Strange Associations

Earlier on this week, my younger sister, Jane, had cause to rouse a house full of students at around half seven in the morning. I can’t say if she did derive any pleasure from it, but if I were in her position (having a job and living in a house full of students) I’d be pretty hard pressed not to have revelled in the experience.

Either way, the reason Jane felt obliged to wake up everyone in her house was that, over the course of the evening, someone engaged in what might best be described as a “criminal enterprise” had taken it upon themselves to hammer, punch or otherwise perforate a hole in her kitchen wall. This hole is large enough for Jane to confidently peek her head through and glance around her neighbour’s kitchen. This tells us a significant amount more than a simple measure of diameter might – this is not just a sizeable hole, this is a hole big enough to be a source of entertainment. Naturally enough, Ross managed to sleep through the whole night, despite being separated from events forceful enough to smash through a house by just one inter-room wall.

That aside, the point of this blog wasn’t to discuss damage done to their house, nor Ross’s various shortcomings as a human being (manifold though they might be). It’d be wrong to say the whole event seemed unusually familiar to me, but the image I was left with, of plaster, broken into chunks and flecking a smooth surface, did remind me of something. This was despite my never having been in a house that had had walls similarly broken, to my memory at least. Somehow, the image of a broken wall resonated with something somewhere in the leaky archive of my brain, and it took a couple of days for my mind to reclaim it.

I’ve talked before about the fact that myself and my siblings were, in the mother’s absence, raised by a series of (sometimes only in the loosest sense of the word) maternal figures. One of the most accurate embodiments of this was the mother’s sister, who we referred to simply enough as “Waa”, a name introduced to curb the difficulty a child’s tongue has in negotiating the kind of consonant slush that constitutes her Christian name.

We spent some time in Waa’s house, and while there it had occurred to all of us that there were a number of doors in the house that just sort of “led to nowhere”. They didn’t open, and where some of them did, there were bricks instead of rooms. The whole week seems very strange because of it, but for around a week, having things around hat “led to nowhere” seemed not to warrant any explanation. Being a child only slightly more shy than curious, and more than a little fearful of a bearish uncle (and it must be said, an only slightly less bearish aunt), it was easier just not to ask about things. In situations like this, it’s best to have a brother.

When asked about the “mad doors that go to nowhere” Waa was relatively forthcoming. She explained that she’d bought two houses, side by side, with the aim of reclaiming one that had (by means I’ve never fully understood for reasons possibly related to bearishness) been pretty much completely gutted – that is to say, the architectural equivalent of eviscerated. There were still the lines where walls had once been, and I seem to remember various props supporting the whole affair, but this wasn’t a house so much as a kind of dusty, indoor version of outdoors. Sure, it had walls, but they weren’t enough to make it an inside, this was just a piece of outside someone had built things around. They’re very different.

Why she felt the need to show us this house from the vantage point of a first floor doorway, one which literally opened out onto nothingness, I’ll probably never be able to figure out. What seemed most jarring about the whole experience to me at the time was that it was the moment I took to come to terms with the difference between indoor doors and outdoor doors. The door that now separated a wayward child from falling to their rubbly possible-death was (even to my maybe-twelve-year-old hands) disturbingly thin.

It seems now, through the miracle of reason, as though we only stayed with Waa for about two weeks, if even that, but in my memory that two weeks stretches out for months, distorted as it is by the lens of childhood and the number of disturbing details crammed into so short a space. There is something decidedly discomforting about seeing a woman tell someone to turn a lamp off in case it causes a fire, something she made seem not only possible, but very likely indeed.

What was then only marginally less disturbing (for the fact that I understood so little of it) was when someone questioned whether or not a lamp could really start a fire, to which the response was, and I remember this quite vividly, “Well- stranger things have happened, but, knock on wood.” A short knock accompanies the statement, followed by very slight furrowing of the brow, “-or in this case… asbestos.” I’ve always liked to think that was a joke, but I’m not sure if that makes it any less menacing, considering the deadpan tone in which it was delivered and the various other potentially life threatening features of the house.

There were other things that happened there that struck me as particularly mad, but I’m getting tired and want to upload this before sleep catches me.