What Was on the Shelf

By the end of the first week I had a system, and I'm aware of how that sounds. People build systems around the most frightening things in their lives the way you'd build a fence around a well. The fence doesn't fill the well in. It just lets you walk past it. My system was the notebook, and a torch by the bed, and a rule. The rule was: count once, at night, with your eyes, from the top of the stairs. Write the number down. Do not open the eighth door. Do not stand near the eighth door. Look, count, write, go back to bed. Four nights I kept the rule and four nights the number was eight. The door was always at the end of the landing and it was always shut and the brass handle always had its hundred years of hands in it, and every single morning it was gone and the striped wallpaper was old and undisturbed where it had been. And every morning, too, something else was gone. The second morning it was a scarf — long, grey, the one I'd had since university, and I went looking for it to walk to the shop and could not find it, and worse, could not properly remember the weight of it, the way wool has a weight. The third morning it was a song. I can't explain that better than to tell you that I went to hum the song I always hum when I'm cooking, the one my mum used to have on, and I opened my mouth and there was nothing in the place the song lived. The fourth morning it was the name of the street I grew up on. I sat with my tea and I reached for it the way you reach for a light switch in the dark and my hand closed on wall. I wrote them all in the notebook. Scarf. Song. The street. Underneath I stopped writing very tired. I started writing, in small letters, as if small letters were safer: the house is counting. and every night it counts to eight it takes one back. It took me until the seventh night to understand what the eighth room was for, and I understood it the way you understand a sum — all at once, with a cold drop in the stomach. The door appeared at night and was gone by day, and the house was, gently and without any malice that I could feel, lighter every morning by one thing of mine. The room wasn't a room. The room was where the things went. Every object, every song, every street I had ever stood on — all of it was being carried, while I lay refusing to count, through the eighth door, and the door took it somewhere the morning couldn't reach, and shut. And here is why I am writing this down at last, all of it, scarf and clock and street, fast, tonight, while I still have the hands to do it and the memory of what a notebook is for. It is the eighth night. I have just come up the stairs. I have just stood at the top of the landing with my torch, keeping my rule, and I have counted with my eyes — bathroom, bedroom, bedroom, box room — and the eighth door is at the end of the landing, shut, the same as every night. But tonight the eighth door is open. Just slightly. A hand's width of dark. And on the landing floor, in the spill of my torch, halfway between the box room and that open door, somebody has set down, very neatly, with great care, my grandmother's brass carriage clock. The hands at twenty past four. It's not taking anymore. Tonight it's offering. And I have understood, standing here, that a house that has spent a week learning exactly what I am made of has not been emptying me out for nothing. It has been making room. And it would like, now, very much, for me to come and see what it has made room for. I am going to write down the number first. Eight. There. And then I am going to do the one thing my notebook has begged me, all week, in my own small careful handwriting, never to do.