The Obscura Spore
| 28 min read
The newspapers had been in the front room since 1991, and now they were something else.
Delia had left them for day four because they were the worst job in the house and she had wanted to build up to them. Nine towers, chest high, along the wall between the window and the chimney breast, and she had checked the dates on the top layer with a torch on her first evening: Warrington Guardian, March 1991, a headline about a bus route. Underneath, more of the same going back. Her mother had subscribed to two dailies and a weekly for thirty years and had thrown away none of them, and Delia had priced a skip on that basis.
The skip was in the drive. She had gloves, a paper mask, and a roll of rubble sacks. She crossed the room and put her hand out for the top of the nearest tower and her hand went into it up to the wrist.
It was cold. Not damp-cold. Cellar-cold, the temperature of a stone step.
She pulled back and stood looking at the hole her arm had made, and the hole did not close, and the edges of it were not paper.
The towers were still tower-shaped. They still had the sagged, slumped geometry of newsprint stacked for decades, the way the middle of each pile bulged under its own weight. But the substance had been replaced. Under a surface that had the colour and grain of old newspaper, and even something like the ghost of a headline in it, the pile was made of strands. Translucent, wet-looking, thick as bootlaces at the base and finer higher up, woven into a mass that held its shape the way a wasp nest holds its shape. Light from the window went into it and came out somewhere else, three inches to the left, in a way that made her look at the window to check the window.
She stood there a while. She had a lot of practice at standing in this house not reacting to things.
Then she leaned in and smelled it, because she was forty-three years old and there was nobody to tell her not to.
Youth Dew. The heavy, sweetish, sticky-sweet of it, her mother's perfume for as long as Delia had known her, the smell of being kissed on the top of the head before a school run. And underneath that, dry and hot and mineral: the back of a television left on all afternoon. Dust cooking on glass. The smell of the room after the picture went and the screen kept its charge and pulled the hairs on your arm towards it.
The strands were sweating. Beads of clear fluid stood along the undersides, gathered, ran, and did not drip. They travelled sideways instead.
Delia went out to the kitchen and drank a glass of water and looked at the wall clock, which had stopped at twenty past four in some year nobody had recorded.
"Right," she said.
The house was 22 Ferndale Road and it had been full for as long as it had been her mother's alone. Delia had a working theory about the process, which was that her father had died in 1996 and had taken with him the only person capable of saying Corinne, no.
There were rooms Delia had not been able to enter on her first visit. The back bedroom had a wall of carrier bags reaching the picture rail, each one full of other carrier bags. The dining room had furniture stacked to the ceiling in an arrangement that had clearly been engineered rather than dumped. The hall was a channel eleven inches wide with a path worn into the middle of the carpet, and the carpet on either side of that path was in perfect condition, dark red, unfaded, forty years old and never walked on.
Her mother had died in the front room in a chair with a view of the newspapers. Three weeks ago. The neighbour had noticed the curtains.
Delia had told the crematorium people that she was fine, and told her sister that she was fine, and told the solicitor she would have the house cleared by the end of the month, and had come up from Stoke with a car full of sacks and a set of ideas about closure that she was already, on day four, embarrassed by.
She went back into the front room with her phone out and photographed the towers.
The photographs came out fine. Nine translucent masses, greyish, ropey, with the light doing its trick. She sent one to her sister and typed what the hell is this and then deleted the message before sending, because Kay would come, and Kay coming would mean two of them in the house, and Delia was not ready to explain why she wanted to be alone in it.
She did not know then that two of them in the house was the entire answer.
She noticed the second thing that afternoon and spent an hour arguing with it.
There was a corner of the front room, the one behind the door, that had a shopping trolley in it, upended, full of Christmas decorations. When she looked at that corner directly, it had a shopping trolley in it.
When she was at the far wall with her back to it, working on the towers, the trolley was there in the edge of her vision and so was something else, a paleness low down where the two walls met, spreading and retracting slightly, the way a jellyfish does nothing in particular. If she turned her head fast enough she got half a second of it: a fan of the same translucent strands, coming out of the join of the walls, having eaten some part of the trolley she couldn't identify.
