The Wood Between the Worlds (continued)

S. Lewis Silverwood

Chapter Three                                  
Pulpit Yew

Joseph was sitting on the arm of a chair, his legs crossed. His hair had been cropped short and he had bleached it pale but I recognised him immediately. He stood up and walked towards me. It seemed impossible, but he was taller and thinner than I remembered. He wore a black mourning suit and tie. In one hand he held a glass of red wine; the other hand reached out towards me.

“Joseph… What has it been- three years?”

He put his hand to my hair and gave me a wry smile “What’s this, Violet? A bob?”

I was electrocuted by his touch “No, it’s nothing, I…”

“A Fitzgerald bob?” he withdrew his hand and sloshed the wine around the glass “How jejune,” he said as he sipped the wine over his lips, his eyes rolled up at me with raised brows.

I took him by the elbow and steered him through the house. The day was starting to thin and the light was already dying. I moved him carefully before me. He allowed himself to be guided and I felt his arm turn limp and yielding in my hand. We walked out through the open front door. I kicked it shut behind us.

I had not seen him since the last day of the sixth-form. There had been a graduation ceremony a few months later but neither of us had gone. We both pretended that we were too cool and cynical to go but really we just could not face seeing each other.

The road was quiet outside Janet’s house. Street lamps were starting to blink into life. It was still warm. We stood by the side of the house in a corner swamped by rhododendrons. I lit a cigarette and offered the packet towards him. He shook his head “You quit?” I said.

“To be honest, I can’t say I ever really committed to the vice in the first place.”

I smiled “And to think you gave me my first cigarette.”

His face drifted away “How ironic, considering your eventual mastery of the discipline.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m worried about Katy,” he replied.

I stared at him. I did not know whether he had really answered my question.

He ignored my stare and continued “Where have you been? I had to deal with everything myself.”

“What do you think I’ve been doing? Trying to finish my degree.”

“Katy said you didn’t even come down to see your dad when he was in the hospital.”

“He’s been in and out for years, every time they said it was serious, and what, how was I supposed to know this was the, you know, this was the time?”

“You were supposed to be there for Katy.”

“Hey, what, you know how it was with my dad, why do you think you can dump this stuff on me now, you know, you’re not my fucking boyfriend anymore, you don’t get to push me around like this.”

“I was hardly your ‘fucking’ boyfriend even then, was I? I think your other boyfriend was the one for the fucking. I was rather more of a mother-substitute I would say.”

He leant back against the wall and downed the rest of the wine. He titled his head towards me in search of an aggressive response. Finding nothing but restraint in my eyes, he stuck his tongue out and tossed the glass over his head. It tinkled into pieces in some other garden.

We heard shouting coming from upstairs. Standing away from the wall, I saw Katy stick her head out of an upstairs window “Is it time to cross the streams?” she said. I didn’t know if she was talking to me or not. She didn’t look down towards us but kept her face tilted towards the moon.

“What did she say?” I asked as Katy’s head disappeared back inside. Before Joseph could answer me, Katy reappeared with a brass fireplace poker and began knocking out the window panes. She smashed at them one by one, wide-eyed and giggling “What are you doing? Jesus!” I shouted, ducking back inside the house.

I ran upstairs and burst in on the front bedroom. Katy span around with the poker in her hand “You know he’s out of your league, Violet.”

I pulled her out into the hallway “Yeah, we’re going now,” I hissed. The stairs had begun to fill up with aggressive uncles come to investigate the noise. There would be confrontations and inquisitions that neither of us could possibly handle. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do “Fire!” I shouted “Everybody get out! There’s, er,  there’s a terrible fire!”

It was mayhem. I never knew how violent old people could be. The younger ones were thrown to the carpet in their mad panic to escape. You would think that the elderly would be calmer in the face of mortal danger but if anything they are worse. It’s not that they have less life to lose I suppose as the fact that they’re that bit closer to death and have seen enough of it already thank you. Either way they know how to use their elbows and their zimmers in a narrow corridor.

By the time we had made it outside and far enough down the street to stop running, I realised that Katy was now wearing her motorcycle helmet. I lit a cigarette and waited for things to cool down. Joseph caught up with us “Hey Kate,” he said as he picked a spider from her shoulder “Where you going?”

I was aware of the kindness in his eyes, blackened with late nights and banned from meeting my gaze by his temper.

Katy paused and knocked a gloved hand against her helmet “Where’s my bike?”

I sat down on the verge “We left it at the cemetery. You don’t remember me driving you back here?”

 “One of you give me a lift will you? I’ve got to get out of here,” Katy said, kicking a lamppost in desperation.

Joseph took her hand “I’ll take you. I think me and the Violet were finished talking anyway.”

I flicked my cigarette butt up into the air. It landed in the street in a detonation of sparks “I really don’t think she should be riding the bike yet. What was that all about upstairs? She needs a few more hours to come down.”

“Hey, I’m still here, fuckhead. Don’t talk about me like I’m not here.”

I stood “Okay fine, girl. I didn’t mean it to sound like that. Just take care, that’s all.”

Katy paused in front of me. Neither of us moved. I could see my own reflection in the visor of her helmet. I looked distorted and weird.

Katy chuckled and turned away “Cool. I’ll see you back at the house then.”

Joseph unlocked the doors on his car and let Katy climb into the passenger seat. She was still wearing the helmet. Joseph leant into the car and spoke with Katy quietly. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. After a minute, he came back up the garden path and stood a few feet away from me. He continued to face the street “There’s a demo tomorrow,” he moved his eyes around to mine “You do still demo don’t you?”

“What’s it for?”

“Do you want to come with me or not?” his voice faltered but did not break “Because that is where I’m going and I’m asking you if you want to come with me. I’m not asking if you want to know what it’s for.”

“Okay. Okay, yes I want to go with you. I’ll call you tomorrow. Just make sure she’s alright before you let her get back on that thing, will you?”

“She may be a baby but she’s not your baby you know.”

“She’s not your damn baby either.”

“She’s nobody’s baby now.”

“Touché.”

The street lamps began to flicker on. They hummed a pink glow, threatening the night with their unending orange light.

“So tell me something, Violet.”

“Yes?”

“What are you going to do with the house?”

“Shut up, Joseph,” I said gently.

“You are the man of the house now,” he said, his voice a parody of the inquisitive mourners.

I felt the words pump into my brain. I wished people would stop saying it. It was my father’s wake and I wanted to be able to feel something other than dread. I wanted to feel sorrow. I wanted to cry. But my tear ducts had long since run dry and their currents moved away somewhere else inside, the herald of internal weeping.

I was not ready for the power of land ownership. I was Hamlet playing King Lear, too in love with my own personal disaster to administer the dissolution of the kingdom. He looked at me like I was a fool. It may not have been his intention. I never could tell. Part of our childish love had been built upon the mystery of his judgement. I was sure that his words were always innuendo, codes of subtle meaning. The sensation of running behind his to catch up the whole time had been unique. Nobody else had ever seemed worth the effort.

Joseph drove Katy away. I waited on the doorstep for a while before getting into my own car. I managed not to go in and say goodbye before leaving. There was no more time to waste on the people inside. There were more important things to do.

I drove the car down the old streets. It was dark. The heat of the day had lasted beyond the sun. I drove with the windows down. Halogen lights flashed into the car, off and on. Everything smelled like it was partially melted. I could taste that there was going to be a storm. The roads were empty.

I drove with the music on full. Something with a piano, the Divine Comedy, I didn’t listen. I shoved the steering wheel in the right directions and the shapes around me realigned themselves. I didn’t even really concentrate on the road. The streets around me were too familiar to pay attention to. It was disappointing. I had wanted it all to look unfamiliar. I wanted to be such a different person that it all looked tiny and false. But my years away had not been long enough. I had not altered. These were still the roads that led to home.

I slowed the car at the turning past the lights and stopped. I got out. I walked back down the street. There was a new shop. It was a late-night place that sold cigarettes and bread. The lights were too bright and the radio was playing house music. It was at odds with the downbeat plastic racks and the sleepy Iranian family behind the counter. There was a tired child gazing sleeplessly at the CCTV monitor. If it wasn’t for people like me, I thought, you’d be in bed. I bought a bottle of Bushmills and headed back to the car. I didn’t wait for my change. It wasn’t much. Even though I was broke, I didn’t care. The shop was too depressing and it was the kind of day where you could just let things go.

I climbed into the car and dropped the whisky bottle onto the passenger seat. I liked having the scotch ride shotgun. It made me feel tough. I adjusted the rear-view mirror and checked that my face at least had changed. I was pale and thin in the moonlight.

I was procrastinating. Not wanting to go home. I knew that. I took the car for a walk around the streets, searching for the evidence of time. There was not much to find. I gave up and headed for the house.

I rolled down the hill and killed the gas. The car continued forwards. I nudged around the turning into the terraces and let the momentum carry the vehicle up along the hill. It was enough to climb the pavement and park.

I stepped out of the car and wandered up and down the street. On the opposite side of the road stood a string of terraced houses. Bombs and renovations had kept them from any kind of uniformity. Some were festooned with loft extensions and skylights. Most were unkempt. Each had a small yard and steps leading up to the front doors. I delayed looking at the old place. I did not know what effect first sight would have.

The side of the street behind me was bare. There was no pavement. A low wall ran along the length of the hill. Behind it loomed a scrub of hawthorn and wild roses. The plants were all black in the darkness, black weeds and black roses. Beyond them was a steep drop down to the train tracks below.

I pushed away from the car and walked towards the house. The windows were dark. The house was empty. I longed for the sight of Katy’s bike and when I couldn’t find it I knew that I would be alone in the house. All the curtains were drawn.

It was a parrot house: there were the same number of rooms as a normal house but each one had a floor to itself so it very tall and very narrow. The houses on either side were much shorter so it looked like it had been concertinaed into its present shape. The only multi-roomed level was the ground floor with its kitchen and conservatory built out as an extension like a whalebone bustle onto the back of the living room.

