The most important thing here is to get as much of this down as I can, while it’s still fresh in my head. I guess I’m trying to make as much sense of it as possible so I can figure out how all this happened – how it spiralled out of my control and got to this point.
I’d better get going before I lose this thread of sanity.
I wouldn’t exactly say we got the house for a song, but it was cheap enough. It was a ‘fixer upper’ for sure; a Victorian era townhouse with ‘character’ – i.e. woodworm and more mould than a Glaswegian cemetery.
Ally, my wife, suggested I take some time off and work on the house, seeing I had a tradesman background and she earned enough as a senior comms advisor for us both to live off.
She was a keeper, Ally. Loyal, gorgeous and sharp as a straight razor.
Ah shit. I told myself I wasn’t going to cry.
Too late for that now though, I guess.
Anyway, I got stuck into the house, cleaning out all the junk left behind by the old guy who had owned the place before us. Apparently in his youth he’d been some kind of explorer or adventurer, back when there were still things left to be discovered – before drones and satellites that could photograph every corner of the Earth.
There was nothing valuable left; the guy had been a hoarder of the highest order – there weren’t just piles and piles of towering newspapers to clear out, there were jars of urine stashed in the back of cupboards and mummified rat corpses everywhere. Ally and I had to live in a motel down the road for the first four months before the place was fit for human habitation.
Probably the most unusual of all the things that the old man had collected were his plants.
At the back of the place was a big glass conservatory. Now this wasn’t a modern conservatory; this ancient edifice was brass, bronze and massive slabs of yellowed glass – crusted with a century’s worth of verdigris, lichen, mildew and mould. It was filthy, humid, overgrown and clammy.
And I hated the place.
Ally had great plans to turn it into a hothouse for all sorts of succulents and tropical plants, but truth be told, if it had cost less to demolish it than it would to clean it up, I would have just torn it down.
Things went pretty well after we moved in for good and left the motel behind. Ally’s border collie, Jack, loved the place and would tear about, scratching up the already scarred wooden floors. He was a pretty good dog, but he ended up being another chore for me on top of all the shit I needed to do to keep the house liveable. Ally just didn’t have time for him like she used to, once her work ramped up and they started giving her longer hours.
But when Jack went missing, of course it was my fault.
I told Ally that I’d kept the gates closed, but she wouldn’t hear of it. None of the neighbours had seen him and I swear he’d been sleeping on his rug out the back near the conservatory.
We never saw him again.
That it caused a rift between me and Ally was never in doubt. It shoved a wedge in the little cracks in our relationship, and then we started banging on it and widening them even further.