Then it wasn't there. Trolley, decorations, skirting board, a mouse trap from another decade.
She tried it eleven or twelve times. The turn had to be fast and it had to be unplanned, and she found that she could not really surprise herself, and that the more she practised the less she caught.
She propped her phone against a biscuit tin, set it recording, and left the room for forty minutes.
When she came back and watched the footage, the corner had a shopping trolley in it for forty unbroken minutes. Nothing moved. She scrubbed backwards and forwards through it, frame by frame, and then she looked up from the screen at the actual corner, and the pale fan was there, wide as a dinner plate, and it closed like a hand while she watched.
So the phone didn't count. A lens didn't count. Whatever it needed, it needed a person in the loop, and if the person was watching a screen instead of a room, the room was unwatched.
Delia sat down on a box of curtain rails and thought about a house that had been full of unlooked-at corners for thirty years.
She rang Kay that night from the car, because the car was outside the house rather than in it.
"You sound rough," Kay said.
"It's a lot of dust."
"Have you started on the front?"
"I've started on the front." Delia watched the streetlight come on. "Kay, do you remember the newspapers?"
"God, yes. She wouldn't let Dad move them. He wanted to build a shelf and she went off like a rocket." A pause, a kettle noise. "Are you all right? You've gone quiet."
"I'm fine. Tell me something."
"What sort of something?"
"Anything. Tell me a thing from when we were kids."
Kay laughed, and then, because Kay had a good ear, stopped laughing. "All right. The caravan."
"Which caravan."
"Rhosneigr. The one with the wasp. Delia, the summer of the wasp, you were nine, you got stung on the eyelid and you wouldn't come out of the toilet block for two hours and Dad had to buy you a plastic sword to get you out. We went four years running. You had a bunk with a curtain and you used to make me knock."
Delia sat in the car with the phone against her ear.
She knew what a caravan was. She knew Rhosneigr was in Anglesey, because she had driven past a sign for it as an adult. She had nothing else. Not the bunk, not the sword, not the sting. Not a colour, not a smell, not the sound of rain on a caravan roof, which was the sort of thing that survived everything.
"Del?"
"I don't remember it," Delia said.
"You do."
"I don't. I'm not being funny with you. There's nothing there."
Kay went quiet in the particular way she had. "You've had a shock. Mum's died. You're standing in her house on your own picking up her things. People forget everything at times like this, it's completely normal, it's."
"Yeah," Delia said. "That's probably it."
She worked harder the next day, because working harder was what she did instead of thinking, and because the towers had started to matter to her in a way she didn't want to look at directly.
The strands came apart when she cut them. She used a bread knife from the kitchen drawer and they parted without resistance and without any sound at all, and what she cut off went into the rubble sack and weighed almost nothing, and by the time she got the sack to the skip it weighed nothing whatsoever and the sack hung empty and clean, not even wet.
Three sacks. Four. The first tower came down to knee height and behind where it had been, the wallpaper was perfect. Green fern print, 1970s, the colours as fresh as the day it went up, and along the skirting a line of dark spots where the fluid had gathered and gone somewhere.
She was cutting into the second tower when she noticed that she could not remember the fern wallpaper.
She was standing in front of it. It was two feet from her face. She had grown up in this room. She knew, in the way you know facts about a stranger, that this had been the wallpaper of her childhood, because it was here, behind the newspapers, and the newspapers had gone up when she was thirteen. She had sat in this room for thirteen years with this pattern on the wall.
She put her hand flat on it and got nothing. It was a pattern on a wall.
By half past six she had done four towers. She stopped because her hands had started shaking and because she had made herself perform a test, and failed it.
The test was: name six things from your ninth birthday.