I was suddenly struck with repulsion at the place. It was lanky and deathlike and I twisted away from it instinctively. I felt that something had gone wrong with the world. I was overcome with claustrophobia. It was a trap. I had to get away but there was nowhere to go. My old life was over. University was finished, forever. The flat was gone. The friends were gone. The boy was gone. My future was as empty and filled with ghosts as the narrow house up ahead of me, bathed in sickly orange beneath a dying street light. The house was mine now. My responsibility. It owned me.

I walked up to the front door and felt in my jacket for the key. It wasn’t there. I padded every pocket. Nothing. I returned to the car and rooted through the glove compartment and a selection of my luggage. No. It wasn’t there. I turned back to size up to the house. I unscrewed the cap of the whisky and took a series of belts. By the fifth, there was drool on my chin. “Yeah?” I said, my eyes never leaving the house “Well fuck you too.”

I pulled the long black coat from the backseat and slipped it over my shoulders. The whisky bottle fitted perfectly, mirabilis, in my inside pocket. There was only a slight sound of tearing.

I walked around the block to the church on the corner. There was a locked gate into the yard at the back. I checked that the street was empty and that I was unwatched. I rattled the gate. The street was deserted. Gingerly taking a fistful of wire mesh, I hurled myself up into the air and over the gate. I landed on my back and rolled into the yard. A series of disturbed cats flew out of the darkness like junkies in a spotlight. I could smell bibles and catnip.

The steeple hung in giddy suspension to my left while the main body of the hall lay directly ahead. The roof was low to the ground on the street-side of the yard. I managed to jump up and scramble across the slate without too much difficulty. Once I reached the apex of the roof, I saw what I was looking for: the pulpit yew. It rose up out of the boneyard at the rear of the church like smoke. It was my childhood sanctuary, scene of endless afternoons spent in the avid pursuit of nothing more than the total absence of my parents. One of the trunks still branched out over the roof, just as I remembered. I was not sure if it was the tree or if it was my own body that had grown, but the jump between the roof and the nearest branch was smaller than it should have been. Even as drunk as I was, I could not have failed to miss. I landed clear inside the branches, swayed backwards for a moment and then quickly made my way to the safety of the big trunk. Once I reached it, I sat astride the branch and helped myself to some more whisky. The moon winked down at me in approval. I winked back.

Local legends stated that the tree had been used as an impromptu pulpit to preach the gospels before the church itself had been built. There was a great slash in the hollow trunk where a wooden platform had allegedly once stood, allowing the sermoniser to stand over the heads of his congregation. On our very first climb as children, the pulpit had been our target. It lay below me somewhere in the darkness of her swart canopy. I could not see it. There was a carpeting of green scarf over the trunk and branches and a rustle of disturbed squirrels in her upper branches. Everything smelt familiar and carried with it the tang of scraped knees and the memory of lost afternoons.

Peeping through the branches over the ridge of the roof, I could see the back of the houses in my street. The windows were unguarded. I saw directly into the neighbour’s lives. The scenes were unpretentious: a body slumped before a television, a child practising the violin, a woman ironing socks, teenagers sitting at a table laughing; nothing of consequence but shocking still in their lack of self-consciousness. I drank in the private moments and tried not to be seen. They were vignettes of honesty. Truth is the prerogative of the voyeur.

Something hooked my eye and drew me towards a distant window. It was skin.

Of all the windows on display, my vision had been focused immediately onto the one with the naked girl. According to evolutionary biologists, neurologists and paleo-anthropologists, the brain of Homo sapiens sapiens is significantly larger than its predecessors. This fact is often fodder for vanity. We’re bigger: therefore we are smarter, surely? But the new regions are not there for philosophy or poetry. The extra space is just there to recognise patterns. Patterns and subtle changes in patterns. This improved ability to notice slight changes in colours and shapes made us better hunters. But it didn’t make us any smarter.

I smiled as the naked girl in the window ran a towel through her hair. I tried to count the houses. I wanted to know which number she lived at, but it was hard to tell in the darkness. She bent over and began to pull on her stockings. I took another drink and settled myself. Her hair was dark red and her body was ripe like a berry. If there was any guilt to feel, I couldn’t find it. The moment took me as natural: we were just two organisms floating by. There was an innocence in my passivity. I couldn’t’ see how my eye was capable of violence. Besides which, art receives the audience it is worthy of. Stolen nudity belongs in the gallery of windows and rooftops and rogues.

Then she looked at me. I sat back slightly. Her expression changed but she was too far away for me to be sure of her exact response. Her eyes had widened. I felt their whiteness catch at me. But I could not tell if she was shocked or smiling. Her hand moved across her chest and snatched the curtains into place.

I realised that it was time to move on. The bottle stowed neatly away back inside the jacket and I edged down from the tree and back onto the roof. I made my way towards the guttering. I peered over. The drop was much higher on the other side of the roof. It was at least a storey and a half to the ground. I swallowed. Glancing up once, I noted that the curtains were still drawn. Then I jumped.

The landing was not as bad as it could have been.

After a while, I got up and brushed myself down. I was standing in a small yard at the back of the church. The concrete floor was covered in cigarette butts. The yard was bordered on three sides by the church and the adjoining vicarage. On the fourth side was a plain wall. I stood on the tips of my shoes and peered over. Beyond the wall was the back garden of the first house in my street. My own house was seven doors down. That was only six gardens away. I climbed up onto the first wall and checked out the gardens ahead. They were empty. If I was quick and silent, nobody would even notice. I turned up the collars on my coat. “OK,” I said out loud to myself “You’re a ninja bitch.”

I jumped down into the first garden. I landed in a flower bed and twisted around in the loose earth. I checked the house, crouching. The windows were dark. I was safe. It smelt of peat and moss. I sprang across the lawn towards the opposite wall. I peered over the top.

The next house was different. Lights were on in most of the windows and I could hear noises coming from inside. Some of the windows were open so I guessed that I might not get across without being noticed but I had no choice. I stepped back and took a running jump at the wall. I hurtled up and over.

The second garden was covered in decking.

I landed heavily and almost cracked the planks beneath me. The crash echoed uncontrollably. I slipped and scrambled upright, heading for the next hurdle as quickly as I could. There was no time to check whether I had given myself away. I did not even stop to look into the next garden. I just pulled myself up and dived over.

The third garden was darker than the others. As I landed, I knew that something was wrong but I could not see what it was. The ground felt strange. It seemed to give way under my weight. I had to extend my arms to steady myself. There were noises coming from the second garden behind me. French windows were sliding open. The crash was being investigated. I jumped forwards. The ground moved out of my way. I staggered. I was sinking into the earth. I stopped moving, unsure how to proceed. Someone turned on a porch light in the second garden. It was enough for me to see by. I looked down and realised that I was standing on a tarpaulin. It didn’t make any sense. There were people in the second garden. They were bound to spot me if I did not hide. I stepped forwards. The ground pitched downwards at least half a foot. Water sloshed around my shoes. A corner of the tarpaulin popped free of its fixture. I fell to my knees. “Shit!”

The people in the second garden heard me. I had only seconds before their heads would appear above the wall. I tried to run but another corner of the tarpaulin came unfastened. I toppled headfirst into the sudden water beneath my feet. I was standing on a swimming pool. The realisation closed around me, quick and freezing.

The pool was surrounded within minutes. The people from the decking house had roused the people from the pool house. Together they all stood around the garden waving torches about and poking at the tarpaulin with sticks. There was a deal of discussion as to what had caused the noises. After a while, it settled into a badger-versus-burglar debate. Someone continued to poke at the tarp during the whole thing.

A heart beat beneath the water. It boomed like a depth charge, lonely and afraid, cold as the grave.

Eventually the neighbours all tired of talking and they drifted away. Before the owners retired, they fixed the pool cover back into place. Then they shut off the lights and went to bed.

I crouched in the shallow end, my chattering head poked above the waterline for air. I waited for a while before pushing at the tarp above me. I was waiting partly to ensure it was safe, but also to delay the inevitable disappointment. I pushed. It was tightly secured. I really was trapped.

The water did not warm up and my prospects did not appear good. I tried to take hold of the tarp to yank it free but my hands could not get any purchase on the material. I began to seriously worry about hypothermia.

I could catch my death.

I wondered about the catching and what it meant. It made me think of children in the playground: little grim reapers in hooded tops and trainers, shrieking like monkeys. It seemed to me a bold and foolish inversion. Of course Death was the one who did the catching, after all.q

I had never shivered so much in my life. My body was little more than a rattling skeleton. I tried everything to escape. I even tried biting at the tarp but my wet face kept sliding away. It was hopeless. I tried to stare-out my mortality but there were still too many tasks to be undertaken before I was ready to die. I had to look after Katy. And more, I could not give up until I had dealt with the house. It was everything that the world had ever done to me. Facing my death in the freezing water, I found determination where there should have been despair. I had been beaten too many times to surrender.

Chapter Four                                  
Maple

Then I remembered the whisky bottle. I took it out of my jacket pocket and unscrewed the cap. There was not enough space between the water line and the tarp above for me to tip the bottle up to my lips. I had to duck under the water to get the bottle high enough for a drink. After a few dunks, I realised that the warming benefits of the whisky were entirely offset by the freezing water. I proceeded to stage two of the operation- breaking the glass. Taking the bottle upside down by the neck, I tested it against the tiles on the edge of the pool. The resulting klang echoed around the pool, amplified by the tiles. Plan B, then. I ducked back under the water.

My jacket swirled out behind me in the floating darkness. I brought the bottle, two-handed, against the bottom of the pool. I had to push against the water with all of my strength. It was like trying to run from a ghost in a nightmare. The first time, I only managed to crack the neck, but the second time I smashed the bottle in half. Slivers of glass eddied around underwater.

I bounced upwards and plunged the broken glass up into the tarp. It ripped straight through the fabric. The sound of the tear was a dawn chorus at the end of a bad comedown. I dragged the glass joyously across, slicing a window into the sky.

I climbed out of the pool. A shooting star flew through the air and disappeared into a cloud. A dog was barking in the distance. I lay for a while on the patio, just breathing. My clothes were stuck to me like sheets of ice. But I was free. My hand still gripped the broken bottle neck. My fingers were white. I was free.

I rose, climbed the fence and passed through the next few gardens without event. By the time I reached my own garden I had lost count and was about to pass straight on. It came as a shock when I realised that this was the house I had grown up in and yet had nearly failed to recognise. I had to check it was really the right place.

