Seven

The estate agent told me the house had seven rooms, and she said it the way you'd mention the colour of a door — a fact, settled, nothing to dwell on. Two up, two down, plus the kitchen, the bathroom, and the little box room at the end of the landing that she called a study with the hope of someone trying to sell it. Seven. I remember writing it in my notebook, because I write everything in my notebook now. Seven rooms. Good light. Smells faintly of the previous owner's dog. I bought it because it was cheap and because cheap, after the year I'd had, felt less like a bargain and more like an apology the world was finally getting around to. I moved in on a Tuesday in March, in the rain, with everything I still owned in nine cardboard boxes and a hired van I had to return by six. The first night I didn't count anything. The first night I sat on the floor of the front room — there were no chairs yet — and ate chips out of the paper and listened to the house being a house. They make noises, old houses. The radiators tick. The floorboards take their time settling, like they're getting comfortable around you. I'd read about that. I told myself it was nice. I was so determined, that first night, to find everything nice. It was the third night that I counted. I wasn't trying to. I'd gone up to bed and I was lying there not sleeping, the way I mostly don't, and I was doing the thing I do where I walk through a space in my head to make it feel like mine. Front door. Hall. Front room on the left, that's one. Kitchen straight ahead, two. Back room behind the front room, three. Up the stairs. Bathroom, four. My bedroom, five. The second bedroom I hadn't unpacked into yet, six. And the box room at the end of the landing. Seven. Seven. I felt the small click of it landing right, the way a number does when it matches. I almost slept after that. But I didn't sleep, not quite, and lying there in the not-quite I did the walk again, slower, because that's also a thing I do — I check my own work. Front door, hall, front room, kitchen, back room, stairs, bathroom, my room, second bedroom, box room. And a door past the box room. I lay very still. I knew the landing. I had carried nine boxes up that landing in the rain four days running. It was short. It had the bathroom, two bedrooms, the box room, and then the wall, the end, a window looking down at next door's gutter. There was no door past the box room. There was nowhere for a door past the box room to go. I told myself I'd miscounted. That's the reasonable thing, isn't it, and I am a reasonable person, I have a notebook full of being reasonable. You picture a landing in the dark and you add a door the way you add a step that isn't there and stumble. I told myself that, and I even half believed it, and I got up anyway. Because the only way to make a wrong count stop itching is to go and stand in the truth of the place and count it with your eyes. I put the landing light on. I stood at the top of the stairs in a borrowed coldness, the floorboards taking their time around my feet, and I looked down the short landing of my cheap apologetic seven-room house. Bathroom. Bedroom. Bedroom. Box room. And, at the end, where the window and the wall should have been, a door. Shut. Painted the same tired cream as all the others. A brass handle with a hundred years of hands worn into it. Eight.