and there are shivers beginning to build inside me. The cobbled yard is quiet, an anticipatory hush like a library or a church, the only disturbance a murmuring that sounds like running water. I know it’s fanciful and stupid, but it feels as though the farm has been waiting for me – or maybe I have been waiting for it.
I mutter my silent prayer, though I do not believe in anyone who could hear it. Please no bodies. Please no death. Tonight I need to concentrate only on living, on being alive.
I open the door.
Here is an inventory of what the farmhouse contains:
A kitchen with faded yellow walls and a laminate floor.
A big wood-burning stove on a stone hearth.
A table missing a leg.
A red electric cooker.
A faulty clock, ticking at irregular intervals.
Scrubbed wooden cupboards, filled with crockery and iron-ware pans.
Some foodstuff, mostly inedible – black and mushy vegetables, their juices seeping onto the shelf below. A hard mouldy lump that might once have been a heel of bread. An open pack of crackers.
But there are treasures I can salvage: a bag of rice, two tins of kidney beans, half a box of Cup-a-Soup, stock cubes, vinegar and a bottle of red wine. For a while I sit and cradle them against me.
A living room that smells of decay. Two armchairs. A shelf of Reader’s Digests.
An old-style larder, with cold stone slabs for preserving food. The larder is empty.
Stairs. Up them, a bathroom with an avocado suite. A wilted spider plant. Six dead woodlice in the bath.
Across the hall, two bedrooms: a double and a twin. No clothes in the drawers or wardrobes. The beds are all unmade. In the airing cupboard, folded blankets and flowery bedding, the kind my mother used to keep as spares in her own airing cupboard, ‘Just in case.’
I heave one of the single mattresses downstairs to the kitchen. It takes more strength than I think I have left to tug it into place. I go back up to fetch a single set of bedding. It smells of the must inside the cupboard, but underneath that, locked into the cotton’s weave, is a smell of washing powder, and of breezy days drying on the line. For a moment I am at my parents’ house helping my mother fold the bed linen, and I press the sheets close around my face.
I light the fire with one of the books and the drawers from the kitchen table, and make up a bed beside it. Once I am confident the fire will not go out, I take one of the heavy iron pans from the cupboard and go outside. In the last light of the day I clamber over the fence and discover a small stream to the side of the house. I set the water to boil on top of the wood-burner and finally let myself look at my leg.
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