The Back Door - Anonymous

The back door was always open. Sometimes, the front door was as well, but she went around the back without trying it first as it was the way she’d always entered the house and it would feel odd to change the habit of a lifetime. The wind was whipping around. A persistent south-easterly silencing the crows’ cacophonous cawing as they circled the conifers. They drifted gracefully despite their size on the thermals, suddenly bombing into nothingness before righting themselves, writing the sky their inky black. Stark against the flint grey she was mesmerised by their drifting, falling, soaring for a good few seconds before opening the door with her shoulder.

Loosed from its hold, it banged furiously against the cabinets and jammed in the hole carved there through repeated action. The kitchen was cold. She frowned ruefully at the mottled brass handle, shivering slightly as the moist air stealthily fingered her face. She angrily yanked it free, forcing it closed. A calendar, briefly airborne in the breeze that had billowed in through the back door, smacked on the cracked tiles where it lay, defeated. An incongruous dated August of pink buckets and orange spades on a silken beach under an electric blue sky grinned up at her. She kicked it viciously under the table. She took a deep breath of musty air. Stood rooted to the spot.

Her reverie was harshly interrupted by ‘You are my Sunshine’ blasting into the emptiness nearly giving her a heart attack. She’d set it as her ring-tone years ago and never changed it and now the tinny technological imitation of the song echoed, bizarrely, filling the silence and bouncing off the walls. Fumbling in the pocket of her down-filled puffa-jacket, only now noticing how cold and rough and raw her hands were, she answered. All flustered.

‘So, you’re back?’

A sister’s voice snapped the question, the accusatory tone unmistakable as it travelled the distance between them. All business.

‘Yeh. The back door was open. How’d you know I was here?’

‘I didn’t. But I knew you’d tell me.’

She sat heavily on a kitchen chair that scrapped jarringly on the tiles – she noted in an abstract sort of way that it was slightly sticky, nearly wet. The house must be damp.

‘Listen. I’m only here to have a look. I won’t stay.’ A deep sigh that somehow came out like a muffled moan, nearly a choke, surprised her. She noticed her back teeth hurt when she ground them together and she consciously tried to relax her jaw. It creaked when she moved it back and forth, back and forth.

‘I don’t care. Do what you want. We should get that door fixed. More money.’

She could picture the sister raising big, china-blue eyes to heaven and imagined her cocooned in her warm rosy kitchen enveloped by smells of baking – she was a right baker – and calendars showing the correct dates and pictures of happy, smiling children and curtains that matched the yellow table-cloth and the digital-radio crooning softly in the corner over the log burner. She was probably wearing a frilly pinny.

‘I’ll text when I’m finished. Maybe you’d get someone to fix that door.’

She punched the call off and stood on slightly shaky legs. The sitting-room was as bleak as the kitchen, but revealed slightly more. Old ash lay heaped in the cold hearth and the scuttle was half-full. A Cadbury’s Diary Milk wrapper saluted from between the coals its distinctive purple a signal that there had been royal enjoyment here. Once. Miniscule dust particles hung in the air and sleepily rose in the weak white shaft of afternoon sunshine penetrating the gloom. An empty tumbler perched precariously on the arm of the settee which had been pulled up too close to the fire and television. She moved it absently, placing it precisely on the water-mark it had created on the mahogany side-table. The remote controls lay right at the back of the settee, right in the corner, one on top of the other. He would have been looking for them. He was always looking for them. You’d ring and the first thing he’d do was fumble to turn the telly down because he could have it on as loud as he wanted with no one else to please. His teeth might be there too as he often took them out if he was watching ‘Fair City’ or something and he’d whip them back in if anyone called, cunning as a fox. The layout of the room suddenly annoyed her. There was plenty of heat.  The oil was delivered like clockwork – they had seen to that. Why did he insist on hatching before the fire, huddling over it, staring into it, thinking of days gone by and refuse to live his life in a comfortable position sitting a normal distance away from the fire and the telly, basking in the heat which could’ve been blasting from the radiators? The choky sigh threatened to bubble out. She noticed her jaw was sore. She moved the sofa back to where it should be. It didn’t look right, in fairness. She moved it back. Back and forth, back and forth.

