Knock Loud

From the street to the door is a short walk. Through the gate and up the broad steep driveway, he knows by heart the words on the piece of paper, written in black felt tip pen, taped to the door.

“Knock loud, I’m home.”

The door is painted a bright glossy yellow. It stands out against the white painted frame and the red bricks of this semi-detached, rambling old house that backs onto fields. Her back garden is littered with junk. An old treadle sewing machine takes pride of place just outside the back door, rusting slowly from endless drenchings in the rain.

The front garden is as steep as the driveway, and is paved in pink and cream paving slabs; squares of coloured cement, with spaces for rose bushes to grow. He knows this house from childhood. He remembers it from when she was a child, and he was a constant visitor. He remembers the smell of her drunken father. He recalls the swathes of clothing draped over available surfaces, few of them clean, fewer still ironed. He feels like he has been coming here for years, in his memory.

He stands on the doorstep, looking at the sign that he has seen too many times now to count. He raises his hand, fingers tucked against his palm, thumb to the outside. He is ready to knock, to make a strong firm sound of bone against wood, but pauses first. He listens for sounds. He angles his head, craning his neck slightly. He strains to hear a noise that will confirm the part after the comma.

For days now he has been knocking as loud as he can, and there has been no response. He has peered through windows, trying to see past the net curtains. He has rattled the door handles, testing them to see whether they will do their job and open the door.

He remembers how the back door was always open. They would be in and out, running up and down the garden, picking their way through the junk that her father never got rid of, the man who finally died a month ago. At the bottom of the garden, beyond the fence, was a track that led onto the fields that led to the canal and the disused railway line. Across the track was the higher fence of the grammar school where her sister used to go, taking A levels, wanting to escape, be something more than this place was used to. He can smell cut grass now, the memory of it rich in his mind. The way the school field would smell in the summer, the first week of the holidays, when the gardening staff would bring out the large mowers and cut back the sports pitch and the rough grass around it.

They would cross the track and clamber over the school fence, one giving the other a peg up, the one on the fence reaching down, legs wrapped through the railings to hold their position, pulling the second one up. They would run along the lines of loose cut grass, rolling it up, trying to make a bale. They would grab great handfuls of the stuff and pretend to be bombers, flying over enemy ground, dropping their grass incendiaries onto the unsuspecting victims below.

All this flashes through his mind in the moment he stands, fist raised, ready to knock.

The sound of his knuckles rapping against the wood surprises him. Lost in his memories of childhood, he hadn’t realised that his brain had started the process without telling anyone but his arm and his hand. His knuckles hit the hard surface of the door, which somehow feels spongy and not its usual resistant self.

He looks at his fist, at his knuckles, then up at the door. The sheet of paper with the words of reassurance and instruction written on it is drifting away from him.

The door moves open slightly. Enough for him to put his hand inside and for his fingers to feel their way across the inner box of the Yale lock. He pushes against the small round button, sliding it upwards, and the mechanism releases, the chamfered bolt springing out quickly enough to catch his wrist. It tries to embed itself into the thin skin just below his palm. The skin that on her wrist is soft and perfumed.

He catches the door edge with his fingers as he pulls his hand back instinctively, and it almost closes, locking him out again. Almost, but not quite. His reactions are quick, and he slides his fingers into the narrowing gap between door edge and door frame.

“Hello?” he calls out, as he pushes the door open. He hesitates to step inside without knowing that she is there, that she has invited him in. There is no response to his call, though. He tries again, and the silence of the house continues in place of his noise.

“Andrea? Are you home?”

Absently, he pulls the sheet of paper from the door, taking a few flakes of yellow paint with him. He folds it a couple of times, not looking at its surface, then scrunches it into a ball.

“Andrea? It’s me. Peter. The door was open, so I came in.”

Still there is no reply. Peter pushes open the door into the front living room. It looks exactly the same as it did when they used to wriggle in here as eight year olds and sit between the sofa and the window, their backs pressed into the leather of the three-seater. The cracked leather suite is the same, with its strange knitted seat covers. There are newspapers piled up on the seats of the armchairs and ladder back wooden chairs, on the piano stool. The piano looks dusty and neglected.

