Eventually, we ended up back in the hallway again.
‘Shall we take a look outside? The aerial pictures showed a building out in the back garden, facing towards the sea,’ said one.
They walked through the porch. I followed them. There was a snapping, ripping sound. I stared outside and finally understood why, when they’d first appeared, they’d been bleeding all over their faces.
IT WAS A jungle out there.
There was no garden any more. Just a century’s worth of scrub and gorse wrapped around our house in dense coils. It pressed up and broke through every single window, and poured down the chimney. The house looked as if it was being eaten alive.
But that’s not to say it was all bad.
The rampaging growth had at least one thing going for it.
It blocked out the sea. I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t hear it. I couldn’t even smell it any more. And that was fine by me.
The men looked at the mass of spiky undergrowth in front of them, took a few stoic breaths, and plunged in.
‘Should have brought a machete,’ said the chubby man, as new scratches flowered on his cheeks and thorns tugged at his belly.
‘Next time,’ said Ponytail, wincing bravely as a stalk jabbed his eye.
I trailed behind them like a reluctant bridesmaid. We may as well have been walking through an overgrown rainforest. Here and there among the undergrowth were reminders of my old life – a few planks on the grass where the picnic table used to be, a toddler-bike skeleton, fragments of the red-brick path my parents had laid.
After what felt like hours of slow bramble-hacking, they came to a stop.
‘Here it is,’ said Ponytail, in front of a dilapidated, tumbledown shack.
Dad’s shed.
It didn’t look good. Although, to be fair, it had been on its last legs even when Dad had been alive. Still, time and sea air had left their mark. The felt roof had all but disappeared and when the door was opened, it paused for a minute before falling off completely, startling a small fox inside who ran out indignantly. The wooden floor had given way to grass which towered over our heads. Through its stalks I saw the remains of Dad’s easels.
I hung my head. I could almost smell paint, turps and smoke.
‘Well, don’t just stand there,’ I could imagine him saying. ‘Ask if they’ve got any pets! We make our own luck, right? Go on, girl – hustle!’
The two men walked away, back in the direction of the cottage.
I sniffed the air again, longingly, but the smell had gone.
There was something slower and thoughtful about the chubbier man’s movements. All of his earlier exuberance had gone.
‘Play again what you know about the Cliffstones tragedy,’ he murmured. ‘I learnt a bit about it at school, but my download’s slightly rusty.’
The older man’s face crumpled. ‘Oh, it was tent udder sad,’ he said, pushing back the brambles as he spoke. ‘There’d been a freak earthquake in a French village, which was tragic enough – loads of people there had died. But what no one had anticipated was where the shockwaves of the earthquake might go. It sent ripples along the ocean floor, straight towards Dorset, and Cliffstones bore most of it. The entire village – all three thousand residents – was wiped out completely.’
‘Well,’ I muttered. ‘Not completely.’
‘Unlike,’ said the other man sadly.
‘The Ripley house was the only building left standing, because it was so much higher above the village. The family itself wasn’t so lucky. They were out at the time, so they drowned too. That selfish girl Frankie – you wouldn’t like her – she was born in a storm—’
‘All the worst ones are.’
‘… made them all go out for lunch even though they had leftovers to eat and a good film to watch on the telly. Horrible child.’
‘I heard that. And her hair went frizzy in the rain, didn’t it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Makes you think.’
‘It certainly does.’
‘Hey, boss?’
‘Yes?’
‘Are we having this conversation in real life or in Frankie’s guilty conscience?’
‘Does it matter? It’s all true.’
And that was the second time I heard my death story.
Hadn’t got any better with age.
Ponytail stopped a moment and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. ‘The village was never rebuilt.
No one wanted this cottage. Some well-meaning
relative boarded up the house. Then, once nature took its course …’ he jerked his head at the brambles,
‘people forgot anyone had ever lived here at all.’
‘Until now.’
‘Toadly,’ said Ponytail. ‘The find of the century. Can’t wait to get going on it.’
What did that mean? And why had they said they’d bring a machete to cut back the brambles next time?
And why did Ponytail look so smug? Look at him, hacking back at the growth with a triumphant lion-tamer flourish, strutting about like our garden belonged to him. Gazing up at the cottage – our cottage – with that calculating expression, like a judge on a talent show deciding whether or not to press a golden buzzer.
And why – seeing as I was in the mood for asking myself difficult questions – why was he helping the other man drill a sign on to our front door?
The sign which said:
And why did they both look so very pleased with themselves?
A FEW DAYS after this board went up, the first of many visitors started to arrive at my house. And when I say visitors, I mean total strangers who were uninvited. So, not visitors at all, really. More like unwelcome invaders. Like those bad cannibal ladybirds no one likes, or earwigs.
Anyway, they were there, they had keys to our house, they let themselves in whenever they wanted, and it didn’t matter what I called them because none of them could hear me.
They wore purple T-shirts that said Historic Homes: Cleaning Crew. They drank a lot of tea. They ate a lot of weird-looking greyish biscuits. They listened to a lot of pop songs, none of which I knew.
Anyway, at first, what
