13 Rookley Place

I imagine that when she moves her bones creak like the old wooden rocking chair she sits in. But sometimes I doubt if she ever moves at all. Every time I’m here she’s over by the window in the chair, cross-stitching, the incessant creak only interrupted by the clatter of me picking up and putting down objects as I dust. Dusting is a never-ending job here. Each Tuesday the myriad useless objects, spotless the week before, are covered in a fine layer of powder. I move slowly from one end of the sitting room to the other, dragging my feet, the items so familiar to me now that I could recite the order with my eyes closed. The chipped teapot covered in faded pink flowers; the porcelain figurine mare missing a leg and her foal missing an ear; the single turquoise earring with the broken clasp on top of the jewellery box that’s rusted shut; the musty-smelling tasselled lampshade which no longer has a base. But no photographs. It amazes me that someone who has collected such an odd array of worthless junk doesn’t have any. If the knickknacks tell me anything, it’s that she’s an avid collected of things that remind her of better years long past, of which, I’d imagine, photographs would be a prime example. I thought that that’s a characteristic of oldies. Maybe I’m just generalising.

The house seems to yearn for photographs. Even with all the clutter, the jarrah shelves seem bare without discoloured black and white portraits in ornate brass and silver frames, like at my grandfather’s. Even the walls, though covered in gold-framed landscape paintings, seem blank without photographs. The landscapes all look the same; monotonous fields of daisies under blue skies flecked with white fairy floss clouds. So the single oil portrait stands out like a sore thumb, though it’s far smaller than the landscapes. The subject is a pretty young girl with red hair. It could be her. I don’t know – her hair’s white now.

I clean mindlessly, a perpetual spiral of glittery dust forming in the air beside me. The only reason I work here is because I need the money and she pays me so well. I guess she’s just going senile. Maybe she’s lost touch with how much money is worth these days. In any case, she must have had a lot of it at one point. The house is enormous. You can spot it all the way from the other end of Rookley Place, looming in the distance, casting a shadow over the houses on either side of it. My house is at the opposite end of the cul-de-sac, number 72. This is number 13. It’s meant to be an unlucky number. Yet I find it hard to imagine that anyone who ever lived in this house could have managed to be unlucky. Even though it’s on the verge of being decrepit now, it still has an air of grandeur and luxury. Probably all the houses are on land that once was paddock to the horses. I wonder if she’s ever been a horse-rider.

I’ve never spoken to her. Mrs Kent, a woman with thick-rimmed glasses and an impatient manner hired me. At the time I thought Mrs Kent must have been the daughter. Later, I found out that she was the full-time live-in help. She retired about two weeks after I met her. That’s why all of us got hired. We each play our parts. Together we probably only just achieve what Mrs Kent did on her own. I often wonder why Mrs Kent didn’t just hire another ‘Mrs Kent’. It seems absurd that I’m employed simply to clean one room.

I was right up to the far end of the sitting room, dusting the old walnut grandfather clock. It still worked, the dull tick punctuating the silence.

Silence?
No creak of the rocking chair.
She wasn’t rocking anymore.

I whipped around, fear clutching my chest. She was tilted sideways in her chair. My heart lurched. For the frozen instant that I stood unmoving all I could hear was the resonate pounding of my heart in my ears. She moved. I shakily exhaled the breath that had caught in my chest as I came to the realisation that she was merely leant over groping for the dropped cotton that had rolled away from her. I apprehensively began walking across the room to her, my heart still beating fast and hard. She was still stretching for the cotton and hadn’t noticed me yet. As I reached for the yarn of olive green cotton my hand brushed her outstretched fingers. They were coarse like sandpaper. She raised her head slowly as if her neck had stiffened into immobility, from all those hours with it bowed into her lap as she stitched. I was startled when she looked up. She appeared even older this close than she did from afar. Her face was creased with deep wrinkles. Her thins lips matched her brittle wrists. Her skin, and even her fingernails, had taken on the colourless tones of her eyebrows. But the feature that shocked me most was her eyes. Though slightly sunken beneath her brow bone, they were the most brilliant shade of deep brown. We locked gazes and those intense dark eyes bore into mine. Stooped and frail though she was, her stare was fierce, hard and strong. For a brief moment she looked right at me, right through me. And for a fraction of a second I saw myself reflected in those eyes. Then her thin lips broke into a smile and, with great effort, she pushed herself upright in her chair. I supported her shoulder to steady her, and handed her the cotton.
“Thankyou” she croaked, her voice low and rough as if it hadn’t been used in a long time.
“Your welcome,” I murmured offering a half smile and beginning to turn away.
“How wonderful for you. A family, how lovely,” she was saying, having resumed rocking slowly back and forth in her chair. I frowned and turned back puzzled, beginning to ask her what she meant, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was staring at her lap, olive green cotton back in hand, cross-stitching again.

On the way out I passed the caterer in the doorway. She was a timid girl with a big nose that swamped her angular face. We only ever worked opposite shifts and at opposite ends of the house. I wondered if she got as bored as I did, as I questioned myself every day when I saw her in passing. Then, for the first time another curiosity flitted through my mind. I wondered if she knew anything about our employer. I wondered if the caterer wondered too.

*                              *                              *

It was Tuesday again and I was late. I hurriedly rushed up to the front door, flung it open and almost hurtled straight into the caterer. I laughed nervously.
“We’re making a habit of meeting in doorways, huh?”
She didn’t reply, instead looking at a point just below my chin. Her lower lip trembled slightly. She was holding something in her shaking hands.
“Here”, she said almost in a whisper, “It’s your last paycheque.”
“What? Why?” I asked, looking at her quizzically.
“You’re not being fired,” she said softly, “It’s my last shift too.”
She handed it to me and I stared at it, dumbfounded. I looked back up, struggling to say something, anything, but the caterer was already walking away. She paused and looked over her shoulder
“Stay and work today. The place will still need dusting.”

