I didn’t stop thinking about the woman all the way home. I played the scenario over in my mind. I imagined the child or children who were waiting for the medicine, what their ages were and if they were boys or girls. I had wanted to follow her to see where she lived, to see why a woman who was shopping in an affluent area couldn’t afford a bottle of paracetamol. The walk that was supposed to alleviate my racing mind had achieved the opposite. I counted the lamp posts on the way home to calm my cluttered thoughts, tightening my grip on my shoulder bag until I reached the steps that lead up to the house that I was just coming round to the idea of calling home.
I had become accustomed to a solitary existence, so being greeted when I arrived home was a real novelty. Yet again I was surprised that one of my three house mates was just reaching the bottom of the stairs as I came through the front door.
‘Oh, hey,’ Mini said as I closed the door behind me and began to unwind the scarf from around my neck. She eyed me in that way I was becoming familiar with. Being assessed was not unusual to me and Mini always looked slightly alarmed by my presence, as though she wasn’t entirely sure what to do with me. I imagined she thought I was always on the edge and might do something crazy at any moment, my strange routines adding an almost nervousness to the house. Mini, as her name suggested, was the youngest house member at just twenty. At fifteen years her senior, I had yet to shake the notion that she saw me as a slightly crazy distant auntie or cousin rather than a house mate she could confide in.
I took my cap off and hung it on the coat stand by the front door. Ignoring the mirror, which in the past would have encouraged me to check my hair for post-hat frizz.
‘I was just going to get some lunch.’ Mini began walking into the kitchen.
‘Okay.’ I followed her because I constantly felt the need to compensate for my inability to be that house mate; the one who sat up until dawn, chatting and giggling, offering to paint nails, plait hair and listen to endless stories of near misses with ‘the one’.
I tried to ignore the chaos of the kitchen and sat down at the huge table that could seat at least eight. I was still getting used to eating with others again after spending so much time taking my meals alone.
I was still struggling with the size and openness of the house: five bedrooms, a huge kitchen, two reception rooms and three bathrooms between four of us.
One lonely room had cocooned me for the last year where sounds would arrive uninvited, an echo of an infant yelping or screaming, but always, I heard the cries. They say you never stop hearing them. I was forever alert; ready to run to the slightest whimper.
Even in a house this size, there was nowhere I could hide that would drown out the sounds that ran through my mind on a loop.
Mini’s uncle owned the property and let it out for a price that would choke a Yorkshire man, but made London renters nod with enthusiasm whilst daring to utter the word bargain. I looked around at the kitchen with its large surfaces and random scattered items: bleach, washing-up liquid and an array of utensils were out on the surface next to the sink, which was deep, white ceramic and stained with tea. The Aga was greasy and a pan left over from breakfast was still perched on top of the insulating lid; the fat congealed to a sticky, yellow mass. The huge wooden kitchen table had a general tacky feel to it that didn’t seem to lift no matter how many times it was wiped.
Up until now I had managed to not let the mess get to me, but I wasn’t sure how much longer I could leave it. The lack of order in here brought everything to the surface. Even now in the kitchen with Mini, I began to look around for something I could open and shut an even amount of times to satisfy the monster who I knew would not rest.
Perhaps if I offered to clean the kitchen? I imagined this as a way I could bring a little bit of me to the house; up until now I hadn’t felt confident enough to take the initiative and show the girls some level of basic domesticity. I had little else to offer in the way of sparkly wit or entertaining anecdotes about my day. I looked around and thought perhaps I could assert my role as the older and wiser house mate and draw up a cleaning rota. Perhaps I would be the one who would instil some basic home skills into these girls, something they would look back upon in later life, remember me and be thankful for.
Mini pulled open the fridge, and I caught a glimpse of the salad tray with its dying leaves stuck to the clear shelf and a mass of jars that had left rings that could be seen through the glass underneath. I averted my eyes; I didn’t need to see it to know it was there. In the last few years, cleaning had become a compulsion; something I needed to do and do well. Looking around, I felt something new growing inside me: an uncontrollable need to cleanse the house from top to bottom.
Mini opened a tub of prawns in Marie
