Ada didn't stop at hugging the wall. Here she is now caressing glossy surface with pads of fingers. Imbibing a lover, she inhales the fumes of barely dry paint. Her hot cheek is cooled by the seducer’s skin.
“You're so cold,” she whispers, and where tongue flicks behind teeth, she leaves lips slack and wanton. Tip travels to wall: it's like licking a flat egg. A fly bobbing around the bare light bulb makes a generator hum. Ada thinks her own breathing is thunderous in the otherwise quiet house; mouth is full on wall, batting deep breaths from throat to ears.
Ada removes her clothes and presses her naked front against the brick blank page. She’d like to be inked up to leave two full teardrops, a kidney-shaped ghost of stomach dough and a triangular tepee of black wire. She thinks of butterfly pictures made by folding paint between paper at school, and suspended for a second in childhood memories, is prompted to pump her arms up and down like fashioning a snow angel.
Sounds, in turn, each incited by the energy of the other, agitate the previously still air. The cat pads across floorboards; fridge buzzes courgettes into fleshy green vibrators; pipes groan in cavities; television turns itself on through a fluky power surge; wind calls down the chimney; there is the chatter of glass on glass as a train passes on nearby tracks.
“This is new for you,” she tells the house. “Nobody has made love to you before.”
Some months earlier, on the night the house awoke for a second time in its history, there was a death of an old lover overseas caused by a hazelnut of mercury kept tight in a heart. Ada won't hear of that in this book, but when she does, she'll weep into the chest of a grandfather clock and wish time back.
That night, Ada had been trying to sleep through the stifling honey heat of a summertime witching hour. Typically, her bed was gritty with crumbs from pastries, toast and packets of crisps. She couldn't get comfortable: the prawn cocktail aroma irked her nose, the sheets bunched up under her thighs and the duvet cover, usually buttery soft from years of washing and soiling, was inexplicably as rough as a sack.
How her brain buzzed with bees. Might be, should be, will be, will never be. And for the things that would never be, she longed to find a twig, a broom, a paddle, a wind, to change the direction of the current so the things that would never be, would in fact be, and in glorious colours too – cerise, cyan, ochre, royal blue, the heavenly white of cloud lining, the earthy orange of gold leaf.
At least, thought Ada, tomorrow is a new day. This adage had acted as a lighthouse, guiding her vessel into its fifty-second year.
Downstairs, in a room off the chintzy hallway, a male scribbled at a bureau, writing with a quill to get ink all over sausage digits he hoped were flags of intellect and fervour. He had a habit of gesticulating wildly to show them off.
It wasn't for the girls he did this, but for God too. Which was why he felt glad when the blue blood of the nib found its way to his jowl, even though everyone in the house was in bed.
The man was writing on some parchment purchased from the art shop. The pulp of the paper allowed his letters to bloom outwards – spider legs on precise script.
The night the house awoke for a second time, there were two more inhabitants of the Edwardian villa. The twins slept beneath a skylight in the attic, on iron bedsteads dragged into place with their own scrawny arms. They gazed up at the moon from which they hoped to catch madness. If only they were madder, they’d have the adults like Playmobil people, inert in their sticky palms.
Theirs is a well-trodden road, being the tongue to the city’s mouth, and Viola Sororia had become a rotting tooth of stained bricks and peeling paint. The windows are mournful eyes that glower at mums pushing prams, businessmen reducing their carbon footprint by walking to work and woodpigeons, jays and blackbirds plastering the modest drive with berry-peppered milk. Viola Sororia only ever looks forwards, backwards and to the west side; never witness to the bustle of a market, the hymn of the sea or a bride and groom exchanging rings with serene and grateful faces. So limited is its lookout that it devours every detail of action on stage: maggots worming through a rabbit carcass in the back garden, a poisoned fish floating on the pond, a feline shadow slinking through the cat flap, and of course, the actions of the cast.
Later we shall go back much further, to discover why the house was built, but for now, forward, to something of interest in the study. Gun had been tossing the marble paperweight back and forth in his fat palms and dropped it on a hairy toe, sending him hopping around the room. And in hopping around the room he found himself facing a wall – one he tended to ignore because he isn’t an observant person about anything other than his own appearance and manner.
The wallpaper paid homage to the Arts and Crafts era – thistles, ivy and other decorative foliage coiling across the emerald space. This is why the room is so dark and why I always feel jealous, thought Gun.