Outside the crows circled silently, still silhouetted against the sky.

She moved through the room, touching nothing and noticed with distaste an old tissue scrunched up and discarded on the carpet by the fire. Something greenish on its corner made her shudder and recoil. Her disgust made her guilty. On the mantelpiece, the old clock that had stopped telling the time a long time ago was almost buried by random pictures - some left leaning drunkenly against their upright, framed cousins. At once, she wryly half-smiled as she realised that her sisters had correctly presumed what she had not the foresight to action: framing of pictures sent was unlikely to happen and it was not their photos left drunkenly wilting against Christmas candlesticks and old holly branches. The pictures they had sent were neatly framed, their moments beautifully captured, their children happily beamed under sunny skies, their husbands mannishly grinned looking like great big healthy bears, confidence emanating from the snaps. It was her own hurriedly posted prints that softly curled and leaned like drunken men against the others. The non-smiling, half-faces of her and randomers often squinting through non-moments in the rain in some distant English city. Why had she ever sent them?

‘You are my sunshine, my only …’ – ‘Yeh?’

‘Well. You’re there. Are you ok?’

‘Yeh. It’s very cold. It’s odd.’

She let her finger drift gently over the dust along the mantelpiece as she brought her eyes to the mirror. God – she looked a right fright. She raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips at her reflection. A parody of a pose. With a start she realised she looked like her Mother.

‘Come up to me before you leave. You can have your dinner here.’

The kindness of another sister nearly caused that frantic erratic choking sob to erupt again.

‘No. You’re grand. I won’t have time. I’m not staying long.’

‘Sure, you’re hardly heading back tonight? Stay on for a while. You can stay here, if you can’t stomach staying there. I wouldn’t blame you.’

‘We’ll see. I’ll call you later.’

She let the beeping on the phone tell her that the call had ended and mindlessly shoved it back into her pocket as she observed herself in the mirror. Dark-looking circles the colour of purplish soft-bruises cradled her eyes and her eyebrows had seen better days. She’d be going nowhere looking like this, she decided. Well, she’d have to go up – but apart from that, she had no intention of going anywhere or seeing anyone.

The stairs’ carpet was threadbare and although its 70’s swirls were probably coming back into fashion, somewhere, probably being resurrected in some faux-ironic way by some faux-iconic designer, this hideous hallucinogenic heap that had seen better days would surely to God in heaven above never pose as a template for anything fresh or fashionable. The air on the stairs and landing was arctic as she paused outside the cheap, ply-board bedroom door painted one too many times and now chipping sadly away revealing layers of past. A faint smell of disinfectant or something vaguely medicinal hung in the atmosphere and she could just make out the corner of the avocado wash-hand basin through the bathroom door that lay slightly ajar. The brown dressing gown that hung shapelessly on a peg that threatened to peel from the wall, giving just the faintest eerie impression of a man. She shivered involuntarily. Condensation had turned the windowsill on the landing as black as a crow’s wing and, for the smallest moment, she stood transfixed – staring out at the patch of sky available through the half-inch of clear glass at the top. It looked like rain.

Only a long time after, safely ensconced once again in her pristine office, in her carefully ordered life back in that distant English city, did she allow herself to think about that day. The way she had fled – bolted really, let’s not put a tooth in it - like a frightened March hare back down the stairs, through the sticky kitchen and out the back door. Back the way she’d come. If she allowed herself to dwell on it, to unpick the past from the present with the sharp intellectual needle of her brain, she might feel the haunting hangover of embarrassment. But she wouldn’t do that. Instead, as she gazed out the floor to ceiling window, perched high above the bustling streets, streets reassuringly populated with busy, anonymous people hurrying about their busy, unknown professional lives, her forehead pressed against the glass, she felt as free as a bird. Safe in her eyrie.

Was it when he’d croaked ‘Hello sunshine’ that she’d lost her mettle?

Back and forth, back and forth.