The Transition. Luke Kennard

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СКАЧАТЬ the name MRS GENEVIEVE TEMPERLEY landed face up on the carpet. Genevieve had apparently judged The Go-Between the novel least likely to appeal to Karl or to Janna or Stu in the event of a spot check. Well, whatever. He felt happy that she had a secret. What was she going to use it for? A work do? Clothes? It was harmless.

      What if she decided she’d had enough and got on a train? What if she skipped town? What if she caught the train to the airport? What if she skipped town, fled the country and didn’t take her medication? God, he loved her. He wanted to look at the photo.

      He searched every book on the shelf, but it wasn’t there. Maybe Genevieve had found it. Had found it ages ago, hated him for it. Maybe it was a fairly innocuous thing to have by most people’s standards, but the fact remained he had taken the photo, four years ago, while Genevieve was asleep, two T-shirts wrapped around the camera to muffle the sound of the shutter, and some of the frisson of looking at the photo came from her unawareness of its existence. A betrayal. A seedy little voyeuristic betrayal. Is that why … No. He had last ogled the photo when they were packing a few days ago, while he was loading the books into a cardboard box, while Genevieve was out of the room. He distinctly remembered slipping it back into The Prince. Fucking hell.

      Karl put Genevieve’s credit card back in The Go-Between, decided to say nothing and sadly went back to reviewing the chair. He took breaks in the kitchen to make tea or coffee and eat chocolate digestives, which he consumed at the rate of a hyperactive child. For lunch he boiled an egg and baked a tomato and garlic flatbread he found in the fridge. It was a Smart Fridge. He had read about them, reviewed a couple of models. The back of the fridge was a locked metal door which opened directly onto the backstreet and it got replenished every four days by an automated delivery service. You didn’t even need to order anything unless you wanted something special.

      After overeating he went straight back to his work.

      THIS RESPECT FOR Janna and Stu’s privacy lasted until that afternoon, when Karl made a reconnaissance of the ground floor. The dining room had feature wallpaper depicting a storybook woodland. Karl cracked a walnut by throwing it against the tiled floor. In the living room two unblemished white sofas sat in an L shape. A vast flat-screen TV faced a large abstract painting on the opposite wall. It was grey, black and white; the paint looked like it had been slathered on with a trowel and could have been taken for a DIY process abandoned part way through. Karl didn’t like it, but he liked that Janna and Stu liked it. He liked that there were things in the world people loved which he didn’t understand.

      When he turned he noticed a low emanation of yellow light between the black-painted floorboards by the living-room door. Some kind of underfloor lighting? The light vanished, and Karl imagined the click of a switch, although he heard nothing. Then the light appeared again, for a moment – as if someone had forgotten something and returned temporarily to retrieve it – then off again. Karl lay down and tried to look between the floorboards, but the gap was too narrow. ‘Hello?’ he said. He got up, brushed the dust off his face and stamped on the floor. It sounded hollow, but this meant nothing – the usual cavity under the floorboards. What he had seen, presumably, was the glow of a light fitting mounted in a ceiling beneath the ground floor. He walked to the hallway and stamped on the red tiles, which felt solid. He unlocked the front door and walked into the street. The front garden had a cherry tree and pale Hepworth-like stone. There was no indication that there might be a cellar. He tried the door of the understairs cupboard. It was locked. It had a big Chubb keyhole, which was a bit much for a cupboard. He looked in the little wooden key house by the front door and it didn’t contain any likely keys, which only cemented his notion. Something else was wrong, something askew, but it took him a while to identify it.

      ‘There are no books,’ he said to Genevieve, that night. ‘Unless you count the Blu-ray manual.’

      Genevieve shrugged.

      ‘They’re not readers,’ she said. ‘Don’t be a snob.’

      The next day he decided to explore the first floor. He let himself fall backwards onto Janna and Stu’s king-size bed. It felt pliant and firm, like lying in plasticine, but then it moulded to his form. He looked upwards at the black metal chandelier – a silhouette. In the corner there was what looked like a trapeze – a chrome bar hanging from a ceiling reinforcement on two wires. Behind it a framed print, white on red in large block capitals:

      GET

      THINGS

      DONE

      From their bedroom window you could see the neighbours’ gardens. The one on the left was dominated by a trampoline, but its flower beds were very neat, with lines of bedding plants and a large fuchsia. Janna and Stu’s garden was a well-maintained vegetable allotment, all the way down to the garage. When did they have time to work on that? In contrast the garden to the right was completely overgrown with brambles, taller than the fence and thick as snakes; some fresh and livid green, some dead grey husks. There was a bald patch in the middle of the wasteland, and Karl was surprised to see a single, gnarled foot and the beginnings of a grey-haired shin gently kicking. He craned his neck, but this only revealed a little more of the shin. Crazy old man sunbathing in his bramble forest.

      He felt a prickle on his hand and looked down to see a tiny brown spider crawling over it. Karl recalled hearing something about Lyme disease being transmitted by ticks which looked like small spiders, so he flicked it onto the windowsill and crushed it with a corner of his wallet. The spider curled up and was still twitching when he took the wallet up. You have to really finish the job, reduce it to something non-sentient, a paste of minerals. He used his thumb. Karl noticed a silver key propped up in the corner of the windowsill, a substantial little Chubb key. His brain lit up as if he had picked up the key in a computer game. It had to be for the locked cupboard. He grabbed it and ran down the stairs.

      The door to the understairs cupboard chocked open when he turned the key and in the darkness Karl could make out a bracketed shelf holding a pot of screws and a torch. He picked up the torch and a square of card fluttered to the ground. He knelt. It was the photo of his wife, lying on her side, eyes closed, a half-smile, one arm folded under her breasts. It felt like someone had hit a mute button in his head.

      He put the photo in his pocket and was about to turn on the torch when he heard the jangle of a bunch of keys being dropped on the front doorstep and Janna swearing. He just had time to close the cupboard, lock it and pocket the key before Janna’s key was in the front door. When she came through he was walking down the corridor and turned, as if surprised.

      ‘Oh, hi Karl,’ she said, brightly.

      ‘You’re back early,’ he said. ‘Tea?’

      ‘I work from home Tuesday afternoons. I’m fine, thanks,’ said Janna. ‘Is Genevieve at work?’

      ‘School, yep. Inter-tutor football tournament, actually.’

      ‘Oh, that’s fun.’ Janna sat down on the hallway chaise longue to take off her shoes. ‘Although I can’t really imagine Genevieve with a PE whistle.’

      ‘Ha. No.’ Karl had wandered back into the hallway with the full kettle. ‘I really like your chaise longue,’ he said.

      ‘Oh, thanks,’ said Janna. ‘I reupholstered it, actually. Evening class.’

      ‘Wow. That’s ace.’

      Was ace something he said? Was it something anyone said? Was the general consensus that ace was an acceptable term of approbation?

      ‘Karl?’

      ‘Yes?’

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