She got a birthday. She got a fact, the way she'd get a fact from a form: nine, so 1989, so the house, so a cake. She could not get a single object. Not a card, not a room, not a person's face, not what she wore, not whether it rained.
She sat on the stairs in the eleven-inch channel with the smell of Youth Dew coming out of the front room, and understood that she had spent the day carrying her own childhood out to a skip in sacks.
She found the exercise books on day six, in the cupboard under the stairs, behind a wall of shoeboxes containing every electricity bill since decimalisation.
There were four hundred and eleven of them. She counted, later, because counting turned out to be the family method. They were the cheap kind with the sugar-paper covers, and each one had a room and a date range on the front in her mother's small upright hand, and inside, in columns, was a list of objects.
Front room, shelf 2, left to right: brass dog (chip on ear). Brass dog (no chip). Photo, Ron in uniform, frame cracked bottom right. Glass swan. Glass swan, smaller. Ashtray, Blackpool. Ashtray, plain. Tin, biscuits, Coronation, holds buttons — 44 buttons, 6 mother-of-pearl.
Every object in the house. Room by room, shelf by shelf, layer by layer. Dated, redated, re-counted. Some pages had been gone over four or five times in different pens across different decades, the same objects re-listed, and beside some entries a tick, and beside others a small pencilled seen 4.iii.02, seen 9.viii.02, seen 1.i.03.
Not an inventory. A patrol.
In the last book, which was newer than the others and had a plastic cover, the columns stopped after two pages and her mother had written prose instead. Delia read it sitting on the hall floor with the torch in her teeth.
Ron says I should get help and I would like to get help but there is no help for this. I have tried to explain it to him twice and both times he was kind and both times he understood something else.
It eats what nobody is holding. That is all. It is not evil. A stomach is not evil.
The rule is simple and horrible: it can only be where nobody is looking. So it cannot be everywhere. It has to choose. If everything in a house is counted and touched and known and dated, there is nothing in that house it can put its mouth on, and it must go and be somewhere else, or it must live in one corner and take what it can get.
People say get rid of the clutter. Every time you get rid of a thing you make a space where a thing was, and nobody remembers the space, and a space nobody remembers is a plate set at the table.
I do not keep the newspapers because I am ill. I keep them because as long as I know that the pile behind the door is 1991 and the pile at the window is 1989 and I go in every day and I say so, that is nine feet of wall it cannot have.
Delia turned the page.
It took Peter on the 14th and it took him out of me over about four years and I let it because I could not carry the 14th. I want that written down. I made the trade with my eyes open. I said take that day, and it took the day, and then it kept eating outward from the hole because there was nothing to stop it, and by 1991 I could not tell you his voice. I have his shoes and his school photograph and the certificate and I know the shape of the facts and there is nothing behind them.
So now I count. It gets nothing else. Not one more thing.
If either of the girls reads this: do not clear the house. I am sorry. Do not clear the house.
Peter.
Delia sat with the torch going dim and turned the name over, and it did what the caravan had done. It was a word with an outline. There was a fact attached to it, and the fact was brother, and the fact had a date, 1987, and a cause, which she could produce on demand, a van reversing outside a shop on Padgate Lane. She had produced it before, at parties, in the flat neutral tone of someone reporting family history. I had a brother, he died when I was eleven.
Eleven. She had been eleven years old and she had lived with a nine-year-old boy for nine years and she had nothing. Not his voice, not his hands, not what he smelled like, not one afternoon.
She had always had an explanation for that, and the explanation was that she had blocked it out, that children do, that grief is strange. She had said that sentence, or a version of it, to perhaps thirty people over thirty years.
She went upstairs. The back bedroom took her twenty minutes to get into, and inside, under the bags of bags, she found what her mother's ledger said she would find: a pair of black lace-ups, size four, polished, in a shoebox with the tissue paper still in the toes. A framed school photograph of a boy with his mother's short upper lip and his hair combed wet.
She looked at the photograph for a long time in the hope that something would arrive.
