1.

During the course of the next couple of days Tim learnt something new about himself, or at least remembered something he’d forgotten. He was an expert unpacker. He considered himself a premium nester. He attacked the house with gusto, wiping down and bleaching surfaces and vacuuming floors before placing his furniture and the books and prints he enjoyed in a way he found both practical and pleasing on the eye.

Of course the many flaws of the house weren’t lost on him. His ‘fashionably unmodernised’ Victorian had all the features expected of a home that had remained largely structurally untouched since it’s minimal foundations were laid. There were a few nods to comfortable living – the creaking heating system for one and the indoor bathroom (tiny and attached to the kitchen, like an afterthought). At the front of the house was a small living space, or ‘parlour’ as he thought of it, with a dark dining room behind before opening into the galley kitchen and aforementioned bathroom. Upstairs were two bedrooms – three in estate agent parlance assuming someone was happy to sleep standing up in the third, a coffin-like box room. But, for all its faults, newly clean and with furniture, it was starting to feel like a home. While it was chilly and cramped, with a lingering sour damp smell, Tim decided to think of it as ‘cottagey’, he had to, he wouldn’t be affording the typical modernisation programme anytime soon.

At 6.30 on Friday evening Tim settled into his easy chair in the parlour with a satisfied grunt. It had been a productive day by anyone’s standards. Sure, the room needed decorating and the large bay window needed more than a sheet protecting the room from drafts and the inquisitive but, with his television in place, art on the walls and his prized mid-century bookcase on display it felt pretty homely. He reached behind him and felt the radiator – oh, happy day!

The plumber, Marco, had been one of the largest men Tim had ever set eyes on. He’d literally squeezed himself through the hallway like toothpaste from a tube before filling his bulk into the tiny kitchen. Tim wondered if the next-door neighbours had heard the man’s breathing, which thundered like a lorry disgorging a load of cement. Accompanying these wheezes and grumbles had been the sound of Marco sucking his teeth and muttering about ‘condemning the bleedin’ thing’. Thankfully such drastic, and expensive, measures had proved unnecessary as he’d slowly, with surprising delicacy, breathed new life into the appliance. ‘Mr Waverly,’ he’d explained, ‘serviced regularly, it should last you a few years’. As Tim handed over his credit card and tried not to openly wince at the costs of labour and materials, Marco had held up a finger as wide as Tim’s arm, ‘Mind you,’ he’d cautioned, ‘it’s never going to run what you’d call ‘quiet’, if you get me drift? It belongs in a museum but I reckon you shouldn’t get gassed in the night’.

Now, the heat seeping into the room gave Tim a sense of genuine relief. Sometime soon winter would start to bite and he hadn’t wanted to experience icy showers or burst pipes.

He was idly thumbing through his phone, pondering a takeaway, when he happened to glance up. His stomach gave a strange lurch, like there’d been a sudden alteration in the room’s air pressure. In the alcove next to the fireplace (the only feature in the room he intended to retain long-term) was an unusual stain. It was the type of mark that, perhaps, could be better observed by not looking directly at it. Tim moved closer and the effect was lost, so he resumed his seat.

He couldn’t immediately determine what it was about the stain (‘the handprint’, he told himself) that seemed so uncanny. He stared at it, unblinking for a few moments before realisation dawned.

Tim could see the whorls of fingerprints more clearly than he should, and the lines on the palm, but that wasn’t it. Suddenly he felt a rush of chill air slice through the newly-heated space, accompanied by a sudden twinge of nausea deep in his bowel. The handprint didn’t look like it had been left my someone touching the wallpaper. It looked like someone’s hand had had pressed through from inside the wall.

2.

At around the same time, and just a few feet away through the wall, Mary MacDonald took a sip from the last cup of tea she’d enjoy that day (she’d given up her regular 8pm some drink some months ago to avoid waking in the night).

Once, Mary’s house would have been the mirror image of Tim’s own. Unlike next door, however, Mary’s was knocked through and extended. Despite her advancing years, Mary’s tastes tended toward modern comfort. She had taken full advantage of her late husband’s life insurance payout to knock through, extend the kitchen and have a luxury bathroom plumbed in on the first floor. The home was filled with soft fabrics and tactile surfaces, not for her the chintz and trappings of old age.

She gazed down at her Kindle, The Bell by Iris Murdoch, and smiled to herself. Mary had lived in this house for nigh-on 50 years, having moved in as a somewhat naïve newlywed. On the surface Oldfield Street might look largely unchanged but, like her own home, she knew that what stood today was little more than a series of facades hiding cavernous rooms, countless extensions and, in some cases, myriad tiny flats – some of which were little more than a single room.

