‘Better just check there isn’t any gas leakage,’ said the man with the white ponytail, fishing a gadget out of his pocket.
Well, that answered that. And I went back to feeling rubbish.
Questions dropped inside me like felled trees. Who were these men? Why did I keep seeing unsettling details in the beam from their head torches, like the waist-high drifts of powder piled up against the walls of the hallway? How had they managed to get their hands on our house keys? And why did they smell of mushrooms?
After a few minutes, Ponytail tucked his gadget into his shirt pocket. ‘We’re just a pair of eyes today, okay? Don’t touch anything, don’t open anything.’
‘No touching, no opening,’ said his companion agreeably.
‘And look out for rats.’
‘Rats?’
‘The more established their lairs are, the more territorial they can get, and they’ve had the run of this place for a while.’
‘Toadly. How long again?’
‘Well, it’s been empty ever since the Cliffstones tsunami in 2019 …’
‘And it’s 2121 now …’
‘So a hundred and two years.’
What? A spasm of shock ripped through my body. I tried to steady myself on the top step, slipped on the rotting carpet, and went plummeting down the stairs,
one
step
at
a
time.
TWO YEARS WOULD have been okay. I could have dealt with that. It was just the other hundred I was struggling with. I lay at the men’s feet, gasping and trembling like a gill-hooked fish thrown on deck.
The words boomed and banged in my head. Now everything made sense. The spiderwebs. That shroud of dust I’d woken up in. The bramble taking over the bedroom. That hadn’t happened overnight but year by year. Decade by decade.
The only other thing, in my life to date, that had ever lasted for one hundred years – or felt like it had – was double maths on Thursday afternoons. And this was even longer than that.
‘Start in the kitchen?’ said the chubby man.
They moved cautiously, with wonder, as if they’d landed on the moon, their boots leaving track marks on a thick carpet of dust. I staggered in behind them, unsteady and disorientated on weakened corpse muscles, and peered round. Then instantly wished I hadn’t.
The last time I’d seen it, before All The Death, the kitchen had looked … well, like our kitchen. Like anyone’s kitchen. Like yours. Normal. Cheerful.
Birdie’s drawings on the fridge. Slightly wilting but valiant houseplants, overdue library books, half-empty jars of strawberry jam on the kitchen counter. You know. The bright sweet tangle of normality you don’t realise you love until it’s gone.
And now? The kitchen was as brown and mouldy as an unwanted apple left to rot on a branch; collapsed, sunk in on itself, speckled by time. Birdie’s drawings had crumbled away from the fridge magnets and fallen to the floor in a heap. There was a disturbing stain on the lino. It must have been caused by all the food in the fridge – those turkey leftovers that could have saved our lives – decomposing, leaking out, and drying to a crust.
And to top it all off, the house had vomited on to the kitchen table.
I took a closer look.
Well, it wasn’t vomit, technically. But at some point over the last century, the kitchen ceiling had ripped open and smothered our kitchen table with dank wood, plaster and what looked like—
‘Pigeon droppings,’ said the shorter man.
I looked at it in horror.
The men, on the other hand, seemed delighted. Even in the gloom of the kitchen their eyes shone with childlike joy.
‘Tent udder,’ said the tall man happily. ‘Ping fleck.’
The shorter man nodded eagerly. ‘Echo that. Verified purchase amazing.’
They were certainly using some interesting words for it. They just happened to be totally the wrong ones.
‘What’s in there?’ said ponytail man, shining his torch through the damp rotting doorway that led to Mum’s study.
Off they went.
It looked pretty bad in there too. Black mould covered the walls, carpet and desk in frenzied whorls. It was worst on the corkboard next to Mum’s desk. In her lifetime, it had been covered with cheery photos of us.
Well, they weren’t cheery any more, not unless you thought people looking like they were being eaten up from the inside by a bubonic plague was cheery.
While most of our old snaps were lost to the creeping mildew, there were some that hadn’t succumbed completely. Those were almost worse to look at. Us larking about on the beach as fungus lapped at our feet; Birdie at bath time, grinning at the camera, skin spotted with the first beginnings of rot.
‘It would have been better if the ceiling had fallen in here too,’ I muttered.
But the two weirdos in my house didn’t seem to think so. Instead they went into paroxysms of delight at the sight of Mum’s old computer, the crumbling pile of Post-it notes by her keyboard, the framed photos on her desk. As their beams swept over the mildewed motivational posters on the walls and stumps of dead plants on the windowsill, they gushed to each other about how brilliant it all was.
‘This home office is so twenty-first century, so evocative,’ said Ponytail.
The other man nodded vigorously. ‘That mountain of old coffee cups,’ he said excitedly. ‘Great bit of local colour, wonderful insight into the way people worked and the dietary habits of the time.’
I stared at them both. Seriously? They were both getting excited by Mum’s old coffee mugs? You’d think they’d found the Holy Grail or something. Did they not get out much?
We roamed the bottom half of the house for hours, gasping in delight or horror, depending on whether we were alive or dead.
I couldn’t understand it. While all I saw was devastation, they delighted in it. They got excited about the weirdest things. The sofa. Our toilet brushes. Dried-up soap in the bathroom. One of Birdie’s school shoes lying on its side under the hallway table, its leather now brittle and cracking with age. They called them ‘artefacts’, ‘snapshots’ and ‘poignant pieces