Nothing arrived. She thought, in the cold analytic way she was starting to hate herself for: this is what the wallpaper felt like.
She rang Kay at eleven at night and said, "Tell me about Peter."
There was a silence on the line long enough that she checked the screen.
"Why," Kay said.
"Because I can't. Because I've got no more of him than I've got of a photo in a shop window, and I've spent my whole life thinking that was normal, and it isn't, is it."
Kay started crying, which Delia had heard twice in her adult life.
"He used to do a thing with his tongue in the gap in his teeth," Kay said. "Like a click. He'd do it all the way through Blockbusters and Mum would go mad. He was frightened of the boiler cupboard. He'd only eat toast cut in triangles, and if you cut it in squares he'd cry, actually cry, at nine. He called you Deed. Nobody else ever called you that."
Delia put her hand over her mouth.
"You knew all this," Kay said. "You knew all this. We used to talk about him."
"When?"
"All the time. Up until." Kay stopped. "Up until you moved to Stoke, I suppose. You stopped, and I thought you'd decided to, and I let you have it. Delia, what's happening in that house?"
"I'm going to need you to come," Delia said. "Not to help me clear it. Something else."
She did one more stupid thing first, because she had to, because you cannot be told a thing like that and not try the direct approach.
She went at the front room at six in the morning with a bottle of thick bleach, a pair of secateurs, and the long lighter from the barbecue.
The bleach did nothing. It ran off the strands and pooled on the lino, and where it touched the surface the false grain of newsprint faded out and the mass under it went slightly more visible, which was worse.
The secateurs worked beautifully. She took the fifth tower apart in twenty minutes and filled two sacks with material that was gone by the time it reached the skip.
While she was doing it she lost her bedroom.
It happened without any event to mark it. She was cutting, and she was thinking about the room upstairs at the front with the sloped bit of ceiling, and then she was thinking about the room upstairs at the front, and there was no sloped bit, and there was no wardrobe with the transfer on the door, and there was no gap between the bed and the wall where a person of eleven could lie on her side and read with a torch. There was a room, in a house, which had been hers. She could have drawn the floor plan. She could not have drawn anything in it.
She kept cutting, because stopping was worse, and by the time she got to the base of the tower and found the little sump of gathered fluid there, clear and slow-moving and smelling now of two perfumes at once, Youth Dew over the top of something lighter and sharper that she had a horrible feeling was Charlie, which was the smell of Kay at fifteen, she had also lost her mother's face.
She did not know she had lost it until she tried to find it, and what she found instead was the photograph from the order of service, the one she had chosen herself, 2011, Rhyl, blue cardigan. That photograph had become the whole of her mother's face. She could rotate it and she could not animate it.
She went out to the skip and stood in the drive in the rain with her hands on her knees.
The lighter was in her back pocket. She thought about it seriously for about ninety seconds, standing there, watching water go into the empty sacks. Burn the house and burn the corners.
Then she thought: her mother had written it can only be where nobody is looking, and it has to choose, and nine feet of wall it cannot have. And a burnt house is a plot with an outline on it, and nobody has ever looked closely at the corner of a room that no longer exists. She would be handing over the entire building, all four hundred and eleven exercise books' worth, in one go, in a form nobody would ever be able to patrol again.
She put the lighter on the wall and left it in the rain.
Kay arrived on Thursday. Sam came with her, seventeen, headphones round his neck, and Delia had the grim satisfaction of watching a boy walk into that hall and take his headphones off without being asked.
She had the plan written out because she no longer trusted herself to hold anything in her head for a day.
"Every room," she said. "At the same time. All day. Not walking through. Sitting in it, going through it, saying what's in it out loud. Mum's books tell us what's supposed to be there. We check the books against the room and the room against the books."
Kay looked at the ledger in her hands, and at the four hundred and ten others stacked on the stairs, and Delia watched her sister's face do the arithmetic that Delia had already done: thirty-four years, four hundred and eleven books, one woman.
"She did this on her own," Kay said.
