The walls were closer together than I remembered, although it still had its crazy hexagonal doorway into the lounge-diner, the over-enthusiastic brick fireplace bullying into the living space and ball-bulb uplights along the walls.  At least someone had finally removed the eighties red LED alarm clock built into the supporting arch.  There was a long scorch mark across the wooden floorboards that I don’t remember causing. 

We nudged our way through burly blokes with short hair and fag stinking jackets who brandished tape measures at every surface to make our way to the kitchen.  Superficially, it was as I remembered, although the spray-on frosted class I’d done seven years previously was beginning to peel revealing the neighbour’s yard.  The innocuous lino had been replaced by some with a pattern meant to look like a jagged cliff-face as though encouraging extreme cooking. 

I remembered next door being a friendly, if somewhat populous, family.  They didn’t have enough keys between them, so when I was doing my Masters and at home a lot the two lads would often knock on the door, come through our house, jump the fence, scramble up the drainpipe and go in  through the window with alarming ease.  It was mildly annoying four times a day, but otherwise they were fine.  Whoever lived there now didn’t look so nice.  The little yard was distinctly uncared for with the access to the main sewer open and reeking off a sordid stench which played havoc with my red wine addled fuzziness.  An evil looking dog scowled at us while it took a massive shit.  Another coil of dog turd to join all the others scattered around.

Upstairs the reason for my confusion became apparent.  Someone had obviously decided that a two bedroom house was insufficient and so had tried to convert the master bedroom into two.  The old second bedroom, which we’d slept in for a while and had struggled to get a double bed into, was now the largest.  The other two were tiny; the smaller of the two of little use for anything other than a dumping room.  You couldn’t live there without coming apart at the seams, just like the interior walls which were riddled with cracks in the plaster.

2007:  The dart left David’s hand and hit the board with a dull thunk.  He peered forwards from the imaginary line he’d drawn on the floorboards.  The needle was just outside the triple twenty, again.  He took a few steps forwards and retrieved the darts from the back of the kitchen door.  He returned to his invisible point and poised himself, ready to throw again.  Then he sighed.

He looked at the laptop on the dining room table liberated from a pub skip.  A big solid oak piece of furniture, dark and stained by the boozer’s history. The table told stories, the blank word document open on the laptop didn’t.

David sighed again.

He wanted to go for a walk, but it was raining and he couldn’t be bothered to get wet.  He wanted to do anything other than what he was supposed to be doing, but he couldn’t think of what so he just played game after game of darts, always telling himself that he’d sit down to write shortly.

He liked walking around Brockley.  It helped him think, or so he told himself.  The motion of steadily putting one foot in front of the other created rhythm in his head from which patterns of words could form, but deep down he knew he was using it as an excuse to not write.  Deflection, distraction, procrastination; David was good at not doing.

Increasingly he found himself bound up in a self imposed South East London exile.  Since he’d been working from home, he no longer had a reason to go into the city on a regular basis and so his centre had shifted to SE4.  He’d ended up there by accident, following a girl seven years previously.  He’d moved to London for work and love and never even tried another area of the city.  He’d liked Highbury when he worked up there, but couldn’t see himself living there; couldn’t see himself affording to live there.  Besides, he was resistant to change.  Not like his girlfriend.  She thrived on turbulence.

She was away.  Again.  On the other side of the world or at the coast, wherever her work took her.  He wished they’d said goodbye better.  He wished they hadn’t had to.  He wished he hadn’t stayed behind with his own work, which he wasn’t doing, walking patterns into the streets of Brockley, leaving his imprint on the paving slabs and yet he hadn’t had a choice.  It had made him.

He’d hated London when he’d first arrived.  Perhaps he’d set himself up to, expecting not to fit in.  The Midlander all lost amongst the precocious Southerners fitted his self-image.  But it had truly taken him a while to adapt to the cost, the size, the scope, the difference.  Three years he’d said.  That’s how long it had taken for him to not always feel lost.  He wondered whether it had really been longer.  Whether it had taken until he stayed at home and she went away, until he had walked the streets rather than driving the roads, until he had slowed right down and let Brockley bustle inside his head.  Suddenly, he’d realised that he couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. The very idea of change made him feel ill. 

No, it wasn’t just change he was afraid of.  It was love too.  Even after all those years he was afraid of love, of being in love and there he was: in love with a place, of all the stupid over-romanticised things.  Maybe it was because Brockley was what he spent the most time with, because he saw the people out and about on its streets, because he recognised with a chuckle its silly little ways.

Thunk-thunk-thunk.

The darts left his hand in quick succession.  He peered at the board.  Three triple twenties.

He looked at his laptop, his hand resting on the back of the chair.  Such a small little movement to sit down.

He picked up his jacket and headed for the door.  Writing could wait.  There would always be tomorrow.

Until there wasn’t.

Back out the front a large snaking crevice could be seen in the exterior wall between where I’d once slept and the evil dog’s house. 

‘What a horrible little house,’ said my girlfriend, finding the whole thing somewhat funny, but also being confused as to why on earth I’d ever chosen to live there. 

As we’d gone round I’d pointed out things that had changed and tried to describe it as it had once been.  Poor little house, I thought, feeling obliged to defend it and the life I’d once had, at least in my head.  I felt sorry for it, so neglected and broken up, so destroyed by someone’s greed and indifference.

I felt a little like I’d let it down as I walked away, never to return.