He picked at the embossed leaves without a care for the order of the room. The torn wallpaper fluttered to the floor. Leaves as leaves, he concluded. Outside, real leaves closed their sun-withered fists.
Gun picked, revealing cardboard coloured stone. The ripping made his spine prickle disagreeably, bringing a grimace to runner bean lips. Bulbous, toad-lidded eyes burnt in their sockets and he fancied his sloppy jowls had become razor-sharp with this new, virile urge to deface the wall. On the vacated bureau stood a jar holding a penknife, pallet knife and letter-opener. He plucked them up like a nosegay and tried each weapon in turn. The penknife made deep incisions, the pallet knife scratched shallow legions, but the letter-opener was just right and lifted paper from wall like scaling a trout.
Viola Sororia was able to recall how the wallpaper came to hug its body and felt great attachment to Indigo Foster, who had played bossy foreman to the band of decorators in the 1920s.
“Make sure it’s straight, with no lumps and bumps,” her crystalline voice had ordered the team. “Or I shall pour plaster all over you and make you into garden ornaments, like I did to the cook who over-grilled my kipper.”
Indigo had been wearing a white tulle tea dress with a thick black ribbon hanging low on her hips. She absentmindedly toyed with an onyx and marcasite necklace – a prelude, perhaps, for what would come to pass, but back then, still just a pretty piece of jewellery in the feathery grip of a fidgety young lady.
Gun systematically removed patch after patch of paper – enraged, first, then studious, and at last feeling foolish. The study, which Ada liked to keep shabby, seemed confused and cold with the exposure of a bare wall and the layer of paper and dust soiling the rug.
Whilst Gun worked, Ada found herself chasing Sleep’s tail through a tropical rainforest, tearing through ferns, tripping on strangler figs and struggling to breathe beneath the thick canopy. Salty sweat beads tickled her temples.
Sleep! Sleep!
Sleep was, tonight – although the shape she gave it changed regularly – an ocelot, dappled like a jaguar and as lissom as a spirit. Occasionally it swept up a tree and observed Ada’s lolloping form with the kohl-lined eyes of Queen Nefertari, before whipping its head away and disappearing into lush vegetation.
Listening to the forest, Ada concentrated on its music: insects and frogs shaking maracas, rasping guiros, shuffling casabas, chiming agogo bells and trilling ocarinas. Her pulse experimented with bongo rhythms.
The ocelot led her into a circle of citrine gemstones, used by healers to stimulate the dream process.
Yet Ada wasn’t able to succumb. Something irritated her even more than the oppressive warmth. She hadn’t noticed it before, but as she pulled herself from jungle to bedroom, her ears discerned an unpleasant ripping. Startled, she bolted upright, wondering, what the piccalilli is going on downstairs?
She never closed her bedroom curtains because she relished the feeling of sky spilling over her in a nighttime tide then creeping away as morning prevailed. The same lunar light the twins basked in upstairs allowed Ada to locate her jogging bottoms and a vest she suspected was aimed at teenagers but had bought for the hopeful rainbow motif. Her neck, recently soaked, ached as a chilly breeze swirled in and out of the room, throwing a fat souvenir pencil from shelf to floor. I’ll take that as my weapon, she thought, in good humour. The token from Great Yarmouth became a colourful sword with a rubber handle. Holding it aloft, the plucky woman moved soundlessly across the landing.
It really was a most curious and meticulous noise. Not indicative of defacing bills to destroy important numbers, or shredding newspaper to bulk up the fire. Sometimes Gun received mysterious packages in the post and would rip up the cardboard boxes to go in the recycling, but that made a meatier, longer tear.
I really don’t know the man at all, thought Ada, suddenly apprehensive.
She had placed the advert for a lodger in the window of the organic food shop where she bought pulses, whole-wheat peanut butter and miso soup. A little café in the rear had become a special place to drink a coffee alternative made from acorns and eat cakes that surprised her: beetroot and raspberry, rutabaga and golden syrup or geranium and chocolate. It wasn’t that she didn’t drink coffee – in fact, she did, to excess – it’s just that whilst she was in those surroundings she felt like someone else with a different life. Sat at the hardwood bench, with a magazine she wouldn’t usually read, eating substances she couldn’t fit together in a recipe herself, in not quite her part of town, Ada felt very peaceful. And so, it seemed unlikely that putting an advert for a lodger in that particular window could bring any trouble. When Gun rang up later the same day, although she had misgivings about his name, she put the phone down thinking: how fortuitous.