"Every day. Since 1991."
"We thought she was mad."
"She was holding a line," Delia said. "She held it for thirty-four years and then she died in a chair looking at the last nine feet of it."
Sam said, "How many people can you get?"
That turned out to be the right question, and it was a seventeen-year-old who asked it.
They got eleven. Kay and Sam and Delia. Mr. Oyelaran and two lads from the clearance firm, who agreed to work by the ledger and be paid by the hour instead of the load, and who took it better than she expected once she stopped explaining and started paying. Hester Pike, a valuer from Stockton Heath who came for the furniture and stayed because the exercise books were, in her words, the most extraordinary document she had ever been handed. Mrs. Anwuli from number 26, who had noticed the curtains, and who brought her sister. Two women from the church hall who came for the jumble and were given a room each instead.
Eleven people, every room of a nine-room house occupied at once, from eight in the morning until it went dark, for six days.
Delia had expected a fight. What happened was quieter and much stranger.
On the first day it left the upstairs. She was standing on the landing at about eleven and she felt the temperature of the house change by a degree, and Sam shouted from the box room that the corner had gone weird, and by the time she got there he was standing with his phone in his hand looking annoyed.
"It was there," he said. "It was, like, the size of a bin lid. Right there. And then it just wasn't, and it's not the way things aren't there when you're being an idiot, it's."
"I know," Delia said.
"It went sideways."
By the third day the whole ground floor was clean, and the front room was the only room in the house where anyone would agree to work alone, and only Delia would, and only in daylight.
It had gathered into the corner behind the door.
The four towers she hadn't cut had dried up and gone. What was left was a mass about the size of a chest freezer, wedged into the join of the two walls and the floor, thick where it met the corner and finer at the edges, and it no longer bothered pretending to be newspaper. It was translucent all the way through. Light went into it and came out wrong. The shopping trolley had gone from that corner, and Delia checked the ledger, and the ledger said front room, corner behind door: trolley (wheel missing), Christmas decs, 3 boxes: 61 baubles, 4 strings lights (2 working), tinsel green, tinsel silver, angel (Peter made, 1985, egg box).
She read that line eleven or twelve times.
The trolley was in the hall. Two boxes of decorations were in the hall. There was no third box, and there was no angel, and the corner sweated its clear fluid and the smell of it had thinned down to almost nothing.
On the sixth day it was the size of a dinner plate, and on the seventh it was smaller than that, and Delia sat on the floor three feet from it with the ledger on her knees and the sun coming in the window and read the whole room out loud to it for two hours.
Front room, shelf 2, left to right: brass dog, chip on ear. Brass dog, no chip. Photo, Ron in uniform, frame cracked bottom right.
It did not fight. It had never fought. Her mother had been right that a stomach is not evil, and Delia thought there was something worse in that than there would have been in malice, because you can hate a thing that wants to hurt you.
At about two in the afternoon it gave her Peter.
She was not looking at it. That was the whole trick of the thing, and she had spent nine days learning it, and she had let her eyes go down to the page. And into her, from nowhere, without warning or ceremony, came a boy sitting on the floor of this room with his back against her legs.
Not a fact. Him. The weight of a head against her shin. The click of a tongue in a gap in teeth, over and over, through the television, until she put her hand on the top of his head to stop it and he leaned back into her hand instead. The smell of him, which was Vosene and biscuits and the inside of a coat. His voice, going, "Deed. Deed. Deed. Is it Wales tomorrow."
Nine years old. Alive. Two feet from her, warm, on the floor, in this room, in the light off the fern wallpaper.
Delia sat with her mouth open and the ledger sliding off her knees.
She understood the offer completely and instantly, the way you understand a hand held out over a drop. Look away. Keep your eyes on the page, on the window, on your own shoes. Give the corner one unwatched hour and it would give her back the boy, and it would take the hour's worth of something else, and there would be more of him tomorrow, and she would spend the rest of her life in this room with her eyes on the floor being fed her own brother in pieces, the way her mother had spent thirty-four years in this room refusing the same offer with all her furniture piled against it.