Everything had changed while I had been away. The gardening had been abandoned and the ornamental rows had fallen into dereliction. The grass was uncut, the vines had untangled and there were no more tomatoes in the greenhouse. The flowers were all dead.

I walked up to the back door. It would be unlocked. It had always been left unlocked.

A pile of bricks and a metal grill, the vague intention of a future barbecue pit. I shoved them aside and pushed at the door handle. It did not open. The back door was locked. I leant my forehead against the frosted glass window and sighed. Lifting my eyes up without moving my head, I whispered to the house “I hate you, you venomous bastard.”

Without warning, as if it no longer took orders from my brain, my neck moved. I snapped my head back and hurtled it forwards. My forehead smashed into the window and punched a circular hole clean through the glass. I staggered back, a palm to my forehead, a bolt of lightning through my temple at the shock of it. I reeled at the sight of the hole. I patted my face for blood: nothing.

The neighbour’s lights were coming on again at the sound of the breaking glass. Quickly, I thrust a hand through the hole, unclicked the bolt and opened the door. I slipped inside.

Joseph rang the doorbell. He tipped his ear towards the house. There was no sound; the battery was dead. He leant back and rapped on the wood with his knuckles. No answer. He knelt down and shouted through the letterbox “Hey ladyboy! Stop playing with yourself and let me in!”

There was a noise from within. It sounded like a chair being dragged across floorboards.

He stood back and smiled to himself. As he waited for me to open the door, he patted his cropped hair and smoothed the arms of his summer jacket. He wore Clarks shoes and Buddy Holly glasses. On his wrist was a large studded bracelet. It was incongruously macho.

The morning was still. There was no ambient noise, no traffic. The sky was devoid of wind or birds, as if something had sucked them all away.

The door swung open and bounced against the wall. I stood in the doorway. I was just wearing a bra and skirt. My shoulders were set at an animalistic angle, closing off the corridor behind me. I winced, a hand over my eyes at the brightness of the day.

 “Ouch,” I said, deadpan.

Joseph produced a silver-plated hip flask. He held it up in front of him and tipped his head to one side “Hair of the dog that bit you? Cure for rabies.”

“Come in,” I said, moving back into the gloom of the hallway, rubbing at my corpse mascara.

He followed me inside. He was not ready for the scene.

An oversized papier-mâché skull lay at the foot of the stairs. It was an Aztec mask from the Day of the Dead carnival. Joseph found it grotesque. “Okay, that’s got no place lying at the foot of someone’s stairs,” he said.

The hallway was otherwise normal. The décor was plain suburban drab: beige and creams, dark wooden furniture and carpeting; militaristic maps of the colonies in gold leaf, barometers and dust. In contrast, the skull was a violent interloper, lent a particular viciousness by its careless landing. I kicked at it as I walked into the lounge “It’s called a calavera.”

“Yeah, but what’s it doing there?”

I paused “Found it in my bedroom upstairs. Don’t know where it came from. Didn’t want it in there.”

“So you threw it down the stairs?” Joseph asked. He was joking.

“It shouldn’t have been in my room,” I replied.

“Oh,” he said.

I led him through to the living room. It had been overturned. The signs of recent violence were everywhere. The room had taken such a kicking that it was almost comical. Toilet paper streamed across the ceiling, caught up around the frills of the lampshade and draping to the floor. The three piece suite had been tipped upside-down like a child’s fort. The rugs from the floor had been scooped up and dumped on top of the chairs to camouflage them. Tomatoes were stuck to the walls, partially exploded. The little red stains looked like bullet holes in the chest of a giant.

I had uncaged my father’s racing pigeons. They flapped stupidly around the living room, covering the floorboards in shit and panicky feathers. Joseph covered his hair with his hands as he entered the room, as if the pigeons were vampire bats. His knees bent slightly, cowed and afraid, trying to reduce his height to avoid the chances of a pigeon flying into his head. The gesture betrayed his nervousness at the scene. I could tell that he wanted to leave immediately.

There was a mattress on the floor of the living room. I had dragged it down from upstairs the night before. There were no sheets. I had not thought about it. I had just spent the night wrapped in my overcoat for a blanket.

I sat down on a corner of the mattress and rubbed my eyes “Do you want a coffee?” I asked, fumbling for a cigarette.

“Look, I’m going to go. This was a bad idea,” he said.

“No wait,” I lifted my head up and tried to say something. I could tell that he was staring at my eyes, trying to work out if I had been crying, “I’m sorry,” I said “Give me a minute. I know it must look pretty fucked up…”

“No, it’s cool…”

“I just couldn’t sleep upstairs last night. I don’t know why. So I pulled the mattress down here to sleep, so, you know, it was the only way I could get off to sleep, I don’t know. It was weird being back in the house again. I don’t think I’ve ever spent a night here alone before. I don’t think I’ve ever slept anywhere alone before you know, I mean, totally alone in the house or the flat or whatever. There’s always been people around, I’ve never been that alone and here there’s always been, you know, Katy or, you know, um…you.”

“I understand,” he said. I did not believe him.

“You’re lying.”

“Of course I am,” he laughed “I have no idea what you’re talking about, you pretentious art terrorist.”

“Oh,” I smiled; glad to switch the mood. I gave him a taunting expression “So you think this is a ‘piece’?”

“Well, it’s a piece of something, that’s for sure.”

I flicked the cigarette ash on the floor with a deliberately camp motion “Are you making me that coffee or not?”

“You’re shaking.”

“When I was nine years old I came down with something called Sydenham Chorea, the Saint Vitus Dance. It was a couple of months off school, I don’t remember exactly. There’s no cure and they don’t prescribe much apart from bedrest and diazepam. I don’t remember getting any diazepam, but I do remember being pumped with whisky and valium from my mother’s supply. I used to have to omit them up when she gave me too many.

“I just lay in bed shaking like a maniac, half-drunk and my mother laughed. The whole thing amused her. To honest, I wouldn’t really call it abuse. I would save that for some of the other things that happened.

“You know why they call it Saint Vitus Dance? You know Saint Vitus?  Saint Vitus was a Sicilian kid. Vitus is means ‘lively in Latin; it’s a pretty cool name. He converted to Christianity at the age of twelve. I guess this was considered spiritually precocious. Tales began to spread that the young convert was able to produce miracles. There are all these stories about his adventures with his tutor and his servant. When I first read about his adventures I always thought that they would make a good animated series for children, especially in some big religious country like Italy. I don’t know why, but I always imagined they had a dog with them on the adventures. I don’t know whether the dog could talk or not. I never really gave it much thought. The dog was white though, a little Jack Russell like Snowy in the Tintin books but less yappy; more stoic.

“Vitus’ dad told him to stop being a Christian. This was all in like 300 AD. But he didn’t so they boiled him in oil. Now he’s the patron saint of actors, comedians, dancers, dogs and epileptics. He’s got the power to protect against lightning, animal attacks, oversleeping and, guess what? Against the Dance Mania.

“You ever read about this? It’s like a thousand years later in Europe, right, the Middle Ages, and the Black Plague is everywhere and then this Mania appears. It starts with headaches and hallucinations, then mad laughter and shaking, gurning and these sudden erratic movements. Then you start lashing about and people gather around to watch and then, get this, then they too start dancing along with you. So it grows and people start cults and you’ve got hundreds, thousands of people just dancing for days, jumping around in fields like mad bastards and the women are tearing their clothes off and everybody’s naked and they’re all fucking and singing and dancing and the priests are just standing around trying to exorcise them and they dance them right into the chapels to Saint Vitus to conduct these banishing rites. Then they go in there and people are playing music, right, the Tarantella? One time a bunch of people are supposed to have danced non-stop in a circle for a whole year! These people tried to pull their daughter out of the circle but they just pulled her arm off and she carried on dancing. By the end of the year they’ve worn a hole in the ground.

“Nowadays they say it was all caused by ergot, this hallucinogenic fungus in the bread. You know Robert Louis Stevenson, yeah? When he had TB his doctor injected him with ergotine to stop the bleeding in his lungs and two weeks later he wrote Jekyll and Hyde.

“The feast of St Vitus is on 15th June, my birthday. I used to drop a lot of acid on my birthdays. I never wrote a horror novel, though.”

Joseph ignored me “Where’s Katy?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said “Katy’s not here.”

I propped myself up at the kitchen table. Joseph put two mugs of coffee down. They clunked heavily. He scraped a chair back and sat opposite me. Light came in from the windows behind me, fractured into gold and green by the odd coloured panes.

“So,” he said, facing the broken glass in the back door “You didn’t ask me what I’m doing now.”

“OK,” I blew on my coffee to cool it down “What are you doing now?”

“So kind of you to ask. I’m working at the Herald. It’s in the sales department and I’m acting up as manager now.”

“But you were going into journalism, weren’t you?”

“Yeah? And I am in journalism. It’s not all just about celebrity interviews and columns.”

“Yeah, but, shit, I mean, telesales? You’re what, you’re a salesman?”

“No, don’t be so annoying, I coordinate the advertising contracts and manage the accounts with our regular clients. It’s not like I’m cold calling or anything. Fuck you, anyway, it’s a good job, I’ve got my own place now and I’m saving up to go travelling. Do you remember how you used to talk about going to India? You used to talk about it all the time.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t think I’ll be doing that,” I did not want to tell his the truth. It would mean giving too much light to something that was still vulnerable. The past was a snare that had entrapped me and this weakness had to be disguised, above all from Joseph “I’ve seen through it,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well that’s how they get you, though, isn’t it? You work to save up to get away from work and then you go away and spend the money you made at work and then you come back and you start all over again, the whole time telling yourself that the two months a year that you spend getting dysentery and smoking chillums on a beach in Thailand is your real life but all the while you’re just another wage-slave, you’re still just as chained up to all the bullshit but your chains are so long you can’t even see it.”

Joseph kicked my seat as he crossed his legs. Whether I was doing it deliberately or not, I was assassinating his dreams and mocking his values. He resented my idealistic arrogance. It was uncorrupted by reality and so it was untested. It was worthless to his “So then,” he said “You’re never going to get a job?”

