Why Behind The Fence?
When I took the house, near the city airport, I did not quite expect the future to blot out any memory of why I decided to take it in the first place. Whether the family I called my own was always my own, I suppose now has taken on a blinding irrelevancy, bearing in mind the events I am about to impart. Two girls, one boy, with large gaps of time between - and a wife whom I could not recall marrying, so perhaps the knot had yet to be tied.
The many rooms in the house were tangential to a quite unfathomable maze of corridors. A gawky building that had several storeys, and in between each of them were weak floors more like garden fences than stable platforms. Despite being a city dwelling, it had a rather large garden, mostly overgrown, but peppered with tiny plots which my three children maintained as a fitful hobby. My wife, though, spent all her time indoors. She was ever painting the Forth Bridge of housework, which is not surprising, given my take on the number of rooms.
It was as if we had lived in the house for ages - whilst I knew, in my heart of hearts, that I had only just moved there. Having given up a nondescript occupation on the abandoned northeast coast of Essex, I decided that, with the help of the web, I could do a job almost anywhere: from whatever home in which I decided to billet; and so decided, well, I might as well live in the city: as good as anywhere. Become a freelance writer. Why not? And living near the airport, I could watch - from my study window - the huge planes taking off and landing. Even now, though, I cannot be precise as to when the planes started changing shape into things far more outlandish.
The house haunted me. Not like ghosts haunt, but rather a sense of being subsumed by a belief that I knew every nook and cranny from an earlier life. I eventually became frightened of never being frightened. Any sane person would have been frightened when faced with events that became more than just worrying illusions. But I am beginning to jump ahead of myself. I need to remain rooted in the person I then was. Plenty of time yet to stretch my limbs into the grubby sleeves and trouser legs of the person writing this.
My youngest child, the boy, one day knocked on my study door. The children rarely disturbed me when the door was shut because, then, I had told them, I was sure to be busy writing. Yet, today, I was mellower than usual and called for him to enter. I somehow knew it was him. It was his turn. In any event, I knew it was not my wife, because I could hear the Ewbank being pushed across the thick piles of a higher storey.
The boy's face was flushed.
"Yes?" My voice was pitched between irritation and resignation.
"Maisie's started up a new plot."
He was about to tell stories about one of his sisters; it was the daredevil anger in his eyes, the evident need to drop her in it, probably because she had been spiteful to him earlier in the day. He knew that they needed my permission before starting up a new plot.
"Where?" I suppose, in those days, my sole conversation with the kids was made up of one word questions. But I sensed a greater verbosity building up a head of steam, almost unbidden. Thoughts are often autonomous, if one can but heed them.
"Behind the fence." His treble piped the words with a manly deliberation I could only admire in one so young.
"Why behind the fence?"
In my flustered state, I had intended to ask which fence but decided to persevere with this irrelevant question instead, for fear of even looser words leading towards a lack of control on my part. I nursed the hand that wanted to slap the boy's already red cheek. I stared him out, daring him to blink, while the question I had already asked sank in.
He began to stutter. His eyes slid. I didn't want to stigmatize him for life, so decided to relieve the pressure.
"Well, I suppose it doesn't matter why behind the fence but rather which fence. You see, I did tell her she could start another plot, but I don't want any of you straying beyond the edge of the garden."
I knew that the council wouldn't countenance alterations on the public byway, even if it were a child's flower bed. At that point, a rather low-flying craft droned past the window, only about one hundred yards above the ground. A vast flying-machine that, in my contemporary eyes, resembled more an Enterprise than a Virgin. Its vast undercarriage was lowering like bundles of ballast in slow-motion release. Or rather bombs from the wars few people now remembered. For a moment, it even took from my mind the important matter of my children's doings. I had never seen such an unkempt monster masquerading as an aeroplane, although, for months now, the various fly-bys had gradually been altering their credibility gap; till now, this probably had been the last straw that broke any regular viewer's final grasp of reality. Yet, that particular worry could wait. I turned back to my son. He was cowering in the corner, as if he had seen through the mixed motives of my hand, which was, by now, flapping wildly in the air like a flying fish.
I gradually returned to an even keel and spoke in a relatively steady falsetto: "Tim, go and tell Maisie I would like to see her here."
He nodded, muttering, as he left the study, words along the lines that the fence in question was indeed the one at the end of the garden. Who knew what dangers lurked behind that particular one. I shuddered. I had not even ventured that far down the garden path, let alone considered creating a beachhead, as Maisie evidently had, in that vicinity.
I heard the sudden eruption of the washing machine below me in the cellar, churning away, I guess, at our smalls through several noisy programs. It needed watching during this hectic process and my trusty wife would be hovering nearby in case the odd tweak of a knob or two became advisable.
My other daughter - the one who wasn't Maisie - I could now see from the window was pegging out some washing earlier done by the machine. I cringed as I saw what items she was hanging up, but nobody from the road could see, so I only needed to worry about any prying eyes at the portholes of the planes. I sighed. I loved my family. I regretted my shortcomings as a father and returned to the screen with a will. I never minced words, but here I could process them sufficiently for them to be easily absorbed. It seemed if half the day had expired before I heard another light tapping at my door. This must be Maisie, at last.
I can now tell you that it wasn't Maisie. We never saw Maisie again. The grief that beset us all was hard to bear. I now live alone, dressed interminably in grubby dungarees. The web has overgrown and is populated with black widows. My son became a pilot in the planes that they now send to Mars, carrying advertising logos for Milky Way. I can see them striating the sky as they wend the universe beyond this, our garden of uncultivated earth. My wife and surviving daughter managed to escape into one of those ring-fenced refuges for the battered and spiritually bereaved. What I wrote that day in this study was unsaved and not backed up. It was, in hindsight, more relevant than what I painstakingly scratch today in ranks of neat dead insects.
The house still haunts me as do my dreams. And my unwieldy craft can never land for, suitably frightened at last, I tumble through several floors of my churning mind, yearning for dry ground.
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