A House Can Be a Home
by Jonathan Fraser
Yes, a house can be alive too.
It was a very old bungalow by the time we found it. The roof was an old burgundy colour and there were small pretty plants growing in the black gutters. It had stone walls encrusted white by wind strewn salt that glittered when the sun hit it at odd angles. And this made it flicker and vibrate. It danced a quick one-two step in the mornings, settled for a nap in the afternoon heat and made a very slow, slow waltz when the sun hung low over the water.
The front door led to the sitting room through the kitchen. One could access the two bedrooms and two bathrooms from a corridor that began from the rear of the sitting room. We found the ocean had already set its roots throughout the entire anatomy of the house. It did this by way of its smell and sound that it sent on strong winds and the many souvenirs it had left in different rooms. A red crab scuttling sideways, a bathtub full of empty spiral shells, small unidentifiable bones under the kitchen sink, dried seaweed, yellowed stalks of grass, an empty nest and grains of sand too.
The deep molasses brown of the windowless corridor’s wooden floor had shifted to a pale sun bleached yellow the colour of boiled sweet potatoes in the sitting room. Floor-boards creaked, moaned and complained as we moved from room to room. All the doors too, seemed to take issue with the manner in which they were used. Drawers refused to open or close and taps constantly turned. Some of the windows outright refused to move, regardless of how gently they were implored; an entire house that would much rather remain left well alone.
We thought, and to this day many years on I still do think, that the house was in love with the ocean. That may seem absurd but one need only look at how the house faced the water with its tarnished windows wide open in empty embrace. Listen in the mornings to how the house sighed in lament at low tide when the ocean recoiled from it. How it shuddered sometimes in its afternoon slumber because of this dream or that and how, at night when the ocean was at its fullest, it inhaled all that it could and held one tense, longing breath.
With time, the house came to tolerate us and our quickness; our need for movement and our cycles of routine. It let us fill it utterly with ourselves. We repainted the walls brilliant white before changing our minds to a marvelous yellow. The taps were replaced and the hinges to doors and cupboards oiled. The tiles in the bathroom were replaced twice and the extra bedroom became a study-cum-library. We added a veranda to the West facing wall of the sitting room to enjoy the ocean at sunset. The windows in the kitchen were left open for the nearly thirty years we lived in that house; open to the wasps, charcoal monkeys with faces like hairy children, sand and rain that would visit often and unannounced.
In all of this, it must be understood that the house kept its heart closed off to us. It is common knowledge, nowadays, that a house’s heart is in the lowest room it has and our house kept its heart behind a locked door in the kitchen that led to what we assumed to be the pantry. In the ring of house keys given to us when we bought the house, this particular key was not among the rest and it felt somehow improper to force our way in. We never found out what was behind that door and so made a game of guessing what lay there. A host of crabs. Money from a bank robbery gone awry. A pale old man subsisting off said crabs. A human skeleton. A very quiet bird’s nest. A smaller house. Nothing. Love letters that were never sent. A signed copy of the Old Man and the Sea. A tennis racket. A collection of Rhumba vinyls from the 70’s. A left shoe.
As time wore on, the house moved through cycles of indifference and malice. The periods of indifference lasting several years as the house pined after the water, forgetting itself in the hopes of being consumed by its lover. The house eventually turned its attentions inwards, this attention manifesting as annoyance and minor inconvenience. Stubbed toes on coffee tables, cupboards left open and stubborn locks.
This continued as the annoyance became an intense dislike which eventually condenced into a dense malaise. There were moments when one would wake in the night with the feeling that they were being watched and the dark sections of the room that evaded light felt all the more thick.
I was away visiting family over the weekend when one of these oppressive episodes manifested. Rahab was deeply disoriented and I was afraid with the fear directed to a family pet that has bitten you.
And yet we stayed on.
We lived with the house like this for many years and cannot say that it felt sorry to see one of us die and the other leave. The years came and went bringing with them the many events that weathered us but houses, like trees, live very slow lives and our house didn’t change very much at all. And now, when I look at the many photos we took with the house in frame, I recognise that distracted look it had as it faced toward the water.