“I don’t need that shit,” the more that I allowed the words to come, the more I felt that this was the truth. India had never happened “It’s so pavlovian- the alarm bell rings so you go to work and run through the maze like a good rat and then the home time bell rings so you go home to your cage and push your buttons for some food. It’s a life sentence.”

“So why go to university then?”

“I don’t know,” I felt angry “To get away from here?” I regretted the snap of my words. We both knew that the word “here” could easily be substituted by the word “you”.

If he was affected, he concealed it “So how are you going to pay the mortgage on the house?”

The house again “God, right now I just feel like burning it down.”

He put his hands solidly onto the table, gripping the wood “I like this house.”

“I hate it,” I took a sip from my coffee “There’s something wrong with it. I can’t sleep properly here.”

“Hey- remember that time we took a shower when we supposed to have double politics?”

“Yeah,” I chuckled. I was surprised at his comfort with the past. In my years away I had forgotten how easy he was about things like that. Brook had been the opposite: so buttoned-down, straight-laced and repressed. I had lived with him for so long that I had forgotten men could ever act differently. Brook was one of those vigilant feminist-collaborators whose abhorrence of all things sexist was actually the mask of a puritanical and Victorian attitude towards sex. Any display of female sexuality, even mine, especially mine, was tantamount to a betrayal.

“And your dad came home and you could hear me downstairs- do you remember?”

“Yeah,” I said “And I told you to hide in the laundry basket and you said-“

“You hide in the fucking basket!”

We replayed the moment in our heads, laughing at first and then, as the memory of our nakedness and vigour came back to us, a meaningless embarrassment settled over the table.

“Yeah,” I said, trying to break the moment and hoping somehow that other words would follow. They didn’t come. My lips failed me and I returned to my coffee. It was bitter and black.

“Violent Radical,” Joseph said, his train of thought having carried his onwards “That’s what your sociology teacher used to call you. God. You were always so tediously political about everything.”

“Tedious? Moi?” I affected a mock indignation “What are you doing here anyway?”

“The demo.”

“Yeah, but I never called you. Whose idea was this demo anyway?”

“I don’t know,” he replied in petulance. He regretted coming around without waiting for me to call his first. He was beginning to worry about how it would all look, how I would interpret his motives. He did not even know what he was doing there with me. This kind of action without premeditation suited his but he liked to be the first one to guess at his impulses. Nothing was obvious to me. He need not have worried. I had no idea what he was doing there, nor myself; me in my old life, him in the doorway of it “Yours probably.”

He kicked my seat, deliberately this time.

“What?” I said.

“I’m annoyed with you. You’re not being serious.”

“About what? My legendary tediousness?”

“No,” he was no smiling “About the house.”

“Oh.”

“If you don’t sort out your mortgage then they repossess the house, don’t they?”

“Well, say they do? I’ll just get a new place and, to be honest, it creeps me out just bloody being here, like I haven’t grown up or something, I don’t see why you, why you think I should sell out and get some bumfuck job just to keep this museum going.”

“I don’t care what you do. It’s Katy I’m worried about. There’s something wrong and she won’t say what it is. She won’t really say anything. Since your dad died she’s just been really withdrawn and there’s things I don’t understand, like the scar on her chest, she wouldn’t tell me where it came from but I could tell that it was something, you know…”

I did not know why it bothered me but I did not like the idea that Joseph had seen the scar. I wondered if it was because I did not like the idea of him seeing Katy without a top. I remembered him stroking my own chest once, years ago. How strange that I did not even have breasts then and yet I feared that he might have compared our physiques and found his memory wanting “How did you see her scar?” I asked him, surprised that I had even vocalised the bud of my jealousy.

“She showed it to me, that’s the thing. She wanted me to see it but she didn’t want to say where it was from. I couldn’t understand what she was trying to tell me.”

“It was my mother,” I kept my face turned towards the wall while I talked. I couldn’t stand to look at him while I explained. I did not trust my eyes to mask my feelings as I spoke “When we lived on Maple Drive. That was why they took us into care. And then we had to come and live here with Dad. None of us wanted it that way, not really, I think sometimes Dad just went along with it out of shame for what happened to Katy.”

“What did she do?”

“She was doing the ironing and she was listening to the radio. She always wanted to listen to the radio while she did the housework. And Katy was there and she was reading out loud, trying to learn to read and she used to have to practise out loud because of the dyslexia and she told her to shut up because she couldn’t hear the radio. But Katy carried on reading out loud, she was just a kid, you know. And so she held her down and put the iron on her chest to make her shut up.”

“Fuck… I never knew.”

“Yeah, well,” I scratched my head and tried to move on “It didn’t stop her reading. She was obsessed with books for years. Dad used to have to force her to stop reading and go outdoors. ”

“Well that’s what I’m trying to tell you, your Dad’s not here anymore and you’re the only one Katy’s got to watch out for her now.”

“Shit, Joseph, she’s not a little kid anymore, you know, she can look after herself now.”

“Yeah, though, but I don’t think she can. I’m serious, she’s been down for a while and I think she’s getting worse and she needs this place to be secure. Think about it, Kane, you know… I can’t believe it now, but I was relieved when I heard you were coming back. I thought, yeah, thank god Katy’s got someone to care. But you’re so selfish and you haven’t even considered her.”

“And, but,” I spluttered “You,” my temper bloomed up at his words, but I could not truthfully deny what he had said. I waved my hands at him as if I was too angry to speak. I folded my arms and returned to my coffee in silence. I wanted to ask him more about what was happening with Katy but I couldn’t face another lecture. I remained mute. He ignored me.

After an age he asked me the question he had been biting down since our reunion at the wake. The gender question. I felt mildly betrayed at first: was this really just all he had come round for? But then I started talking and it just ran out of me and I realised that he had every right to know. We had been virgin schoolboys when we met. I used to tell him I wasn’t gay. Almost every time we had sex I would tell him. I always knew I was straight in some way but it took a while to reconcile this with my proclivities. It’s not the first thing you think of exactly: “I am a straight woman”, not an easy thing when you’re born a man. Being attracted to other men was just the first irrefutable part of it all.

 “If I could have afforded to do the whole thing private, believe me darling I would have. The NHS route is horrible. It’s all mental health assessments and 12 month waiting lists. You have to nag everybody before they even agree to see you, let alone start talking about surgery. I just wanted the ‘outside me’ to match the ‘inside’ one, you know?… I was self-medicating from the internet and living as a woman for over a year before they even prescribed any legitimate hormones… in the meantime I just got on with whatever I could afford privately as I went along: electrolysis, speech therapy, augmentation… Every time I had to go to the stupid identity clinic I felt degraded, patronised, insulted, it was awful. They treat you like shit. They actually see it as a mental illness: they call it gender dysphoria. It’s in their book, the fucking Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, do you know what I mean? They just think you’re crazy.

“Once you’ve fought your way through all of that, the surgery isn’t so bad… not really…  I had rhinoplasty, vaginoplasty, labiaplasty everything… I was lucky, the surgeon was the best I could have got and I’m fully sensate, thank God. I can get wet. I can come. I actually feel real.

“It didn’t end there, though, you’ve got estrogen injections, progestogens, anti-androgens, agonists, God, everything… I’m a woman now, I mean, I’m living in a different body, the right one, my sweat even smells differently, my skin is thinner but it feels soft. I have to keep out of the sunlight but I think I look better pale anyway… but my body still fights against me. My body thinks that my vagina is a wound, can you believe it? A wound… so it wants to close and I have to use dilators every now and then to maintain the volume but I mean, you know, well... I just wish my body would accept me the way I want to be, even if the rest of the world won’t.

“University was hard. I was cross-living for the summer before I started, so I just went in as a woman. They call it RLT, Real Life Test, you have to do it legally for two years before you can transition. I was undercover like James Bond or something. They were all new people there and nobody knew me as a man so I didn’t tell them the truth. I didn’t even see that it was the truth, not really. They call it living by stealth. I just wanted to be accepted, to just be a normal woman in my new life, but almost every day was crashed by His little guest appearances. “Him”… the man I used to be, the boy you knew. People would see Him hiding in the corner of my eyes, disguised by all the slap and the body support stockings but still there in the back of the code like a Trojan virus. They would double-take, whisper, stare… they had detected the trace of Him in me and it turned me from a woman into a freak right in front of them. A monstrously invisible mutation from an ordinary woman to a shameful tranny… God I hated it…

“But I had friends. I even had lovers… there were a few other people there who were as outcast as me and we formed our own new world beyond the privet hedges of normality. I can’t say I was an anti-conformist. Not really. I was desperate to conform but I just wasn’t able.

Five hours later, we stood in the road as the world tore itself apart around us. The riot was a maelstrom, spiralling in circles. Faces blurred in the swirl, rioters running first one way and then the police running back at them. Joseph and I were stationary figures within the spinning top. We were locked into each other’s eyes. The chaos was somewhere else.

Night had fallen early. The pressure of the summer heat had finally cracked the sky. A thunderstorm ripped down at the streets, pelting fists of water and barrelling winds. Fires burned in improbable places. A double-decker bus had run across the pavement and ploughed into a shop front. A meat wagon lay on its side, blue lights waving desperately. A gang of young warriors stood tall on its prone side, brandishing the crude tools of revolution- bottles and bricks, sticks and stones.

We continued to stand in the middle of the road marvelling at each other. The plastic casing of the traffic island next to us had been overturned. Uncovered, the strange bulb cast expressionist shadows at our faces. We didn’t notice anything. A phalanx of the Tactical Support Group struck out, less than ten metres behind us. It ploughed into the gang around the fallen van, shields out, truncheons raised. We didn’t take any notice.

The air was heavy with violence but we didn’t feel it. The sounds were deafening but we didn’t hear them.

Something more important was passing in the air between us.

Chapter Five                                   
Yggdrasil

The looting had begun an hour ago. We had ducked into a pub to escape the first police charges. As we stood in the dark wood interior, squinting through the frosted windows, it became apparent that the pub had already been abandoned to the night. It was completely empty- no customers, no staff, and no landlord. I had raised one eyebrow at Joseph. Within minutes, we were behind the bar, our mouths wrapped around the optics. Within a few minutes more, we were on the floor behind the bar, our mouths wrapped around each other.

