17 Alma Road
The sixteenth section...
XVI
As he walks back down the stairs, Owen wonders if, in the intervening years since his aunt’s death, the house has ever felt like his, something he owned — and concludes it hasn’t. No matter what the lawyers tell him or the legal papers say, surely it will always belong to Florence and George. He can’t help but wonder what she might have said had he been able to confront her right here and now with that very same question about ownership, ask her to apply it to the place on this precise day. Unsurprisingly he can envisage two answers: the first is that the house always seemed to own itself, that they were merely custodians, and that it will always be so. And the second? It is the second answer — most likely entangled with duty and legacy — which concerns him. It is not fear of ownership nor lack of willpower or uncertainty which assails him, nor is it the complete opposite; rather, it is something he is unable to name. Perhaps it is a word from a lexicon with which — in one way or another — he at least seems to have so much trouble.
This notion of parallel languages comes to him much in the same way as the notion of parallel worlds and the liminal spaces between them which are inhabited by — who knows what? And even if theories of a ‘multiverse’ are no more than superstitious claptrap, he is forced to engage with it because of Maddie — not simply as a younger sister who seemed to live her life in a world at odds with his own, a world where their realms collided only so often (and always in Alma Road), but also because of her presence here, today, whispering in his ear, as if she has once again broken through from wherever she may be now, reawakened in the nebulous form she has chosen to take.
And then the idea strikes him that perhaps it is he and not Maddie who is the interloper; that when he pushed open the rusted gate, crossed the threshold, he was the one who was breaking through boundaries, leaving behind the world in which he was most comfortable and transgressing into another. Into hers. Or into the house’s. Or even both.
And inevitably into another time too.
Pausing at the bottom of the stairs, he realises he needs to urinate and so slips into the downstairs loo. “There was another door after all” he says to himself, as if it were a private joke. The black-and-white floor tiles and white walls are familiar of course, and he has probably been in many similar bathrooms over the years. Bathrooms are not special; there is no reason to feel attachment here. He rinses his hands and then, in the absence of a towel, shakes them vigorously, all the while staring into the face that greets him in the mirror. It is then he sees it, hanging on the wall behind the door, a solitary little pen-and-ink sketch the removal men must have missed.
This one he remembers.
They had gone to the coast at one point during the summer immediately following his A-levels and before he headed off to university. After a while camped on the beach, he and George had gone off in search of ice creams leaving Florence and Maddie behind. When they returned, his aunt was looking out to sea, his sister sketching the coast in the opposite direction. Although unchanged, the distance between them seemed immeasurably large.
“And you’re wondering if you missed something?” Maddie’s voice emanates from somewhere close enough to make him blush.
“Is nothing sacred?”
Owen lifts the picture from the simple pin upon which it is hung and carries it with him from the lavatory and back into the hallway. Neither trophy nor souvenir, he is unable to decide what it might represent — if anything at all.
“Well you didn’t.” Chastened or not, his sister is back. “Miss anything I mean. We had been talking about my A-levels and how important they were, and what I might do at university, and then what I might do after that. It was no more secretive than that.”
“I didn’t say it was secretive,” he protests.
“Oh, sorry; I thought that’s where we’d got to, revealing secrets.” Maddie allows a small but pointed gap. “It didn’t strike me at the time how much of our lives aunt had planned out for us.”
“Why do you say that?”
“That afternoon — while you were off getting the mint-choc-chip or whatever it was — it was evident that she had been thinking about it a great deal. Didn’t you ever get that sense?”
Owen moves the sketch to his left hand and heads for the back door, his right hand playing with the keys in his pocket once again. Apart from general academia-related conversations with both she and George, he is unable to recollect any such plan relating to himself.
“Perhaps I didn’t matter so much,” he suggests, though without any bitterness, “because unlike you I was never going to do anything extraordinary. And by the way, it wasn’t mint-choc-chip. None of us liked the stuff.”
Maddie laughs.
“The things you remember.”
“And the things I forget,” he offers, pulling the back door open and moving into the garden once again.