(as recounted to me by Rahab)
Rahab cannot describe the outside of the house at all now. She does not know what the exterior walls look like anymore and can only approximate their texture from memory. She does not know the measure of the roof from the ground. Rahab cannot tell you the last time she left the house; that is all gone from memory. She had taken to keeping a log of her days spent inside but once she stopped, even for one day, Rahab lost track of when she had left off.
The first morning was particularly heavy and it pressed her evenly into the comfort of the bed. She woke a little after noon, which was not odd for Rahab on days like this. She could still feel sleep hanging on to her shoulders like some overgrown child as she made her way into the kitchen which, in memory at least, had melted into the sitting room and corridor and bathroom.
It was after a long shower that Rahab took notice of a door ajar to the right side of the corridor across from her bedroom. The door opened into the laundry room and through the doorway, she could see a pile of neatly folded clothes. Rahab started walking away and would have not given the laundry room another thought had she not remembered that the house did not actually have a laundry room.
Every other weekend, the laundry was done by hand and hung out to dry and yet there was an entire laundry room replete with a washer and dryer. The clothes folded in neat piles were her own and smelled of the same detergent she always used. She felt the different fabrics in between her fingers and inhaled the air around them thick with lavender scent. The clothes, the room and everything within it were just as real as she was and yet she had no memory of the room existing prior to the ten minutes preceding her discovery of it.
Rahab began to question her memory; perhaps there had always been a laundry room there all along and she had only just forgotten about it on account of the sluggish day she was having. She pushed the room from her mind and set about filling her head with activity. The day drew on faster and faster and eventually, Rahab found herself heading to bed having entirely forgotten about the sudden laundry room.
She was up at dawn the next day and made a beeline towards the laundry room which, unsurprisingly, was still there. It still had the soft scent of lavender, it still had a washer and a dryer. All four walls were accounted for. A window still framed the ocean.
As Rahab was turning away from the door into the corridor, she noticed another room resting comfortably in the corner of her eye. The door to this one was a lovely shade of eggshell white that she would have chosen herself and stood at the end of the corridor where her bedroom’s door previously had been.
A fear that she could not easily explain rooted her to the floor. Rahab was not entirely sure of what she was afraid of and at the same time, whatever fueled her fear also drove her curiosity. Rahab stood in place for what seemed a lifetime, her breathing keeping pace with the crashing waves outside, before she ran towards the door and through the threshold.
The room was the same shade of white as its door and devoid of furnishing. It had the same wooden floors as the rest of the house, a bulb hung from the ceiling which was the same height as the other rooms and two windows framed the ocean as it came and went. The windows were what gave Rahab pause. The floor map she held in her mind had the room oriented away from the ocean so that the view from them should have been impossible and yet there was the ocean defiantly going about its business.
Rahab spent the rest of the day in the new room, forgetting to eat or bathe. She put things into the room, opened and closed the door and ran in and out of it to see what would happen but the room remained a room. However much fun she was having in the room, Rahab refused to let herself fall asleep in it. Another day passed.
On the third day another door lined the right side of the corridor and Rahab had prepared herself adequately. She had a tupperware container filled with food, a notebook and a pencil. This door was deep brown and felt heavy even as she pushed it open to reveal a very long room with a study table and chair and shelves lining the walls. All the books she had ever owned or read were in this library and there were many times more that she had never even seen. She spent the third day on the floor of that room pulling out all sorts of books that she found infinitely arresting. The night found her at the study table with piles of books at her feet.
Every day since had seen the house manifest another room. There was a dining hall among those rooms with a long dinner table down the middle and the ocean framed in the windows. Another room was very very high but without a measuring tool, Rahab had to make due with guessing from her own height how far up the ceiling was. There was a kitchen with black tiles and gleaming stainless steel ovens, cookers and fully stocked fridges. A bathroom somewhere was carved entirely from stone and had an entire wall open to the beach.
