Read Online The Backs (2013) by Alison Bruce - Free Book Online

rite. With each door she opened, she braced herself for experiencing further unexpected emotions. But instead the emptiness inside translated into blankness, nothingness, a silent vacuum. This place felt like a dusty Tussauds’ exhibit, the props and figures gone, and the deserted set exposed as something flimsy, meaningless and without any context.
    She left her own room until last. The wallpaper was almost as she remembered it, cream adorned with blue stripes and sprays of sweet pea. She had thought the decor childish at the time, but now, strangely, it seemed far too mature for her: a room she would only grow into in twenty years or so, or maybe only in a different lifetime. She’d always doubted she’d make it to thirty, never mind almost fifty. She opened the window and the fresh air squeezed past her, pushing its way all round the room. She left it to chase out the staleness and retreated downstairs to the back room that her mother had called the playroom. There was a patio door leading into a short garden, but primarily this had been the room where the three kids, a TV set and a bunch of toys had been left to socialize. And, sure enough, they’d all developed a great relationship with that TV set.
    The air felt damper here than it had upstairs, but just as still and forgotten, devoid of molecules of perspiration or exhalation and anything human that was more recent than the ever-present debris of dead skin cells and fallen hairs.
    She had no desire to look into either the attic or the cellar, and her father had muttered to her that all the contents left behind were stored in the outhouse.
    A painted, iron patio chair lay on its side in the grass. She brought that in first, then continued towards the brick-built shed beyond. It had a black painted door that looked like it had been made from four planks with a ‘Z” of timber to hold it in place.
Not locked, just full of crap
, according to her dad.
    He hadn’t been wrong on either point.
    She salvaged one saucepan, one dessert spoon, an old sun-lounger and a dustbin sack filled with pairs of old curtains. She piled them into her arms and, at the last moment, added a rusty shaving mirror and a jam jar containing an assortment of ball-point pens.
    She dumped all of this just inside the playroom, then slipped out to buy enough groceries to last for the next couple of days. Once she returned, she changed her mind about sleeping upstairs and arranged the ‘bed’ and metal chair alongside one another, facing the patio doors but at enough of an angle that her own reflection wouldn’t stare back at her. In the end she didn’t use either but sat down on a folded curtain, with her back to the solid wall, and watched absolutely nothing happening out in the garden.
    Sometime later she closed the curtains, and later still, when she realized she was too restless to sleep, she scooped up the pile of post and newspapers and dumped them on the playroom floor. She sat back down on the curtain, cross-legged this time, and began at the top of the heap, with what looked like the latest freebie newspaper. As she flicked through the first few pages, familiar place names jumped out from meaningless columns of text, stories of minor crimes or complaints from parents struggling through road works while making the school run. These were people who had probably never existed in Cambridge at the time she did, or only in previous incarnations. She’d been away long enough for students to turn into parents, and for most of last decade’s burning ambitions to be scuffed into nothingness by the intervening years.
    She dumped the newspapers in one heap and, for no particular reason, started a junk-mail pile next to it. She glanced at each item in turn, learning that Cambridge now had the best opportunities for solar panels in East Anglia, the most exciting furniture store in the south, and at least three award-winning restaurants capable of dolloping their top cuisine into plastic tubs and