Later, we stood in the middle of the road, shocked at the discovery of ourselves “I still dream about you,” I said.

“Good dreams or bad dreams?” he asked, twisting the word “bad” about so that it meant everything and nothing.

“Good dreams that we were still in love and that we never broke up and that I never fucked things up so badly and we were happy together and you know how, in a dream, it can last for years, and some of these dreams would last until we both died of old age, but it felt so real, like you lived every single moment, but then I would wake up in the morning, having dreamt these lifetimes of happiness out for us, and for a moment I would think that it was true, and that it was real, but then I would realise that it was just a dream and it would hit me like a javelin in the face and pin me back to the bed.”

“I know what you mean;” he said “Maybe we are still in love.”

And he kissed me.

At that moment, the riot police surged past. They were nearer this time. A truncheon jabbed out of the phalanx and coshed me around the back of the head. I span around on the spot and fell back into Joseph’s arms. The phalanx charged away. I put my hand to the back of my head to check for blood “The bastards...” I looked up at his for permission “We weren’t doing anything,” I said, by way of justifying my unspoken request.

“It’s OK,” he said “You go. We’ll get separated in this mess whatever we do. I’m going to go home. You’ll call me?”

“Yes,” I jumped back to my feet, picking a discarded brick up from the tarmac. I kissed his cheek, whispered goodbye and sprinted off into the fray. I raised the brick above my head before loosing it “Police bastards!”

“Number forty FIVE! please.”

I sat in the Jobcentre. It was an open plan office on the ground floor of the Inland Revenue building. The ceilings were low and the carpet was thin and mean. Grey-skinned men in plastic jackets stabbed uselessly at the job computers. They took slips of paper from the machines and trudged across to queue up in front of an unmanned desk, holding the little slips in their hands.

“Number forty SIX! please.”

I was sitting on a shallow chair in Waiting Area B. Two girls sat opposite me, their hair tied back in buns. They wore pyjamas under their padded jackets and were sucking on dummies. I tried to ignore them. They looked like trouble.

“Number forty SIX! please.”

Where was number forty six? Maybe he had killed myself and was lying dead behind one of the job computers, a little slip of a Death Certificate in his hands, printed on greasy fax paper.

“No? Number forty SIX!, please.”

The two girls opposite me slouched upright and made their way slowly to the desk marked “Fresh Claims.”

I continued to study the carpet. The windows were tinted brown and the day outside just looked dull. There was no point going in search of hope out of the windows. I thought about my hair. It was shabby and brown like the world outside. I should get it cut, I thought, but I didn’t know what style. It might look worse. It was probably better just to leave it.

I was looking for Katy. She had not come home. I had a lead on someone who might be able to help me find out where she was, but so far I had been sitting around waiting for over an hour without results. It was frustrating. I needed to find her and make sure that she was OK. Joseph had started to get me worried. I did not want to let on but I was starting to think he might have been right.

The two girls were having an argument with each other at the desk. One of them stood up and told the other one to fuck off. She walked out of the doors and into the street. The woman behind the desk was photocopying a form. When she got back to the desk, the second girl had left. She shuffled the papers for a while. Then she took a white card from the chain around her neck and plugged it back into the computer on the desk. She sighed.

“Number forty NINE! please.”

I double-checked the ticket in my hands. Number forty nine. I got to my feet, crossed the space between Waiting Area B and the Fresh Claims desk.

“Have a seat,” she said without looking up.

I sat down.

The skin on her face was green from the computer screen’s antique glow. She wore a cheap top and a pinched expression “Name please.”

“What happened to number 48?” I asked.

“No, I’m sorry, what?” she looked up. Her mouth fell open at the sight of my face.

I cracked a smile “Alright, Green?”

“Excuse me,” she said “It’s just you look almost like…”

“Yes. It is me,” I said “I’m a woman now.”

“Je-sus!” she pushed back from the desk and sat upright “Kane! What the hell are you doing here?” Green dropped her hands into her lap and shook her head as if dislodging cobwebs from her face “Kane, mate, I never thought we’d see you in this town again. God, it must be, what, only a few years since college but look at you, I mean, wow,” she reached her arm over the desk, half standing. We shook hands.

I bowed slightly. I felt cocky. I had the element of surprise “Now what’s this I hear about you working for Babylon?”

“Steady on, mate, it’s only the bloody DWP. Some of us got to make a living too you know,” she laughed and tutted her head at me “Bloody students.”

“Not any more, girl. I finished.”

“How’d you get on?”

I shrugged “Don’t know yet. Listen, do you still live up in Compton Street?”

“Compton Street? What, haven’t they demolished that shithole yet? No, mate, I moved out of there years ago.”

“Ah,” I scratched my neck “You see I’m trying to find Katy, my sister, She’s not come home yet and I thought she might’ve been with you lot?”

“I don’t really knock about with most of them anymore, bunch of slags and wankers up there,” Green appeared pensive for a moment before brightening “Hey, do you still see Joseph?”

“Saw him yesterday as it is. Why?”

“Nothing, it’s just, well, it’s funny innit, what happened with him and Katy and that…”

“What happened with him and Katy? What d’you mean?” I didn’t realise that I had raised my voice until I noticed the slight silencing of the air around me.

A needle-faced supervisor peeled away from a filing cabinet and positioned herself behind the chair “Everything alright here, Ms Green?” she asked, her voice awash with suspicion.

“Yes, yes, everything’s fine, thanks,” Green replied, blushing.

She maintained her hovering position.

“Er,” she went on “We’re just making a fresh claim.”

“Oh,” she said, her head moving slowly towards her shoulder “It just appeared to be a social call,” she spat the words “That’s all. But if you’re fine…”

“Yes, yes, thanks.”

“Good then, good-good,” she turned and left.

Green leant over the desk and whispered, one eye following her away “Look, Kane, I’m sorry mate, but I’m at work, you can see how it is.”

“Sod that. I want to know what you meant.”

Green leant back and exhaled “Well, if you want to carry on sitting there you’ll have to make a claim for benefits.”

I nodded “Go on then, sign me on then.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

“Name please?”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, Green.”

“Alright, alright, keep your voice down will you; what can I do?”

“OK. Violet Kane.”

“Violet? Oh well, whatever. National Insurance Number?”

I shrugged “I don’t know, do I?”

“Alriiight,” Green slapped her fingers on the keyboard “What’s your date of birth?”

I answered the endless stupid questions curtly, constantly eyeing the flow of the interview for a chance to grill her about Katy. Was I blind? No. Was I pregnant? Ha ha. Was I living in a care home? The process took a long time. The longer it took, the less I liked Green’s face. It had aged since I last saw it. The skin around the eyes was puffy and worn. It was like sitting across the desk from a stranger. It was not that I had forgotten what she looked like as such but more that I had never really looked at her properly to begin with. Green had been a side player to my social life in college, somebody I assumed was a good friend just because she was always there. I had never questioned it. Now, I realised, I had no idea who this woman really was.

“What was your last job?” Green asked. She had settled into the routine. I was now just another jobseeker to be processed.

“Student. Look, how long does this take?”

“Well, did you do any work while you were studying?”

“Look, man, I had the same crappy summer jobs that everybody else had and if you think I want that in your computer, you can forget it. I’m not doing that kind of shit anymore.”

“Alright, well, I have to put something here under “Usual Occupation”; it’s so we can decide what sort of work you’re going to be looking for once you start signing on.”

“OK, well, put “Sociologist” then.”

“Come on, Kane, we don’t want to be here all day do we?”

“What’s wrong with that? I studied it for three years, girl- it’s what I’m trained to do. Just put it in the box.”

Green rubbed her forehead “It has to be computer coded. You get it? I can only put an occupation down if there’s a code for it, can’t I?”

“So, what, a job doesn’t exist if it isn’t in your computer?”

Green’s patience had run thin so she pulled the monitor screen around to face outwards “There, go on, have a look, go for your life.”

I scanned down through the categories and the codes on the screen “Well, look, what about under “Social Work”, if you cross reference it with “Information”, hang on, can I borrow the keyboard?”

Green motioned with her hands to say “Go ahead.”

“OK,” I rattled away on the keys, pulling up drop-down menus and options. Green watched incredulously as I zipped through the software as if I had been using it for years. I narrowed my eyes. I had always been quicker than she was and now I was outperforming her in her own job. I enjoyed making her suffer about it “Yeah…” I paused “Here it is. Sociologist. Code number 451/J,” I looked up “Don’t you want to write that down?”

“No, I don’t want to write it down.” Green snatched the keyboard back “Thank you.”

I could tell that I had soured my chance to push for more information about Katy and Joseph. I decided to switch onto something new “So, listen, what happens about my dad’s mortgage? I think she’s in arrears already, you know, so do I claim Housing Benefit or what do I do?”

Green raised her eyebrows at me “Well yes, you need to go to the Housing Department and complete the requisite forms but, well, no, there’s a bit of a delay but it will be fine, just ask down there and they’ll let you know what to do…”

“What you mean? Is there something else I have to do, or?”

“Listen,” Green nipped “I just do Fresh Claims for Jobseekers Allowance alright, if you want to know about housing you have to go to the Housing Department. At the end of the day, that’s it.”

I knew that she was not telling me everything. There was a catch and Green knew it, but I had no way of making her talk “OK, fuck it, are we done here?”

“Almost,” Green sneered, throwing a grey form across the desk “You need to fill that out and bring it back to this office.”

I flicked through the form “What? Is this serious?”

“Yes. You need to write down exactly what you’re going to do to search for a job and how many times a week you’re going to do it and exactly what kinds of jobs you’re searching for. Then you sign it. Then we sign it. And that’s your jobseeker’s agreement and you have to stick to it. Make sure you keep some proof of what you’re doing as well, because we’ll check, every time you come back to sign, and you will receive your benefits only as long as we’re satisfied that you are doing everything possible to find work. Alright?”

“You’re enjoying this, you cow. I can’t believe you and me were ever mates.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah,” I leaned forward “My sister.”

“I told you, I haven’t seen her. Why don’t you go and see the junkies up at Compton Street? I’m sure they’ve been taking care of her for you.”

“My sister and Joseph.”

