On Tuesday morning, he carried the broken kitchen furniture back inside the house and dried the wreckage with a tea towel. The very act of reclamation felt as necessary as rescuing a drowning cat from a canal.
Mail from Macmillan Nurses and a council mobility service arrived on Wednesday morning addressed to Mrs Florrie White. He put the letters in a neat stack beside the small toaster on the kitchen counter; he’d repaired that unit as much as possible, and then placed it leaning against the wall, set at a tilt, which didn’t help the house much, but he couldn’t bear another night of the broken wood being outside in the cold. The new steel kitchen units went outside and into the yard. Of course it would not be a permanent arrangement, but he couldn’t settle his nerves until the swap had been made.
He spent Tuesday to Thursday on the sofa, listless and melancholy, drifting through afternoon television shows for the modicum of comfort that they provided. He also took long naps with the gas fire on; its glow and little clicking sounds reassured him more than anything he could remember. But he would often awake from these naps, because the little figure from his dreams would mutter to itself at the top of the stairs. When he awoke, Frank could never remember what it said, and there was no one up there when he looked.
Frank also spent a lot of his time staring at the pattern on the kitchen table and thinking of the rooms he’d occupied as a student: cohabits through his twenties with two girlfriends long gone; house-shares with strangers with whom he had no contact now. In the increasingly indistinct crowds of his memories, there had been an alcoholic who only consumed extra strong cider and Cup-a-Soup, and an obese girl who had eaten like a child at a tenth birthday party and spent hours locked in the bathroom. He could no longer remember their names, or the faces of the girlfriends. He tried for a while until he moved to the living room and fell asleep in front of Countdown.
On Thursday evening, he refused to take a call from Marcus. There had been four since the previous weekend too. All unanswered. For some reason Marcus and his calls were irritating Frank to such a degree that he put his iPhone in the cupboard under the stairs, deep inside a box of wooden clothes pegs. He hadn’t had enough time to think through the changes that he’d once planned to make to the house, and he could not abide being rushed.
His sleep went undisturbed until the weekend and he found himself watching ITV from seven to nine before going up to bed. Happy Shop kept him fed with its inexhaustible variety of memory and flavour. And when Marcus arrived on Saturday morning, Frank never answered the door. Instead, he lay on the floor of the living room with the curtains closed.
At the end of his second week off work, he called the office from the public phone outside Happy Shop to tell them that he wasn’t coming back.
On the Monday of his fourth week in the house, Frank finally went out for tools. Not to renovate the property, but to try and repair the kitchen. That task could not be put off any longer.
The act of leaving the house was excruciating.
Twice the previous week, when he’d been cooking in the wrecked kitchen, he’d looked up because he was convinced that he was being watched from the doorway, as if caught doing something wrong, or eating something he had been told not to. The imagined presence had been seething with a surly disappointment and dark with hostility. That room had become the focus of an intensification of the restlessness growing since the Saturday when he and Marcus had assaulted the cabinets. The kitchen was the heart of the house and he had broken it.
There was no one physically inside the house with him, and there could not possibly have been. But the repeated sounds of small feet padding about the lino, while he napped in the lounge during the afternoons, suggested, to a region of his imagination that he little used, that a bereft presence was repeatedly examining the kitchen. The first time he’d heard the shuffle of feet, he’d actually worried that the former owner of the house had escaped from her retirement community, or worse, and let herself back inside what she believed was still her own home.
Frank recovered quickly from the sudden frights, and within the confines of the comfortable womb of the terraced house he eventually found the supervising presence acceptable, even deserved. Nor could he think of a single reason to doubt his instincts that amends had to be made. Within the house such things were possible.
But navigating his way through the world outside the house, which no longer felt so familiar, defeated him. When he went out for tools, his attempts to move on the Pershore Road wasted him before he’d reached the bus stop in front of the bowling alley.