Ada was always excited by fresh starts: the knees up of a new year, the freshly pressed and printed pulp of a local newsletter. She enjoyed scanning the television guide for new sitcoms, dramas and documentaries. Her favourite season was spring, when the air bubbled and pinged with fresh shoots. It is no surprise that alerted by the crunch of gravel, when she squinted through netting at the new face – though crudely sculpted with a sour brow – she felt a tingle of expectation. A new lodger meant new rules and a new game. A plethora of possibilities.
Gun had been quick to move his big black boots from the garden to the Welcome mat and into the entrance hall. He was large enough to block out a good deal of the sunlight that flooded through the stained glass at the top of the door, and cut a foreboding figure.
“Gun. Pleased to meet you, Miss,” he had said, in a voice higher than one would expect to emanate from such a cavernous throat.
The man’s nose was so short it seemed obscene – plucked from a child and moulded to his plate-sized face with putty. It was hard to know where the face ended and the neck began, but despite his weak chin, the cheekbones were wide and high. Ada, attentive to the shape and colour of eyes, had been surprised how closely his peepers represented large ball bearings. She tottered on her toes to find his pupils amidst the steel and he mistook the momentary closeness for desire. He puffed his barrel chest out and pulled his thick waist in.
“I’m Ada,” announced the landlady, pointing to her heart. “This,” introducing the hall with a swoop of an arm, “is Viola Sororia.”
Gun hadn’t noticed the sign on the gate and had no idea what the woman was on about.
“You might be inclined to say ‘viola’ – like the instrument – ‘so-raw-ria’ but I prefer my mouth to speak of ‘vi-ola, sorrori-a’ because it sounds Scandinavian and I do like the Finns…”
Gun’s first impression of Ada was that he’d definitely fuck her, but she was batty. During that first meeting, and ever since, it was mainly Ada who did the talking.
The recollection of how Gun’s irises gleamed like metal made Ada all the more fearful as she closed in on the disturbance. It had niggled her that he looked like someone, and as she moved toward the noise, she knew it was Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster.
Less proud and unpleasant men than Gun have been known to flip into a violent rage when discovered in humiliating circumstances. Stooping in the paper field he had just harvested and sporting a sweat-stained dressing gown, Gun felt emasculated and silly. A string of snot and crocodile tears linked his chin to his slipper like a puppet string. If we could warn Ada now to turn back, we would, but we cannot, because the ball is rolling and the tale must play out.
When Ada surveyed the mess in the study, she felt no sympathy for the man who shook with post-coital revulsion, but was instead hit with grief for the wall, so abruptly and senselessly exposed. A sob rose from her bosom in an involuntary spasm. Being childless, Ada was prone to mothering objects, places and creatures. Often, by the fireside, she’d stroke her cup of tea like the nape of a toddler’s neck and bask in the sorrow that coursed around her body in the absence of offspring. Here, Ada could have gone to the first aid box in the bathroom to plaster up the wall’s nicks and chips; ran to the laundry cupboard for a sheet to protect its modesty.
“What’s this?” she hissed at her lodger, wading into the river of ivy. “What have you been doing?”
Gun still clutched the letter opener’s handle and inflated his body to be bulky and arresting once more.
Ada’s Mediterranean temperament made bile boil in the witch’s cauldron of her belly. She barred two rows of small teeth at her opponent; the ocelot’s spirit hadn’t yet left her and she fancied claws would turn her fingers into sharp hooks if need be.
Gun’s alabaster pallor betrayed the fear he was gripped by.
Will I kill?
He didn’t know the answer as he asked himself the question. He had always thought he might, if it came up, but he hadn’t anticipated the horror of looking into such a hellish abyss. He was close enough to the act to feel it sucking the life from him.
Do this, he told himself, and you will turn to stone.
And there were the practicalities of the deed. What would he do with the body and how would he manage to touch it when it was merely a suitcase that once contained a whole existence?
The majority of paper strips being face down, baring their safe, magnolia backs, had momentarily calmed the man, but here, a freak draught caused several to dance, flashing rousing emerald at their slayer.
“Go to bed,” ordered Ada. “Tomorrow is my birthday.”
