Mainly, she used it as an extra space for her sewing and crafting materials, back in the days when she had the dexterity and the energy to engage in such things. Before the strokes. She’d climb up here, bundles of fabric clutched to her chest, trailing cotton behind her.
Today is the first time I’ve ventured up these steps in years. I have never felt the need – the house was big enough without adding an extra layer to feel lonely in.
Michael follows behind me, and we are both carefully placing our feet, both silent as we cling to the wooden handrail and try not to displace any of the random items stacked at the sides of each step.
‘Why do I feel like we’re doing something super naughty?’ he whispers. ‘And why am I whispering?’
‘I don’t know,’ I whisper back as I narrowly avoid slipping on a pile of back copies of Homes & Gardens that are at least twenty years old, ‘but I am too!’
‘It’s a bit creepy, isn’t it?’ he says, stopping behind me at the top of the stairs, so close I can hear his breathing. ‘Like there might be some kind of Miss Havisham thing going on up here? Or we might find the desiccated corpse of Juan, the handsome Guatemalan gardener who went missing in the summer of seventy-nine…’
I pause, hand on the doorknob, and look back at him.
‘What?’ he splutters, looking outraged.
‘You – you’re wasted on the law, Michael. You should give it up and become a writer.’
‘That’s the plan,’ he replies, ‘eventually. I just need to get a year behind me, so I can become the new gay John Grisham, and be able to put “former lawyer” at the start of each book so people take me seriously…Anyway, I rarely say this, but enough of me – are you going to open that door or what? I love you dearly, Jess, but I don’t want my face to be this close to your arse ever again.’
I laugh, and push open the door. It’s dark inside the attic, and although I’d never admit it, I am also feeling a tiny bit spooked, and also a tiny bit inebriated.
My hand flails around inside the space behind the door, clutching for the pull string which soon floods the room with the tinny light of a single dangling bulb, hanging shadeless from the roof.
I climb up the final step, and emerge into the tallest part of the room, where you can just about stand upright without banging your head on one of the wooden roof beams. I can, at least – Michael is well over six foot though, so he hunches his shoulders and shuffles forward. He was a weirdly tall child, always slightly stooped in the way of the self-conscious adolescent, and the hunched shuffle looks familiar on him.
The air here is musty and dense with dust; every object is layered with it, draped with crumbling cobwebs. Every surface we touch displaces clumps of grey that float through the unnatural lighting.
My nostrils twitch as they try and defend themselves against the onslaught, every breath lining my throat with an oddly tangible sensation of being coated in grit. There’s an old run of carpet on the floorboards, which looks like an offcut from the one on the stairs, and each footstep I take sends up another small puff of grime.
I glance at Michael, see his face contorted in distaste. He doesn’t like getting dirty, and he’s wearing his funeral clothes. I can imagine him running through a mental checklist of ways he’s going to scrub himself clean later, as he scans the room searching for signs of asbestos or killer mould.
I look around, see the hazily familiar shapes of the filing cabinets my dad kept his records in. I run my finger over the dull metal, wondering why my mother kept them after he died. It seems unlikely that the tax accounts of a now-defunct firm will ever be needed again. Maybe it was too much trouble to shift them – maybe it was a reminder of him. Another thing I’ll never know.
Michael pulls one of the cabinets open, then sneezes repeatedly as a dust grenade explodes in his face, snorting with each rapid-fire ‘ah-choo!’
‘Bless you, times a million,’ I say, reaching out to poke one finger into the now-opened drawer. The paper piled inside is yellow and rotting, ragged at the edges, garnished with a long-dead spider curled up into a brittle ball. I snatch my hand away, and Michael quickly slams the cabinet shut, as though it contains a filthy secret he’d rather not face.
‘Well, this is quite a treat…’ he mutters under his breath. ‘I’m going to need a very long shower after this adventure. Both physical and mental. Possibly some kind of spiritual spa day.’
I nod. He’s right, and I know exactly what he means. It’s not just the dust seeping inside us, soaking through our clothes and our skin, it’s the smell. The smell of mildew and damp dark corners and past lives, now forgotten. The smell of deaths large and small, and abandoned things clustered together in communal sorrow.
I see my mother’s old sewing machine in one corner, down where the roof slopes, and am instantly struck by a memory so vivid it feels like yesterday: a sunny morning, the sewing machine set up on her table in her room at the back of the house. I was in the garden, playing in the imaginative and overly cerebral way of the only child, having conversations with worms and making friends with the woodlice that lived beneath the tree stump.
I must have been very young; maybe four or five. I remember looking up, at the big bay window into the house, and seeing my mother there, at her sewing machine. She’d stopped whatever it was she was doing, and was just sitting still, watching me. For a split second, I felt like the most loved and adored creature on the whole planet. I broke the spell when I waved, and she immediately went back to her work, as though she was embarrassed by the fact that I’d caught her out in an unguarded moment.
Now, the sewing machine sits in its own dark pool of dim light, the once-gleaming black and gold dull and tarnished. It’s surrounded by piles of material, scraps and lengths, different colours, different textures, half-finished clothes and curtains and projects. A feast for moths.
She stopped sewing long before she had her stroke. Truth be told, she stopped doing most things – it was as though she simply had no capacity for living left in her. As though all the traumas I’d brought to her existence, along with the early death of my father, emptied her out. The strokes were just a sequel to the fact that she’d already died in any way that mattered.
I feel the sting of tears, for myself, for her, for everything that could have been that never was and never will be. I squeeze them away – there will be time for them later. When I am alone in the bedroom of the house that is now mine, beginning a life I have no idea how to live.
Michael is delicately rummaging in a pile of photo albums, his curiosity outweighing his disgust at having to touch such determinedly grubby objects. He pulls one open, and I hear the creak of a spine fracturing as he pulls a ‘sorry’ face.
‘Jackpot!’ he exclaims, looking up at me with a grin. ‘Jess in the buff! Looking pretty damn hot in that swimsuit, babe!’
I laugh, and glance at the picture. It’s in one of those albums with the sticky-backed pages and cellophane. The kind members of Michael’s digital-first generation probably never use.
The pages are yellow, the plastic crinkled. It is indeed a photo of me, sitting in a blow-up paddling pool in the garden, wearing one of those old-fashioned swimming costumes that has a little frilly skirt around it.