He stares at it from the doorway, remembering the arch of her wrist, holding her palms up away from the keys. Her fingers, long and graceful even then, seemed to stroke their way across the keyboard, teasing sounds out of the old upright instrument. Andrea Ingram with her shiny brown hair pulled back into an elastic band, practising every day at the piano, working her way through the grades.

He wonders whether the piano is in tune, but doesn’t dare to cross the threshold of the room. He doesn’t want to walk over to it and lift the lid. It isn’t his to touch, to bring back to life.

He has been holding the living room door open with his left hand, but he lets it fall closed again now, and continues down the hallway.

The house is so quiet that he feels as though he ought to tiptoe, or at least tread lightly along the floor boards. Ahead of him is the staircase, behind it the door into the kitchen, and the back door out into the garden. Just before the staircase is another door that goes into the back living room. He has never been in that room. It was where the family ate their meals, and he never stayed for tea. He was never invited, and he never had permission from his mother.

The only refreshment he ever took in this house was the weak orange squash Andrea would make for them both in the kitchen, served in huge pint glasses that her dad had brought home from the pub. The ones with handles and the strange cuboid design pressed into the body of the glass, that made him think of his grandmother’s front door inside the porch. They would gulp the squash down before racing back out into the garden and over the fields, sticky orange moustaches rising upwards from the corners of their mouths.

The door is held open now by a small piece of wood pushed home under the door’s bottom edge. He could go in, peer round the door, see what the room looks like. He chooses not to. He stands, instead, at the foot of the stairs and calls up, “Andrea? Are you there, Andrea? The front door was open.”

There’s no response, still, and the house continues to swallow up his presence with its silence. He walks further down the hallway, past the door to the understairs cupboard, into which they would shove each other during games of Hostage!, inspired by Patty Hearst.

He turns the corner and goes down the step into the kitchen. That’s when he sees her, sitting at the kitchen table, with the sun shining in through the kitchen window behind her. She is very still, and her face is in shadow, because of the brightness of the sunlight beyond her.

“Andrea? Are you okay?”

She makes no response. He doesn’t move from where he has come to a standstill, halted by the sight of her.

“I called through to you. Didn’t you hear me? The door opened as I knocked on it. I’ve been calling round for days now, but I’ve never caught you in.”

He thinks he hears her sigh. He can’t persuade his body to move any further into the room. His nerves and muscles know that something is wrong here.

He looks past her silent form, through the window, and his eyes take in the garden. It stretches away from the house. He’s not in the right place to be able to see whether the treadle sewing machine is still just outside the door, underneath the window. He can see other things dotted in long grass and tall weeds, running the length of the garden to the fence.

“I wanted to come and see how you are. How you’re getting on,” he says to the garden; not to her. She is too still for him to want to acknowledge. “My parents said that you were back up to sort things out. I wondered if you needed a hand.”

He tails off. He looks at her again. His eyes are adjusting to the relative darkness she’s sitting in. He can see that her eyes are glassy and staring straight ahead. Her hands and forearms are resting on the table, positioned as though she is about to start playing a phantom piano. There is a drinking glass by her right hand, a tumbler.

He remembers how they would sit giggling behind the sofa, pressed into the narrow gap, their feet against the wall beneath the window, their backs flush with the back of the sofa. Nobody was there to tell them off for having their shoes on and leaving footprints on the wallpaper. They would giggle at nothing other than the naughtiness they felt, and Andrea would stuff her cardigan sleeve into her mouth and convulse with silent laughter.

He stands now in the kitchen, looking at her, and wonders whether she convulsed slightly when the tablets started to shut her body down. He wonders why she is still so straight and upright, why she hasn’t slumped, why her head hasn’t crashed down onto the table. She looks prepared. She looks as though she is conducting a séance. She looks like an exhibit in a museum, or a study for a still life.

He knows, though. He knows she is only still. There is no life left here.

He walks slowly, backwards, out of the kitchen and along the hall to the foot of the stairs. Here, he turns and faces the front door. He walks the few steps necessary to reach it, and his hand goes up to the knob that will release the chamfered bolt and let him out of this house.

He opens the door and stands on the doorstep. He feels, rather than hears, the yellow door close behind him. He feels the house seal itself off from the world again.

He walks down the driveway and back out onto the pavement.

He walks away, and he doesn’t look back.

© J R Hargreaves October 2006