Home

Update 06/03/2010 – Now shortlisted for the Huddersfield Literature Festival  ‘Less Is More’ short story competition.

I wake up early to find I’m a semi-detached council house in Surrey. Living room, kitchen with dining room attachment, three bedrooms and two bathrooms. Built circa 1954 in the post-war housing boom. Four children run around me, making a lot of noise, so I decide to go back to sleep. Two hours later I’m awake again as a swimming pool in a California ranch house, up on the ridge overlooking Hollywood. The owner, an aging movie star, takes a few laps in me but he’s getting on now and spends more time lying on a lounger next to me, reading a Herman Wouk novel, waiting for his grandchildren to come visit.

I wake at midday and I am a public school in the south of England, late in its day, its glory waning. Cold fills my long, empty corridors and the smell of old churches fills the classrooms. In one of my bathrooms children weep, again and again over the decades, frightened and alone, on the cusp of forcing their feelings back down inside themselves where they will remain trapped for the rest of their lives. Arrogance and fear float through me and as a whole I feel a lost, lonely ache. Once again I sleep.

Briefly I am a Victorian tower, a folly to celebrate a life long vanished from the world. I stand exposed and proud, immovable in the freezing winds that blast me through most of the year. My stone is dense and grey and inside I am dark and wet, a place of shadows and dirt, abandoned trinkets and human waste. Even through the thick stone I can feel a million tiny legs walking over me as swarms of ants move over me. I am just an obstacle for them, just another thing in their path.

By mid-afternoon I am one of those unusual glass walled house that architects build for themselves to prove how smart they are. The sun bakes me, filling the solar panels on my west roof with warm, giving energy which I channel down to the under floor heating in the lounge and study. The rest of the heat is absorbed into thick layers of warm, heavy insulation in my wall and roof cavities, hugging comfort in on myself. The architect’s lonely wife pads over my toasty wooden floors while he’s away on business and masturbates quietly in the study using one of his paperweights to pleasure herself. Her orgasm is very much like the sunshine when it comes.

Quickly now I am a flash of different places. I am a worn, old tent in a field in New England, I am a log cabin 35 miles outside of Juneau, I am a sun baked hovel in Egypt, a shelter made of branches and leaves somewhere in South America, too fast to tell where. Late afternoon and I am the remains of a Roman villa somewhere in Greece, half buried, forgotten, haunted by vague memories of languages no one ever speaks in me anymore.

I’m a children’s hospital in Fallujah next, weary under the weight of human tissue and hurt. My walls are shot full of holes, my walls are soaked with blood and sorrow.  I quickly go back to sleep. Awaking again I am a bicycle shed in a factory yard in a small Russian town, my thin walls chill and strong, alive with some small form of life I can’t quite identify, some hardy fungus or spore that clings to me despite the awful shade of brown I have been painted. My wood inhales bitter smoke as a cyclist savours his last cigarette before the ride home.

The next time I am aware I can feel wood-chip wallpaper being coated with soft emulsion, careful long brush strokes against me. My walls are lined and lined with 70 years of wallpaper, never stripped off before the next application and the suffocating papery warmth jars against the tender decoration being done to me now. I have been bought by a young woman who has worked hard to have her own home and now she carefully gouges new holes in me for central heating and shelving and I can feel the cold dirt of a garden against the damp walls of a cellar which she doesn’t know exists, as the doorway has been covered up years ago.

Now I am an art gallery somewhere near Houston, Texas. I am closed for the night and the only activity is the occasional sweep of a torch beam across the massive canvasses that hang on my walls as the guard makes his rounds. I can feel the soft, warm of the night and its noises pressing against me, lush vegetation hiding me from the world.

Last thing at night I am a tree-house, a unique and intricate design in a massive old oak at the edge of a country estate house. Bright moonlight soaks the tree and the branches which hold me up and together glow and vibrate with a simple joy. A rope ladder hangs like a dead weight from me, from the gaping hole in my main room’s floor. My wood has been scarred and scratched by children and adults alike, each carving their own piece of their lives into me and each scar is a deep love bite in my happy form. Maybe one day they will return to see the lasting mark they have left in me and feel the distance between themselves now and themselves then and the aching nostalgia for another time. I go to sleep for the final time.