Green leaned back and tapped a biro against her fingernails “What do you think happened?” she stared into my face with a hostile vacancy “She was onto that one the second you were out of town. Can’t say I’m surprised that no-one got around to telling you. Although, I’ll tell you something, the look on your face now is priceless. Shame they missed out on it.”

I jumped to my feet and gripped the sides of the desk. I yanked upwards, meaning to turn the desk over. It was bolted to the ground. It did not move.

Green was grinning “See you in two weeks, then. Signing Point 2. And be on time.”

I lay on the mattress in the living room and slept. The room was dark and warm. In my sleep, I dreamt that I was standing at the top of a huge tree, fifty feet above the ground. The branches waved in the wind. The tree stood in the centre of a corn field amid rolling downland. The tree was simultaneously a vast plant and yet also a vast ladder rising up into outer space. Beneath me, I could see the shadows of a crop circle spiralling out around the base of the ladder in delicate mandelbrots. Wild horses ran and jumped below, trampling the corn. They were white Iberians with hooves like hammers and legs full of delight.

I watched the wild horses expand the pattern of the corn circle. The fractal began to widen and loop outwards. The horses unfolded and carried the design in separate directions towards the four horizons. I wondered whether they were coming back. A bray of squirrels was climbing the ladder towards me. Their teeth were filed to points. A drag racing car overtook them and sped up the trunk, flattening branches. It was going to run me over. The perspective and the angles were all wrong. The gravity made no sense. I felt sick. The horses in the distance turned and charged back towards me. I found the head of a baby doll in my pocket. It dribbled onto my palm. The horses were bearing down on the tree. They swarmed and struck the trunk, uprooting it from the ground. I was free-falling, the squirrels snapping at the air around me. The horses were flying up to meet me. I was about the hit the ground.

I sat upright, awake. It was still dark. I was aware instantly of a figure sitting on a corner of the mattress. A slash of streetlight through a chink in the curtains revealed a face. It was Katy. She was perching, cross-legged, and toying with something in her hands. It moved through the light and flashed. It was pointed and metallic. She saw that I was awake. Carefully, without moving her eyes, she slipped it back into the inside pocket of her leather jacket. Her arms were wrapped around with motorbike chains. They rattled in the gloom.

“Violet… I need to know that you wish me well,” Katy spoke quietly; her white moon face searching for me in the dark.

“Katy,” I fumbled for my cigarettes and a lighter “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

“I’m scared, Violet,” Katy’s voice was hushed and pressured. She was furiously concentrating on it, as if only a supreme effort of mind could stop it cracking and flying apart “You used to be a boy and now you’re a girl. I know it’s you inside the armour but how do I really know it’s you and not a trick?... I think that I might have done something bad… maybe they’re going to try and kill me now.”

Katy’s eyes searched my face in the darkness. They probed in wonder as if it was something surprising and unknown. The thought appeared fully formed in my mind that these were the eyes of a madman. But they were not the eyes of a cinema lunatic: all cartoon flashes of white around the pupil and whirling brows; the disturbance was visible in more subtle gestures like maybe somebody had just oiled the sockets too generously. The room was dark. It was hard to say.

I lit the cigarette. The tip glowed in the darkness. I took time to settle the smoke in my lungs and to exhale. I was relieved to see Katy again but the situation was uncomfortable. My head had not yet woken up, so I could not tell if her words were meaningful or nonsensical “Who? Who are you talking about, girl? Are you okay?”

Katy shuddered “You’re not allowed to talk about the Assassins. Not out loud. I could send a message to you but you haven’t been fixed up properly to do it. That’s why I can trust you, isn’t it?”

I propped myself up gently. I could feel the manic energy coming from my sister’s body like a back-draft “I’m missing something here; you’ve got to give me more to go on. Why do you think that…” I struggled for the phrase that Katy had used. It didn’t seem to mean anything. I wanted to engage with her in a way that she would accept but the idea of using the same phrase seemed wrong. I was reluctant to play along with a reality that I did not understand. It seemed distasteful “That… someone wants to hurt you?”

“Because!” Katy kicked away from the bed and edged around the wall towards the window “Because I couldn’t do it, could I?” she snorted, somewhere between a nervous laugh and a gulp.

“Okay, listen, start at the beginning. Where have you been?”

Katy reached the window. She crouched down beneath the sill. Gingerly, she lifted a corner of the curtain up and peered out at the street “I went to see mother tonight.”

I let the lighter slip from my fingers. My tone dropped “You’re lying.”

Katy laughed “No.”

I would have jumped up, but I was naked beneath the sheet “You’re really fucking starting to do my head in, Katy.”

Katy turned her face from the window. The amber light fell across her cheek. I could see that her face was wet. Had she been crying? “You don’t understand what I’m trying to tell you, do you?” she wiped at her eyes “I got there and I saw her and I even talked to her but I couldn’t do it.”

“Who fucking told you to go and see her?”

“The order! Why can’t you understand? But I couldn’t do it, could I?” she began to cry again “I sat on her bed and I put the knife up against her throat and she woke up, even though I didn’t make her wake up, and then we talked for a while but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do anything. But I wanted to, that’s the thing, even though I was just following their orders, I still wanted to go there and do it. You wanted to do it too, didn’t you? You remember what you said to the social worker when we were taken away so don’t lie to me.”

“What are you, insane? All I ever said was that I wanted to come and live here with Dad instead.”

“You liar!” Katy’s voice snapped on the exclamation. She halted. There were splinters in the air from what she had said. She was scared of herself. She tried to control her voice and measured out her words carefully “You said that you wished that she was dead.”

“I only meant it in the sense that she was cruel and, yeah, she was, but I never in a million years wanted anything like this to happen. For fuck’s sake, Katy, what did you think you were doing?”

“Well I didn’t do it, did I,” she sneered and turned back to the window.

I shoved the cigarette into the ashtray headfirst and gripped my temples “Katy, Christ, what’s wrong with you? Listen, I think you should just sit down, I’ll get someone, and I, I just need to work out what to do here…”

“I’m next, don’t you see? I’m the next name they’ll give out. You can’t just quit on a mission. You have to see it through,” she closed the curtains and knelt down by the side of the bed “But I’m safe here, I’m safe inside the house and you can protect me,” she turned around “I can’t see anything. I think I’m going blind. Oh Jesus Christ, I’m sorry, this is all wrong isn’t it? You’ve got to help me.”

I felt the sweat run cold on my back. The hairs on my forearm rose up in response to an invisible charge. I swallowed hard. I was terrified “I promise,”  I said “Everything is going to be OK.”

Chapter Six                  
Apple Tree

The telephone rang. I was asleep on the mattress in the living room. Katy was gone. Her chains were pooled up around the windowsill.

The room had not been tidied since my first night in the house. The chairs were still tipped on their sides and the paintings ripped away from the walls. I had not been upstairs since the first night either. I had just stayed living on a few square feet of the living room floor. The pigeons huddled on the curtain rail, pacing and cooing. Their filth was everywhere.

My mattress faced the TV. It was surrounded by a moat of filth. Cups and plates were piled up within arm’s reach. They were starting to fill with mould in response to the summer heat. My bags and my boxes from the car had been carried in, incrementally, in order of use. Their contents lay on the floor where I had dumped them. Dirty clothes mixed with clean clothes and old tapes with new tapes. Paperwork spilled out on top of every surface. Unpaid bills, letters about the mortgage arrears, bank charges, funeral expenses, private medical bills, invoices from the undertakers, utilities reminders, expired licences, neglected hire-purchases, bailiff’s notices and final demands. After reading a handful of them, I had resolved to ignore the rest. They remained as unopened as my father’s coffin.

The phone continued to ring. I rolled out of the bed onto the floor to wake myself up. It was late morning and the room was already warm for the day. The mattress seemed shabby and stupid on the bare floorboards. I took in the nest that I was building around it and was shocked by the dereliction. It was not right. I would have to move everything back upstairs and start behaving normally. I had no idea what I was supposed to do about Katy. Nothing seemed rational and there were no obvious courses of action. There were rule books and life maps for normal people in normal situations, but Katy and I had both wandered off into uncharted spaces and there were no maps and no threads to tug on to find your way back again. All I had left were my instincts and they were telling me to get things straightened out. Start with the mattress. Then the floorboards. Anything. Make everything as normal as possible. I wanted to start immediately, to trawl everything out and start purging the house. The broken window on the back door still needed to be fixed. I needed to clean up the mess in the living room. I needed to get the pigeons back into their cages and stop living like an animal. This was Katy’s home, not some abandoned tree-house in the woods where I could keep cigarettes and pornography. What was I doing? The phone kept ringing. It could have been Joseph. It would have to be answered, even still.

I realised, simultaneously, that I was naked and that the curtains were open.

I stepped quickly into the hallway and pulled the living room door closed behind me. I wondered whether Katy was still in the house. It was cold in the hallway and I felt self-conscious. I took my long black coat from the rail and wrapped it around myself before picking up the phone. My voice surprised me with its depth and rasp. I sounded old “Yeah?”

“Good morning,” the voice said “Can I speak to Violet… Kane, please?”

“Speaking,” I replied out of one corner of my mouth, an unlit cigarette in the other. I patted the pockets of the jacket for a lighter.

“Good morning Ms Kane, this is the Job Centre Plus speaking. We’d like to talk to you about a job opportunity that has recently arisen that we think you might be interested in.”

“What?” I found a box of matches and tried to light the cigarette. They were still damp from the neighbour’s swimming pool “Already?”

“Yes. Well, we are able to match suitable vacancies to people’s qualifications and, as you are about to become a graduate, your options are very good.”

I could not light the cigarette. I sat down on the stairs. The voice on the phone was beginning to annoy me. I sighed heavily into the receiver. I had decided not to accept the job, whatever it was. Taking a job would ruin my dole prospects “What is it, then?”

“Well, a vacancy has come up for a frontline member of staff in your local Job Centre office. You would be helping people to get back to work and…”

I cut in “Signing people on? I only just came in there to sign-on myself and now you want me to come and work there?”