I was in the sitting room. The grandfather clock’s dull ticking punctuated the silence. Silence. No creak of the rocking chair. She wasn’t rocking. I turned around to look at the empty chair despondently, feeling a dull sense of sorrow. The room suddenly felt overwhelmingly hot and stuffy even though it was a cool November afternoon. I needed to get out. I cast aside the duster and headed towards the door. There’s no use for me here.

I walked out of the sitting room and into the hallway, putting a hand on the wall to steady myself. The wall was as course beneath my palm as her hands had been. I wanted to pull my hand away jerkily, but instead I began to walk forward one hand absentmindedly tracing the rough pattern of the wall. The blistering texture of the wall gave way to the splintered wood of the door frame as I reached the entrance to a room I passed everyday. I suddenly had the urge to check if the room was empty and pushed open the door. It slid open noiselessly.

My eyes took a second to adjust to the dim lighting. A picture window directly opposite the doorway came into focus, a mobile suspended from the roof spun slowly nearby. The weak autumn sun was catching in the mobile’s coloured glass and emerging as red and gold beams of light that danced across the room. They skipped and jumped over the photographs, darting behind the frames where they disappeared.

Photographs!

Photographs, everywhere! On every available surface in the room there were black and white photographs.

Walking around in awe, I run my fingers over them. They seem to run in chronological order. The first lot are of two teenagers, sitting side by side and smiling broadly. Next, the same two freckled face kids have grown into a young woman and a young man, sitting closer, blushing slightly and looking shyly up at the camera from underneath long lashes. Then, they are both in their twenties. In one photo I can just see her curled hair from beneath her long white veil. The white gown falls smoothly from her slender shoulders. He stands beside her, his hair brushed back sleekly, standing proud in his suit. They gaze at one another adoringly. Standing in a frame directly beside it, the young man is standing rigidly, a solemn expression on his face. He is dressed in a uniform that I recognise from my history textbooks as belonging to the army. Slightly to the right of this picture, she sits alone in another frame with a small baby held protectively in her arms, a strong and hard stare fixed at, or rather right through, the camera. I gaze slowly around the room, slightly perplexed. There doesn’t appear to be any more recent photos then this one. My eyes come to rest on a cot in the corner and my throat closes up with the realisation that her daughter never needed a bigger bed.

Near the cot, one photograph in particular jumps out at me. It sits humbly in the centre of the mantelpiece in an ordinary rectangular frame, no larger than the rest of the photos. I walk over to it, my mouth feeling dry, my throat still constricted. What strikes me about it is not its size, or a decorative frame, or even its colour for it, like the rest of them, is in black and white. It is the familiarity. It is exactly the same as the portrait in the sitting room. Impulse takes hold of me and I reach for the photograph quickly, knocking it off the mantelpiece. It falls to the floor and shatters there, facedown, in a million pieces of jagged glass. I stand irresolute in the centre of the sparkling glass circle I just made, my heart racing from the sudden crash of the smashing frame. Through the cracks in the back of the broken mount I can see the reverse of the photo. Something is written on it in slanted curled writing. I crouch down to read it, brushing the glass carefully aside.

Wouldn’t it be magnificent if you could take photographs in colour? One day soon I’ll paint this photograph onto a canvas in a thousand different oil colours! Then I will be able to capture your fiery red hair and the exact shade of your eyes. Those eyes! The precise colour of the autumn horizon at dusk. The sun sets in your eyes, darling. My only hope for our child is that it gets your eyes! I should’ve taken this portrait from the thigh up instead of the shoulders to show our baby growing there inside your stomach. I can’t wait to meet it.
Yours forever, Ben.

I slowly stood back up and stared down at the small, miserable, broken mess on the floor. It was so insignificant there. Just like all the worthless broken items back in the sitting room. And just as her life had been. Small, insignificant, broken, lonely. I imagined her by herself in the sitting room every Christmas, looking out through her window, watching the snow fall on the rooves of the houses nearby. Through the windows of the houses, with failing eyesight, she can just make out happy families around Christmas trees, eagerly unwrapping presents. Tears welled up in my eyes, I couldn’t stand here to be here anymore and I turned to leave the room.

The large cross-stitch took up a vast portion of the back wall, hanging beside the door through which I had entered. Even from a few metres away, I could tell that some parts were more faded than others, as if the whole thing had been completed over a number of years. The golden sunset was stitched in rich colours of golden brown, burnt orange and fading crimson framed by a neat and deliberate border in olive green. Where the edges of the border met in the bottom right corner, the dark stitching was obviously recent.

And I began to cry, the tears that had been welling up in my eyes now spilling down my face. Not everything had been easy for her. She had known love and happiness. And she had lost it. She had her dreams broken and spent the rest of her life trying to relive them through this small, dim room. But maybe she had found happiness again. Even if she had only found that happiness here in this room; even if it were only for a short time; even if it was only a fraction of what it had once been. Or maybe that happiness was just one part of her life, like this room is just one part of 13 Rookley Place, like the sunset is only one part of the day. Perhaps that’s part of the mystery of them all. I’ll never know for sure.

When I opened the front door, the autumn chill met me with unrepentant ferocity. The breeze lifted my hair as I wrapped my thin coat tighter around myself. As I reached the end of the path, I turned to look back at 13 Rookley Place, looming above me imposingly. Even in all its age and decay it was commanding. The setting sun had just reached where sky met roof, illuminating it golden. For a brief moment, the roof’s grey slats glowed golden brown.

Now she was part of the horizon. She had found the autumn sunset.