There was a room with equally spaced out rectangular gaps along the entire skirting of the walls like an inverted turret. Another room’s walls were covered in white tiles and in the middle of the room was a little television standing on a wooden tower five feet tall. The screen was a luminous blue that only cathode rays could produce.
By her estimate, there are some three hundred rooms that Rahab remembers visiting and perhaps three hundred more she does not remember. Of the rooms that have windows, all of them, however impossible it may seem, face the ocean. Then again, the many impossibilities of a house manifesting rooms of vastly different qualities trumps the impossibility of all of these rooms somehow facing the exact same spot.
Rahab had not left the house in all this time and now that she came to think of it, she had not eaten, slept or so much as taken a bathroom break in… those were too many days to remember. This should have amazed her or scared out of her wits but the realisation came to her with the same mundane understanding that the sun was out today; oh, OK.
For this reason, Rahab was going to leave the house.
She made her way through the many rooms that put distance between her and the door. She ducked under the foliage of exotic plants in a warm room with glass walls. The burned wooden planks made such poignant moans and squeals as she carefully navigated the black room. More rooms revealed themselves to her as she made her way out while those she had previously visited remained as she had left them.
Rahab could feel a mounting sense of something build up in her gut and make its way into her throat. It was in part anxiety about re-entering the world but really more of leaving this marvellous house. She was afraid that if she left the house and returned, the many extra rooms would cease to exist and her madness would become apparent to her. Or perhaps the world had changed beyond her understanding of it and she would be lost forever.
She was finally back in the main corridor and the rest of the house was as she had left it. Her bed was still unmade, a fine coat of dust rested on everything and the ocean’s sound still filled the empty space between objects. Rahab set about cleaning and dusting the house. After the her bed was made and she had taken a very very long bath, Rahab made a meal for herself and slept deeply.
The next morning, Rahab found a staircase at the end of the corridor. They trailed beyond her field of vision and Rahab stood there for a very long time.
A house can be a home
The house has always been a house. The house is big the house is wide. The house has wooden floors that at some point or another have been covered and uncovered so that we have overlapping sections of dark and light wood. The house has white walls, the house has yellow walls. The house has open windows, the house has a red roof. The house has many rooms, the house has many doors.
The house has always been a house even when it was a house to many large brown moths with purple hues throwing themselves against the lights outside. Again and again in exhaustion to the point of death. The ants would make quick work of their fuzzy bodies and soft pastel dusted wings. Legs sectioned and wings as well, carried away to secret nests within the house. Many ants made many lines throughout the house and when there were people living here, these lines terminated at uncovered leftovers, bread, honey jars and plum jam.
When the house was vacated, the lines led to dead things. An unlucky bird that broke its neck against a window. A slug that wasn’t fast enough. A lizard, the plump ones with double racing stripes down the back, that got too hot. Many grasshoppers, spiders, geckos, mice over many years.
And there were birds living in the roof. Swallows that cut through the air with such ease made their nests from mud, grass and feathers, displaying the dexterity of their little beaks and little feet. There were plain looking sparrows that stuffed their messy nests into the corner where the roof met with the wall.
The years that pass see the growth of many generations of moss on the walls where the rainwater leaked away from the gutter turning sections of it a dirty green. In the gutters themselves were small green plants that found their way in the guts and droppings of birds as well as the messy leftovers of monkeys. With their small hands they managed to open windows, cupboards, fridges and unscrew jar lids.
In the night, an owl would visit. Warm night air remaining quiet, refusing to betray a hunter on the wing. A breaking of bones then a swift, deathly silence. And if mice could share dreams with each other, death might take the form of silent wings as large as the sky and something sharp in the back.
And the house has always been a house even when there was no one living in it. Even when there was nothing living in it. It danced a quick one-two step in the mornings, settled for a nap in the afternoon heat and made a very slow, slow waltz when the sun hung low over the water.