Suspension, I now realise, was the house’s predominant theme. It had been built in the early 1960s – not prettily but thoughtfully, with an upside-down layout – into the side of one of Norfolk’s rare steep slopes, overlooking an Ice Age mere which unverified local legend claimed to be bottomless. From the street the house was almost invisible: a single-storey slab of utility concrete with the nonsensical tiling choices of a mind in disarray. This invisibility proved a bonus on a main throughfare on the edge of a town synonymous with minor vandalism. Many other houses nearby regularly had their windows smashed on Friday nights. Around the corner ‘JONES MONGS’ had been scrawled on one building then scrubbed almost off, then scrawled again, carefully following the ghost lines of the original inscription. The lead flashing was stolen off the front of my house by thugs on speed, but its lone small window remained intact and ‘JONES MONGS’ was never scrawled on its wall, and for this I still often thank the gods of fortune. On the opposite side the building opened up in a manner many a passer-by would not have suspected: light streamed in from the water and sky through big faulty windows framed with chunky white PVC, and the house hugged the hill like three fat grey steps. On the middle step, where a person felt most suspended and at one with the surrounding foliage, disorientated wood pigeons periodically slammed into the windows, knocking themselves insensible with semi-metallic thuds that reverberated around the building. In the mere, beyond a jetty that rotted off into the water a little more each year, monster catfish – fish of a size mundane British market-town life does not teach us to expect – gorged on the abandoned food of the locality’s many fast-food outlets. When I sold the house, insurers had qualms about the building’s proximity to the water: qualms that were patently absurd, since the foundations remained seventy yards from the shoreline and dozens of feet above it even after the heaviest rainfall. It would have taken outright apocalypse for the mere to flood the building, and even then there was a feeling that you’d withstand Armageddon were you on the middle floor of the house, where the rooms bored back furthest into the sandy rock. Being in that portion of the house was like hiding in a modest, symmetrical cave – the lair of some very minor James Bond villain perhaps, whose main crime was that he tended to be a bit last minute getting his tax forms in.
There was an astonishing feeling of security in that cave, a quiet walled-off-from-the-world sensation almost unheard of in a building on the edge of a busy East Anglian town. This was in welcome contrast to the lack of security associated on a daily basis with my ownership of the place. The house had been a stretch for me to buy as half of a couple, a bigger stretch for us to renovate, then had continued to be a stretch for me to maintain, alone, at a time when my job security was crumbling. I remember no interim phase between the excitement of being permitted to take out a mortgage on such a captivating and unusual home and the dread of the inevitable day when I would be forced to abandon it. I would walk out of the cave’s rear and into the sheltered sky, and feel rapturously suspended, right up in the trees that surrounded the hillside, but simultaneously less pleasantly suspended, floating uncertainly, never able to relax and feel the house was mine or that I could make it fully what it should be. For all the fun I squeezed out of the place, which in the last few years of living there was plenty, much of my residence there had the anxious character of a drawn-out goodbye.
One summer morning during the beginning of the final decisive part of this goodbye I drew back forty-year-old curtains which matched the colour of the sky and saw three men flying through the air thirty yards in front of me at eye level. I had lived in the sky long enough to know that doing so altered a few fundamental laws of gravity, but I was still suprised to see these men bobbing about. Their flight did not appear especially purposeful. It was more like the lazy backstroke you might choose to perform in a roomy swimming pool on a day containing a dearth of pressing appointments. Because it was early in the morning and my eyes had only 70 per cent opened and the sun was shining directly into them, I did not at first notice the ropes attached to the men’s waists, nor the chainsaws they held, none of which were yet operational, but I did hear the classical music coming from a neighbour’s kitchen window, and all this added to the sensation that I was watching a rare form of aerial ballet. I have had a fear of heights most of my life, but it’s a fear with various clauses and contradictory small print written into it. I view planes as an affront to nature and if you plonk me anywhere beyond halfway up the Eiffel Tower I’ll be your worst jelly-legged nightmare, but I can dangle my feet off the edge of the tallest cliffs in the UK and not experience a fragment of nerves, and a large part of my childhood involved getting as far as was feasible up any tree I came across. Observing the flying