As she sat wool-gathering, classical music burbling from the stereo, Mary considered, as she so often did, the other great change in her own life. The death of her husband, Iain. A heart-attack at 70, a banal death for a dull man, she supposed. To say their marriage had been an unhappy one wouldn’t be entirely correct. She supposed it hadn’t been happy either, more a state of enforced togetherness.

As for many women of her age marriage had been an escape, she’d been travelling from her upbringing as opposed to travelling to something. Her mother, a passionate Irish Catholic, widowed young, was one of eleven siblings but only had the one child. Mary had been brought up with what she thought of as her mother’s ’scripture-strictures’, a series of apparently random rules which, she supposed, had some biblical grounding. Among the strictures were clear boundaries as to interaction with the opposite sex. Making eye-contact with a man was considered against the pale, going as far as to hold hands nothing short of a mortal sin (as was going outside with head uncovered).

In Iain she’d found someone thrillingly ordinary. Mary had loved his agnosticism and the escape route he provided from the clutches of her mother, whom she’d largely ignored from the point of her marriage.

The MacDonalds hadn’t been blessed, or cursed, with children and for that Mary found herself surprisingly grateful. Oh, she liked children well enough, she supposed, it was simply that she wasn’t sure if she would’ve known what to do with a one. Iain, an insurance underwriter, had drifted through life with a permanently dazed expression, as if he’d simply landed in position from a great height. Sex between the couple had been as perfunctory as it was rare – she chuckled to herself and sipped her tea, every cloud, she thought sardonically. It had never held much appeal to her.

Unlike some of her peers, Mary’s mind at 78 remained pin-sharp. She had no patience for what she considered foggy thinking, something which had occasionally been a source of tension at the local bowls club. If she was being completely honest with herself, she didn’t greatly enjoy the game but went as she recognised the need to do something with her time now the improvements to the house were complete. The club captain, Miriam (‘Call me Mims’) Thackery wasn’t Mary’s cup of tea at all. A heavily bosomed woman in her early sixties Miriam, the name Mims would never pass Mary’s lips, was too ‘West London’ for Mary’s tastes with her expensive jewellery, perfectly coloured hair and adoring grandchildren. All these elements, along with Miriam’s overbearing style of captaincy, made Mary itch to slap the woman across her perfectly contoured cheek. On occasion she’d to work hard to stop herself doing just that. To add insult to injury Miriam had taken to calling Mary for ‘A chat dear, as you’re on your own’. Mary had, in turn, taking to deleting Miriam’s voicemails as and when they arrived. She had, early on, made the mistake of listening, out of a sense of politeness she supposed, to a series of messages which were as long as they were dull. She despised anybody treating her like an old person.

The last of her tea done, her thoughts turned to the newly installed occupant at number 56. She’d spied his arrival earlier in the week and, of course, had heard his bone-shaking attempts to get the heating going. Having seen nobody else arrive with him, Mary was left to assume the new neighbour was alone. She was faintly surprised by this – okay he was no Paul Newman but, with his dirty blond hair and characterful face, she thought he looked like he’d be popular with women, or men – Mary considered herself thoroughly modern in such matters. Basically, to her way of thinking he should be taken. Not for the first time she allowed her thoughts to wander, briefly considering what it might have been like to have experienced the act of love with someone other than her late husband. She imagined she’d never know. She had thought about introducing herself to the new fellow but decided to give him time to settle, unlike Louise Sanglin who’d been round with unseemly haste. Mary only knew Louise to pass the time but had placed her in a mental box marked ‘faintly needy’ after just a few snatched conversations.

With a deft flick of the wrist, Mary killed the classical music station and pulled up the onscreen programme guide on her cable service, hoping to find something suitably easy-going to watch in order to pass the hours. She’d catch up with her social media feeds and return to Iris Murdoch before turning in.  

A noise made her turn her head. She’d become so used to next door being unoccupied that she’d started to enjoy the relative silence. Not that the new neighbour was troubling her, boiler aside all she’d made out was the usual sounds of someone settling into their new home, furniture being positioned and suchlike. Now, though, came a new noise. Scritchy-scratchy, back and forth, scritchy-scratchy.

Mary raised her eyes to the heavens she didn’t particularly believe in as she realised what the sound was. ‘He’s scrubbing at one of those marks. Not that it’ll help’, she announced to the empty room.

Next Chapter: Chapter Three