“Well, you would be conducting work-focused interviews with the clients on a fortnightly basis when they come into the office…”

I tried to light the cigarette again. The last match folded uselessly in half and refused to ignite. I threw the box down the length of the hallway. It was unsatisfying. The box was too light and too small to make a decent projectile and I put too much effort into the throw. It hurt my arm. Distractedly, I tried to make the correct noises down the phone “Is this full time? How much does it pay?”

“You would be working 35 hours a week, pro rata that’s around ten thousand pounds with a good holiday package…”

“Ten thousand pounds? A year? That wouldn’t even cover my student loans!”

“Well, if you need time to think about the offer…”

“No, sorry, I’m not really interested in that kind of work. I’m looking into some openings for sociologists right now,” I had ceased to care how I sounded.

“So, if I am to be correct, you are, are you not, turning down this offer of full time work?”

“Yeah, that’s what I just said... Why?”

“Well,” there was a pause on the other end of the line. I listened carefully. It sounded like a palm had been placed over the receiver to muffle a conversation in the background. The voice returned “If you refuse to consider applying for this job then I am afraid that I would have to say that you were not currently actively available and searching for work.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means,” the voice’s tone was patronising and sarcastic, satisfied with its victory “That we would consider that you are therefore no longer eligible for Job Seeker’s Allowance as you are not complying with your Job Seeker’s agreement.”

The reality dropped on me like guano “You son of a bitch… Green put you up to this, didn’t she? Is that her in the background I can hear?”

The voice was smiling through the line “I am sorry, madam, I don’t know what you mean. Your claim will be terminated at the end of the day. Any remaining payments will be sent to you in the form of a giro cheque.”

“Motherfucker!”

The tone of the voice flattened out. It was full of sated malice “What’s the matter, mate? You too good to work for Babylon?” The line went dead.

When I was a girl I would spend the summer holidays kicking around a gang hideout in the disused railway station. Our gang was a loose collection of local oddballs, united by our outcast status. They were pretty interchangeable and I can’t remember any of their names. One year when I was around ten, we were caught setting fire to dirty magazines by someone’s mother. As a punishment, I was sent off to the sea with my grandparents and with Troy, the family mongrel. I treasured Troy’s imaginary pedigree. To me he was part wolf, part Alsatian, part bulldog, part hellhound. Best friend.

My grandparents left me to amuse myself, preferring to spend their days in the safe darkness of run-down cinemas and dance halls. I devoured the Summer Holiday Special editions of the comics and terrified myself in a Museum of Curios by feeding change into a glass box that contained a satanic wooden sailor-boy. His laughter was intended to be a pleasant diversion to holidaymakers. In reality, his mechanical screams were fingernails in blackboards, tinfoil on teeth, slugs in socks, banishment to the seaside.

I fell vaguely in love with a red-haired boy while I was there. He was on holiday with his parents. They were from London. It was something about the mirror shades he wore, something about his freckled cheeks and his repressed smile. He spoke to me only once, in the queue for the heated swimming pool in the public baths: it nearly killed me.

It was a viciously hot day and he wore black Speedos with silver lightning across the back. As I stood on the wet tiles, childish cartoon-towel under my skinny arm, I swore silently that I had never seen a more sophisticated boy. Nobody ever wore such cool costumes in our local pool and nobody ever spoke with that radio accent. I had been watching him for weeks, destroying myself with my cowardice, never daring to approach him no matter how many times I played the scene through in my mind. When he turned his head over his white shoulder to speak to me I wondered if he was going to tell me that he loved me and fall into my arms, but all he said was "He wants you to take your dog home."

While I had been distantly daydreaming about his swimming costume, Troy had slipped his lead, followed me into the baths and was sitting on the tiles, scratching. The Life Guard had been shouting at me to remove myself and my bastard dog from the premises but I had not heard a word.

I avoided company for the rest of the holiday and spent most of my time taking long walks with the dog by the cliffs, exploring rockpools and discovering the drowned kingdom of starfish and crabs, alien anemones and jellyfish. It was on one of our magical marine inventories that Troy ran away.

A crab pinched his nose in response to his aggressive investigations and Troy bolted off down the grey beach into the setting sun, howling like the sailor in his glass box. I tracked his paw prints in the wet mud that stretched from the rocks at the foot of the cliffs out for miles to the shallow sea. I followed the trail like a sleuth, hunched over with a toy magnifying glass, drunk and giddy from my bedtime readings, all Christie and Sherlockian. The trail led out towards the Atlantic and then back in to land and was lost in the rocks by the caves under the stony chalk cliffs. I searched until it became dark and stormclouds closed in around me, hissing on the endless sea winds.

I was discovered by my paternal grandparents, shivering and delirious with my leg broken and my body lodged in between two eroded boulders, raving about the dog. As they carried me home I was unplacacted by their reassurances that Troy would return to the hotel before morning. Like a homing pigeon, my grandfather said, or, he added whispering, like a husband on the piss.

I can remember lying in my bed under unfamiliar blankets, my attention focused on the moment by the intense sharpening of physical pain. My grandfather sat in a chair next to the bed and told me about his own boyhood. He had once fallen from an apple tree while scrumping. It was during the war. He had been evacuated to the country and it had gone to his head. He had broken several bones in both of his feet. The friends that he was scrumping with had panicked and run away, leaving him alone in the orchard. He could not stand nor could he walk. I asked him how he had gotten home. “I dragged myself like a sack of coal,” he said.

And it was thus, recovering from a broken tibia, my flu turning to fever, feeling guilty over wasting so much of my search for Troy into some kind of detective game and unwilling to abandon hope for his return, that I was informed of my parent's divorce. My grandmother told me not to worry, but as we left Troy behind and drove home, I knew that home was now forever lost and that I would always merely be travelling away from Troy.

I stood outside the employment agency. I wore a variation on my funeral clothes. I was trying to look smart. I was too hot. I felt unconvincing.

I wore the black coat. It was still damp from where I had fallen into the swimming pool. I didn’t think that it would ever dry. I remembered that I had bought it to wear to job interviews. It was poetic. The coat was now fulfilling its destiny. If it was a parasite on my back, then it was a more successful organism that its host. The universe truly loved that jacket. It was like one of those people who are born lucky and just keep on getting lucky. Rich, good-looking, talented people. Bastards. The world just rolls over and exposes its neck to them. They don’t even have to try, while the rest of us are banging our heads against the swimming pool walls underwater in the deep end.

I smoothed the creases in my unironed shirt. It was a replacement for the faded grey nightmare I had relied upon in the past. I had found it hanging in my father’s wardrobe, some relic of his younger age. I had only been inside the wardrobe to see if there was anything worth selling as vintage. Then I found the shirt. I took it and tried it on. The shirt, like everything else inside the house, technically now belonged to me. I decided to take the shirt, but I could never figure out why it felt like I was stealing it.

I still wore the rubber skirt and the stockings. They were all that I had been wearing since I had arrived. They were beginning to smell. They threw up the occasional hit of stale smoke and dead skin. I could not get the doctor martens to dry out, so I had to cap the outfit with a pair of trainers. They were black suede. I consoled myself that at least this time I had managed to find a pair of socks.

I was aware that I would eventually have to enter the employment agency and face the people inside. I knew that they would all be correctly dressed. They would own real suits and proper shoes. I would look ridiculous and fake. I wouldn’t even know their language.

I wore no tie.

I felt that I was betraying myself already, simply in the act of standing outside an employment agency. I had gone far enough. I was not yet ready to sign my name in blood on the contract for my soul. In all of the efforts I was trying to make on Katy’s behalf, swallowing my revolutionary pride was the hardest. I knew that this was not going to be easy for me.

The street was busy with shoppers and workers. Who were all these people? I felt like an alien in my hometown. The old shops and businesses still seemed the same. The bland, depressing high street was still just as bland and depressing. But the people were unfamiliar. I had the feeling that I should recognise everybody, a feeling that this was where I came from and so this was where I should belong. But I didn’t recognise any of them. There was no real reason why I should know them. I knew that. But the notion persisted.

It was another boiling day. The sun unglued flesh from bone and stuck bodies down to the pavement in muscular blobs. Everybody had peeled off and stripped down, sweating their skin out freely into the air. Even the seagulls were languid in the heat. They barely rolled out of the way of traffic. The townsfolk moved gloopily around me as I stood sweltering in my heavy jacket. I envied them. They were all moving with underwater steps and I was the only one who was drowning.

I steeled myself to go inside. Maybe the office would have air conditioning. Before I could make it to the door, a figure bounced out in front of me “Violet? Violet ó Catháin! Look at that, it really is you!”

It was Joseph’s mother. “Mrs Sheehan,” I winced and held out my hand.

She stood with the sun behind her and a glint of fire in her eyes. I had always been intimidated by her. She shared Joseph’s height and tempers but was supported by a broad frame of body. I had little doubt that she could floor me with a punch.

“How are you doing?” I asked, too nervous to correct her pronunciation of my name.

“Grand,” she crushed my hand between hers and gripped my forearm like a politician, smiling “Joseph told me you were back. And I’m sorry to hear about your father.”

“Yeah, well… thank you.”

“Now, don’t you look nice? Joseph didn’t tell me how much you’ve changed your style. Don’t you look nice as a girl, though. You know I think it is better like this, no more of that funny business, experimentation, you know my Joseph only goes out with girls now? Yes, girls and boys, boys and girls, that’s just nicer isn’t it? And don’t you look smart in that blouse?”

“No, it’s just, I’m just hunting for a job,” I had finished my sentence but she continued to stare at me without saying anything. I was compelled to continue talking. She would have made mincemeat out of a spy “I inherited the house but it’s in arrears and, you know, they cut off my dole money so I have to just take the first job I can get, and I don’t have any choice about it, you know, I’m supposed to be going back to university to do my doctorate but, well, I don’t know what else I can do. I guess I have to just stay here and get things sorted out…”

If she was paying any attention to the words then she kept it well hidden “And Joseph tells me you took him to the demonstration. Now,” she pulled me in closer “You weren’t one of those naughty children we saw on the news, now were you, one of the troublemakers?”

 “No, Mrs Sheehan.”

“Oh, that is a relief now because we saw the pictures and one of these children who was fighting with the police: she looked just like you.”

“No, Mrs Sheehan.”

“Right then, and how is your dear little sister, Katy?”

