The Adjacency of Vacancy

Towards the end, the neighbours grew ashen. The mother walked around her living room in circles, like she’d returned from a war and couldn’t find peace. It seemed a bit dramatic – it was only a renovation. Then came the disappearing. The kids went first – they were practically zombies anyway, I figured they’d sleepwalked somewhere unresurfaceable. Then furniture. It was as if the home was slowly swallowing its inhabitants – every time I walked past, another chair or table was missing. Finally, the mother herself. Which, by then, I felt was a blessing. I couldn’t help but compare and contrast the shiny-faced lady with fresh keys in her hands and paint charts in her eyes to the dried-out vampire insisting on a staring contest with the window. One time, she’d stood, forehead on pane, pointing at me and mouthing something. When I got nose to nose with the glass, I made it out: “We’re all fucked, darling”, her lips tightening over teeth into a rictus grin. It’s incredible how wild domesticity can make you.

The haunted house shebang started then in earnest. You know the score: screaming pipes, creaking wallpaper, leaking doors. It was fascinating – I couldn’t help but see the phenomena through a film lens. I hadn’t watched the genre in my decade with Luke – he didn’t want to pay for discomfort, even when it was free-streaming. But I soon got into the swing of scary. I guess horror’s like riding a bike. And next door was getting the gist of me – it was always just as I was off-dutying my guard when something jumped. The logical next step was to think of the house as a metaphor. Luke had never warmed to my literary leanings, but I’d beavered through stories in my evenings regardless, so now I saw all sorts of symbols: the red blemishes appearing on the bedroom ceiling were inkblots; the rearranged family photos in the hallway were shuffled tarot cards; the TV static which kept flickering mid-episode was a reminder of the nothingness that lurks within everything. It was an afterthought to think of the building like the surveyor I trained as. That was a mistake – you learn in week one: always take a property literally.

Wednesday to Saturdays, the nuisance really ramped up – largely at night, of course. It sounded like next door’s attic was having electric dreams. The party wall pulsed. The sound of appliances orchestraed: dehumidifiers and hoovers and drills switching on and off. It seemed odd to have left storage plugged in. Then flew in the flies – a plague of those black dots that hover around bananas past their sell by date, crawling all over our fridge. The last straw was rank, salmon-coloured tears running down our kitchen wall.

I decided to knock though. The thought of breaking down the back door or smashing a window seemed unbecoming. And I’d heard at work that complaining to the Council could come a cropper during conveyancing. Anyway, it was time for a project. Our house was immaculate, before the goings-on. I hadn’t been able to have children of our own but I took a period of leave equivalent to maternity as a point of principle. I figured I was bound to give birth to something, women always are – and I did! I brought into being our home. Me and the mother next door used to swap notes. She’d moved in just as I was getting cracking. We prickled with excitement. She’d come into some money – a lottery win or a will or something along that vein. My plans came to fruition in a way hers didn’t though. I’d never been particularly practical. After Uni, I’d purposely got dogsbody jobs just to prove to my family I wasn’t purely academic. Of course, I’d ended up doing a masters conversion to surveying and, even then, I excelled at the desk tasks and had to drag the unnatural part of my brain through the building pathology module. But, whereas I got stuck in, YouTubing my way through stripping wallpaper and fixing radiators and even plumbing in a new washing machine, the mother next door talked big but ended up just painting over the odd spot of damp. I guess she had the kids to contend with but they seemed pretty empty behind the eyes from what I could see. I couldn’t help but feel – what’s the opposite of jealous?

Even with some experience under my toolbelt, knocking a wall through would be my crowning achievement. I thought Luke might have said something – he was always dousing my ideas – but he mustn’t have minded. Probably pleased my mind was occupied, I had a habit of spiralling. I decided to go through the spare room, in case it went wrong. It was the one room left to finish. I was still tossing up whether it should be a study or a guest room, so it had sat pristine, its white canvas walls waiting. I tended to keep the door shut. I found a helluva hammer in the shed, which was handy. My first swing was a bum note. But I kept hitting and hitting, crescendoing with such force that I couldn’t say where the strength came from. I struck through a few layers but the bricks were bottomless, like a builder’s brunch. After another skin or two, a rancid smell seeped: stale grafts of bacon and old grinds of coffee. Likely remnants of contractors. Noone has memories like architecture. It was only a metaphor, I told myself. Merely a scripted scene. How substantial could the wall be? The moment I remembered it was actually a solid structure, I broke through, in a cloud of masonry dust.

Into a pink room. Eye-wateringly pink. It was a box room, like ours. With no furniture, like ours. Perfect paint job. I barged through the glossy, white door. I didn’t feel the need to be polite to a house from hell. On the landing (plush red carpet), I noticed something odd – you’d expect semis to have mirror-image floorplans, but the bedrooms and bathroom were in the same layout as ours. I heard a glass smash downstairs – distant crystal, which could have come from either house’s kitchen (we were onto our third wine set, partly down to Luke’s bulldozing washing up technique). I headed for next door’s ground floor, just to check.

Luke. Stood by the sink. His hand wrapped in bloody kitchen roll, staring at shards of glass as if they might rewind themselves together. I knew instinctively he couldn’t see me, so I didn’t try. They reckon women prefer people to things which is statistically why we go into professions like nursing and teaching. As a surveyor, I wasn’t sure that applied to me. But, after making certain there were no attic discos or rotting fruit or crying fishy walls, I fixated on Luke alone and I soon forgot about the houses altogether. We could have been in a field or on the moon, for all I cared.

I stayed around for as long as I could. I was hoping a memory might spark a smile in Luke or I’d watch him cook one of his stews for a friend (I’d told him he should stay in touch but he said men didn’t bother the same) or even pour merlot for another woman. I left hints. In my experience, men claim to hate hints but they come to appreciate them. I downloaded Hinge on his phone and laid out his favourite shirt on the bed. He plodded on, poker-faced. He never played music but he started to watch the odd documentary which I took as a sign of something.

It was a good while before I turned back to look at the old house, like when you climb a peak and wait for the top view – a reward for your hard yards, though this felt more like a punishment. When I did return to the hole in the spare room, it seemed solid, as if it were made up of black bricks that had merged into one dense mass. I knew I had to walk through it. There’s a phrase on those lines, isn’t there? To go through a wall for someone.

Funny, really. I’d fretted about the adjacent vacant and, all along, the void was me. Sorry – I know you’re not meant to spoil the moral of your story. I feel like I need to spell it out for Luke though. I’m not sure what format – I don’t think hints will reach, where I’m going. I wonder if there’ll be children there.