17 Alma Road

The first section...

I

If he cannot recall where he spent the first four years of his life, he knows it might just as well have been 17 Alma Road. Indeed, in many respects that was where his and Maddie’s lives actually started. As the two of them gradually matured their aunt and uncle attempted to furnish them with the components from which they could compile an adequate backstory. Owen had come to regard these individual narratives as fairy tales, as if Augustus and Alice had not been their parents but were figures as imaginary as Hansel and Gretel. Although he now can piece together the last five decades of the house before which he stands, Owen is also conscious of the gaps in the pre-history which had been imparted to the two of them, a piecemeal compendium of fragments which he knows on occasion choose to contradict each other. Had he been tempted to press Florence to fill in all the spaces he believed existed, the opportunity to do go was removed that Waitrose Thursday with the sudden collapse which saw her inadvertently propel her trolley into the side of a parked ‘C’-class Mercedes. Thus it can only be shards of their shared history — his and Maddie’s, Florence and George’s, even Augustus and Alice’s — which come back to him almost as pinpricks of light.

Where the long chain of iron spikes is cemented into the top of the wall, the metal — corroded by the onslaught of rain across the years — has bled onto the stone. It is an unequal and unhappy marriage of both form and colour, discordant in both senses. Allowing his fingers to worry at rust which looks almost volcanic in its eruption from the base of the points, he is surprised how easy it is to lift a little of the crusted iron here and there, thus restoring the slabs beneath to late autumn’s afternoon light. And — as if that were not miracle enough — he is also struck by how pale the re-exposed stone is, and how the impersonating lava, focussed on its own incursion, has inadvertently shielded these small areas. Both invader and protector at the same time. How was that even possible?

Having been distracted, he now looks through the railing to the house beyond, his hand tracing a path down the block-work before instinctively finding its way to his trouser pocket, feeling for a key that used to be there. Wasn’t that how his life had been, encapsulated right there in limestone and iron: the fusion of both pain and pleasure, risk and reward? Or all their lives — though in Maddie’s case reward had proven hard to come by. However he might choose to categorise them, the blend of such experiences had been responsible for fashioning what he had become — even if he is, at this precise moment, unable to recognise in himself anything approaching the fabric of either iron or stone. Were he feeling fanciful, might he not consider himself an example of moderately successful fusion, the amalgam of opposing forces, evidence of a joint victory for metal and mineral? Or, if he felt in a blacker mood, the defeat of both.

And yet it is more than metaphor, this wall and the house beyond. The wall is a barrier, certainly; as much a barrier as the house had been. A construct designed to keep things in or out, separated from whatever might exist on the other side. Years later, standing here again, the wall still performs its function to perfection in spite of the compromised railings. There is a gate of course, the same gate he would have occasionally swung on as a child; but now it is evidently so rarely used that he suspects he would be unable to shift it with the same childhood ease. He glances along to the break in the wall, to the space which frames the gate, and wonders if it has been padlocked — and if not, whether he should try its latch one final time. No-one would stop him. After all, what would any passer-by see other than a late middle-aged man in decent enough shoes and a heavy coat; a man well enough dressed to pass as an estate agent, or perhaps someone with a legitimate interest in the house? Which without doubt he has.