Why don’t you ask your son, I thought. He only does girls now anyway. But I said nothing “I’m sorry, Mrs Sheehan, but I’m late for my appointment and I really have to go,” I tried to extricate my limb but it was held fast in the bear-trap of her hands.

“Yes, of course you are, but you’re going to have to come around for tea to visit us. We can ask Joseph to come over as well. I’m sure he will be wondering where you’ve got to, won’t he, after you left him to make his own way home from the demonstration?”

I was surprised by how much Joseph had told his mother about that day. I had imagined that the events were a secret between the two of us. This would have made it easier for me to have erased them from reality. Now that the outside world had crept inside of our reunion, it would be harder to sweep it away. The thought of Joseph and Katy together was too difficult to face. I could not agree to go. “Yeah, maybe we can work something out, but I’m going to be very busy for the next few days so I’ll call, yeah?”

“I’m not going to take no for an answer, Violet,” she cut me a glare like cheese wire “Saturday, then, shall we say five o’ clock?”

I meant to protest but she was grinding the bones in my knuckles. If I did not comply with her, she was liable to pulp the whole arm “Yes, well, Saturday, okay, that would be… yes, I’ll see you then.”

She released me. I popped away from her. She flashed her teeth and walked away. I turned, defeated, and entered the agency.

By the end of the day, I had visited six different employment agencies. I was getting nowhere. They all had jobs in the windows that seemed promising. Every time I went inside, the jobs evaporated. They were chimeras, just window dressing. Every agency asked me what kind of work I was looking for: I said “anything”. It did not seem to broaden my chances. They eyed me suspiciously. This was not how they worked and I was wasting their time. They wanted people who were pre-nichéd. They asked me what kind of work I had done in the past. I said “nothing”. Their eyes rolled back into their skulls. I was of no use to them.

My pockets were full of business cards. People had given me phoney assurances of future telephone calls. I had promised to come back next week to see what they had. Both parties were in on the lie. They despised me and I despised them equally. Nobody was going to call anybody.

As the shops began to shutter up, I became desperate. Here I was, not only betraying my ideals but scraping the barrel to accomplish it. These were not even good jobs. They were mouse-pushing jobs for people without good qualifications and I couldn’t even talk my way into one. They were talking about customer services and sales. Both of them were beneath my abilities but my confidence had been so undermined that I doubted I would ever find anything, even if I truly wanted to.

Sales jobs were out of the question. I stood against capitalism and I saw the salesman as the footsoldier of capitalism. The jobs were mainly commission-based and this meant pressuring people into purchasing goods and services that they neither needed nor even wanted. It was tantamount to pushing dope. Besides which, I was secretly intimidated by the prospect of cold calling. So that left customer services. I did not really know what it meant but it seemed a step up from sales.

There was one last agency on the street: Sylvie’s Employment Services. I walked straight past the notices in the window and stepped inside. The office was antiseptic green, with hygienic fake plastic flowers. A few job-seekers sat on low-slung chairs, filling out clipboard forms. They were shrunken and hunched. The agency staff glided around the back office, superior to their unemployed clientele. I walked up to the desk and tried to catch somebody’s eye. Eventually, a round-breasted girl in a low-cut blouse sighed her way up towards me. Her hair was scraped back in a tight bun, the scrunchie clamping her humanity down in case it interfered with her caustic professionalism.

“What sort of work are you looking for?” she asked in a tannoy voice.

“I’m in the market for something in customer services,” I said.

She almost brightened “Right,” she flipped a clipboard at me “What sort of thing have you done in the past?”

“Customer based work, really, while I was studying,” I lied “But I recently got engaged and I’m after something full time,” once the bullshit-genie was uncorked, there was no way to control him.

“Are you looking for permanent or temporary work?”

I had learnt enough from my day to recognise the question as a trick “Oh, permanent ideally.”

“Right. Because we only have permanent work.”

“Yes,” I said. For some reason, all the temp agencies hated the concept of temporary work. They were really just third party recruitment services for big corporations like banks and utilities. The workers were not “temps”. They just happened to be very casualised and disposable.

I filled in the form, inventing a life for myself as the kind of brain-dead automaton slave that they were looking for. I faked a job history that they would never be able to fully investigate- part time work for non-existent employment agencies in different towns at companies big enough to not bother with temps in their personnel files.

They then put me through a series of keyboard tests- “ten key” and “WPM” assessments. I was even asked to complete a spelling test involving bizarre words like Mississippi and haemorrhage. This was followed by an interview. The interviewer wore a white shirt with cufflinks. He was young and bored by the day. I decided to bluff my way through it in the guise of a laddish optimist. I steered the interviewer away from the set list of questions into a rambling chat about the merits of different pubs. After ten minutes, I knew that I was safe.

“Alright mate,” he told me “You start next Monday. There will be a month long induction programme, which is basically sitting in a training room for four weeks and getting paid for it, nice one, and you’ll be on six pound an hour, alright?”

A short handshake later and I was standing outside the agency. I had a job. I was even happy about the fact. The only problems were the final words of the interviewer “Oh yeah, mate,” he had said “And there’s a dress code, yes, even for girls, I know, so you’ll have to wear the corporate tie, alright?.”

I returned to the house. I stood in the hallway and called Katy’s name. There was no reply. I made my way to the kitchen and put the kettle on. I rummaged through the cupboards while the water boiled. They were full of junk. There was no food. The fridge was empty, save for a few cans of Guinness. One of the pigeons flapped around near the bin, snooping for scraps. I had not thought to feed them once.

I went to the living room to find a cup for the coffee. The smell was even worse than it had been in the morning. I collected the pigeons and put them back into their cages on the roof. I even gave them some food. Returning downstairs, I opened all the windows and the conservatory door. There was no breeze. The air just hung in the room, unmoving. It had almost changed states from a gas to a solid. I returned to the kitchen and brewed the coffee.

After one sip, I slammed the mug down “Right,” I said.

I picked the papier-mâché calavera up from the hallway and carried it up the stairs to the first landing. Katy’s bedroom was the only room on the first floor. I put the head down carefully and knocked on Katy’s door. There was no reply. Katy had hung a biohazard sign on the door. It was shut tight but there was no lock. I could have pushed it open to see whether Katy was there or not. In truth, I was not sure whether I could face him. I still did not know what I was supposed to say or do. I left it and went back to the living room. “Right,” I said again. I took my shirt off and set to work.

The first thing I did was to get some music going. I found an old CD in one of my boxes, the Beastie Boys. I set the stereo to full volume and turned to face the room.

I grabbed the mattress and lifted it up from the floor. The detritus of my sloth scattered across the floorboards. I kicked everything out of the way and threw the mattress out into the hallway. It crashed against the balustrades and flopped in half onto the carpet. I waded into it and manoeuvred it to the bottom of the stairs. Once it was lined up, I leapt onto it and dragged it up the stairs to the top of the house with my whole body. I shouldered the door open to my old bedroom and tossed the mattress back onto the bed base. I only glanced up at the room for a second. It was enough to spur me on. In the years that I had been gone, the room had become a dumping zone for all the unwanted household goods. A broken lawnmower sat just inside the doorway. It shouldn’t even have been in the house.

My room was a loft conversion built over the existing attic. They had tried to retain as much of the attic space as possible and so my room was never big enough. A small doorway on the hall gave out to the ladder for the flat roof above my room where the pigeons lived. Their persistent nicker overhead kept me awake at night for years. They gave me a lifetime hatred for the call of the urban rock-dove. I used to lie on my bed in that tiny room kicking at the ceiling and cursing my father for his inane obsession with racing the damn things. I did not have fond memories of the space.

I would not have wanted the room to have remained in stasis like a museum piece but I could not dampen my anger at the lazy use it had been put to. All of my childish possessions were buried somewhere beneath the jumble. They had not even been thrown away. It did not appear to have been worth the effort. I took it as a symbol of my family’s ambivalent feelings towards me. I shut the door and walked down to the next floor. There was a small set of steps leading down to the bathroom and above them was my father’s bedroom at the front of the house.

The curtains were drawn and the bulbs were weak. It was hard to take anything in “You’re next,” I said to the empty room.

I jumped back down the stairs and found some bin liners in the kitchen. Returning to the living room, I divided everything into two categories- rubbish and valuables. Most of the room was categorised as rubbish. I filled a score of bin bags and carried them out through the back door to the garden. Then I took down all of the pictures and ornaments and put them into bags. They were tossed out through the windows into the garden. Temporarily distracted, I hastily patched up the broken glass with a piece of spare chip board, in lieu of a replacement frame.

By this time the living room was thick with dust motes. I tipped the furniture back into place and swept the floor clean. I fetched a wet rag and cleaned the tomatoes from the walls and dusted the surfaces. In a short while the whole room was purged. I left nothing but the sofa, two armchairs, the TV, stereo and a coffee table. Everything else had been bagged and thrown outside.

I performed the same task in my old bedroom. Initially I concentrated on getting the junkpile sorted. Hardly anything was worth keeping. There were rolls of carpet and linoleum, spare tins of paint, shoe boxes full of postcards, redundant printers, worn clothing, broken irons, rusted toasters, chess sets with missing pieces, nothingness piled on top of nothingness. There were photo albums with pictures of the family before my parents split: mum, dad and two little girls posing on forgotten beaches on unremembered holidays. I barely even recognised these dated portraits. There were other sets of my father’s single life when Katy and I had lived with our mother. Here my father was with a strange woman, here he was with a new beard on a canal barge and here he was at a Halloween party. They were saturated clips of his independence, his second chance at happiness and freedom. All of that had been crumpled by the reacquisition of his daughters. We had never really seen him during this period. I threw them into the rubbish sacks. They were no use to anyone now.

After a while, I had uncovered the lower strata of my own lost days underneath the junk: old books and toys abandoned in favour of a new life on campus, tiny shoes and faded annuals, cheap handheld games and schoolboy fashion statements. I tore through them all with no compassion. I stripped the room bare in a vehemence that was without satisfaction.

I rolled the bags down the stairs and out into the garden. There was a hill of black plastic piling up on the concreted yard. I spat and blew my nose to clear out the dust. The bags bulged, their contents poking through here and there as if trying to bargain for their release “This i