I made the trade with my eyes open. I said take that day.
Delia lifted her head and looked at the corner.
It was very small by then. It shrank while she looked at it, drawing in from the edges, the fine strands going first, and the whole thing tightened down into the join of the walls until it was no bigger than a coin and then no bigger than a full stop.
Peter went out of her while it went. Not torn out. Withdrawn, cleanly, the way a hand comes out of water, and what was left in the socket was the fact again, I had a brother, he died when I was eleven, and the weight of his head on her shin was gone before she could get a word round it.
She sat on the floor of her mother's front room and made a noise she had not made at the funeral.
They did not get rid of the house.
Kay wanted to and Delia would not have it, and it was the first proper argument they'd had in twenty years, conducted in a hall eleven inches wide.
"You cannot keep a house you don't live in to guard a corner," Kay said.
"I'm not keeping it to guard a corner. I'm keeping it because I've seen what she was doing and I'm not undoing it in a month for the sake of a probate deadline."
"Then what, you move in? You spend the next thirty-four years counting buttons?"
"No," Delia said. "That's what she did wrong. She did it on her own. One person has one pair of eyes and a bad back and a hip, and it just waits."
What they did instead took nine months and a lot of Hester Pike's time. The furniture went to auction, properly catalogued, item by item, with the ledger entries printed alongside as provenance, because Hester had decided the exercise books were the point of the whole sale and she turned out to be right. Four hundred and eleven volumes of one woman writing down every object in her house every day for thirty-four years, with the marginal notes, with the two pages of prose in the last one. An archive at Manchester took them, digitised the lot, and put fourteen of the books in a glass case under a light where perhaps six hundred people a year read her mother's handwriting.
The house went to a young couple who wanted the garden. Delia told them about the corner behind the front room door.
She did tell them. She wants that on the record, if there is a record. She stood in the empty front room with the fern wallpaper stripped and the man from the couple being patient with her, and she said: there is a corner in this room, and it is the corner behind the door, and it is very small now, and every so often you should stand in this room and look at it, and say out loud what is in it. Even if what is in it is nothing. Especially then.
He said, "Right," in the voice people use.
She gave them the printed pages anyway, and the address of the archive, and a photograph of a boy with wet-combed hair, which she asked them to keep on the mantelpiece where the whole room could see it, and which they did keep there for about four months before it went into a drawer, though she does not know that.
She lives in Stoke, in a first-floor flat with white walls and very little in it, which was a decision she made in her twenties and which she has thought about differently since.
Her memory has not come back. She has read that the brain does not work that way, and she has read enough now to know that whatever happened to her was not the brain working in any way at all, and neither reading helps. She has a childhood in the form of a document: Kay's account, written out over four evenings at Kay's kitchen table, thirty-one pages, which Delia keeps in the top drawer of her desk and reads the way you read about somebody else. Rhosneigr. The sword. The bunk with the curtain. A brother who called her Deed and would not eat toast in squares.
She says his name out loud once a day. She started because it seemed like the only maintenance available, and she has kept it up for two years, and she cannot tell whether it does anything.
The flat has nine corners in the main room and she knows all nine.
There is a gap behind the wardrobe in the bedroom, three inches, where the floor slopes and the wardrobe doesn't sit flush. She noticed last autumn that she had been living there four years and had never once looked into it, and that she had a small settled feeling about it, a kind of comfortable not-bothering, which she recognised from her mother's handwriting: nobody remembers the space.
She has a torch on a hook now, on a nail she put in the skirting board herself. Twice a week she moves the wardrobe out and shines the torch down the back of it and says what is there. Dust, a coin, a dead spider, the corner of a jigsaw box, the join of two walls.
Nothing. Twice a week, nothing.
She is aware that this is exactly how it starts, and that her mother began with one wall of newspapers, and that there is no version of the rest of her life in which she stops checking.