9. Apr, 2022

'Auction House'

“You mean, this is it? This is ‘the dream home’?”

Abigail was stunned, to say the least. She was so utterly astonished by the sight that met her eyes when they turned off the road to it that for a moment, she was speechless. When she did speak, it was impossible to say whether she was pleased or horrified.

“It will be” Will assured her, looking at the dilapidated heap with visionary delight.

“But, Will – this isn’t a house! It’s a heap of stones!” she protested. “This isn’t the real one, is it? Come on, joke over.”

“No. It is,” he replied, as if it were quite reasonable to present this to her. “Brilliant, isn’t it? Cheap as chips, Abbie.”

Abbie walked forward over what had once been a pathway to peer inside the dereliction. There were desolate looking things in it.

“Oh, Will – it’s so sad to see! Who lived in it? All their old things are around, look – there are books and records on the floor and bits of old furniture.”

“I don’t know. No family and nobody to take it over. We have to clear it out obviously, but…that’s why I got it. I mean, looks like nothing’s been done for years but the structure’s sound.”

“How do you know?” Abbie demanded suspiciously. “You bought it sight unseen. You let that one slip.”

“I saw the brochure and read the spec. Besides, it’s in a lovely spot.”

By that, he meant it was on its own, a short way off from the outskirts of the village nearby, and in a kind of countryside, if you counted an encroaching, self seeded spinney and an outlook to somebody’s fields as that.

“Will…this is madness.”

“I know, but – it’s great, isn’t it?”

Will was so delighted that she began to believe him as they wandered through the place, noting original fireplaces and high, if cracked ceilings.

“It’s airy anyway,” commented Abbie, peering through a hole which showed some daylight after they had ventured upstairs.

“Oh, look, I’ll soon have it tamed. A brilliant project. We can rough it a bit once we’ve a couple of rooms sorted to live in,” Will assured her, quite as breezily as the draught blowing over Abbie’s head.

“We’ll have to,” said Abbie grimly, but they were young and believed in adventure, so she was up for it in a way. Besides, it was Will’s money, an unexpected windfall from bitcoin ventures, the money he had made from it as unreal to Abbie as this place itself was.

“We ought to have a camp out this weekend and get the feel of it,” Will proposed.

“Let’s hope we’re doing it alone,” joked Abbie. “It could have been squatter central for years in here.”

And yet, somehow, it didn’t seem to have been. The place had that unexpectedly abandoned feeling of all those YouTube videos which urban explorers made about ruined houses they ventured into. Abbie and Will liked to watch them and discuss how easily a place could be rescued. Abbie just hadn’t expected to be doing it in real life.

Abbie picked up the odd, curling photograph of now anonymous people, black and white fading into greys, left out in indifferent daylight. Moments for recollection with nobody left to remember either those, or the people who had featured in them. Most were of a boy turning from child to adolescent, leaning nonchalantly against a car at picnics, perhaps in the sixties. Later, he crouched proudly over a motorbike, looking too young to ride one, so it probably wasn’t his. Sometimes, they were of people in the garden, on a mowed lawn. The outlook was quite different from the wild grass tangle she could see from the window now, apart from the entwined trunks of two May trees, so close they appeared to be kissing. The picture she identified had the trees in flower, as they were now, delicate pink in reality, just more greys in the photograph. In this one the boy was with a man, perhaps his dad or uncle, who was smiling out.

“Look, Will – I wonder if it was always just the two of them here?”

Will looked and shrugged, then she turned the photo over and read in faded pencil,

‘Duncan with Alan, 1962,’ which made it sound as if someone else had written it. Well, of course they had, whoever had taken the photograph, presumably! But who was that? Never mind, they would never know who had lived here, and it would be their wreck now. On a warm May afternoon like this, a hole in one of the ceilings did not seem too threatening and the roof tiles they scanned were in the main still sound, remarkably. That would be the first thing to sort out.

   They arrived to ‘camp in’, as they had started calling it, while the weather remained fine. They had ordered a skip for the following week and wanted to get a good clearing out ready for it. At the village, they stopped in its mini supermarket to get a few easy provisions and scouted out the pub meals they intended to dine out on when clearing up palled. There was water and they could turn the power on for electricity, so the microwave they brought worked. Disappointingly, nobody seemed to have heard of their house, or know any disturbing tales about its history or abandonment. Nor did anyone remember anybody who had lived in it.

      “I hope you’ve told someone where we are,” said Abigail, only half joking. “If we vanish too, nobody round here would have the foggiest, would they?”

       “No, but Dad and my brother would. They’re joining us tomorrow to sort that roof out. Dad’s just texted me,” said Will, as his phone pinged an alert. “I knew he wouldn’t be able to wait.”

Will’s dad was a builder who had no faith in a non-builder son knowing what he was doing. His younger brother still liked to muck in and think he might like to learn the trade Will had never been interested in, being a game designer who lived by the internet. Will and Abbie picnicked under the May tree, and he hung fallen blossoms over her ears like cherries.

“They’re like little bunches of flowers, aren’t they?” he observed.

“Cheapskate!” laughed Abbie. “You’re not fobbing me off with May blossom. It is pretty, though. Oh, who’s that?”

“Who?” asked Will following her eyes.

 To them both, it looked as if somebody wheeling a bike of some kind had stopped at the gate and was looking over at them through the spindly ash trees, which waved together crowding round the old driveway entrance.

“Hello?”

Will got up shading his eyes against the glare of the sun going down over the farmer's fields, which had been empty of anything except green barley any time they looked. A puttering sound suggested somebody was working out there now though, with a tractor or something.

“Trick of the light,” said Abbie. “Funny that.”

They both got up and walked idly down to look out, but there were only trees and the sound had died away, whatever vehicle it was driven off somewhere out of sight. Now that they were on the move, they idled round the outside of the building to the collapsed looking garage lean to at one side. In it was an old and very rusted up heap of motorbike parts – perhaps from the very one proudly featured in the photo Abbie had picked up that first day, or others which came later. A blackbird began to sing in a nearby tree, singing melting notes of great sweetness. Leaves rustled in a breeze sounding, when Abbie closed her eyes, like the sea. It felt, all of a sudden, very like the middle of nowhere.  Back inside, they continued some rigorous clearing up ready for the skip.

“Out with the old and in with the new!” pronounced Will, dusting cobwebs and dirt off his hands.

But they hadn’t brought anything yet, only themselves, the microwave and an old duvet for a mattress come sleeping bag. If anyone were temporary here, thought Abbie (carefully putting the anonymous photographs into a plastic box for bits because it seemed too cruel not to) it’s us. She found the one which had ‘Duncan with Alan, 1962’ scribbled on the back again, a lot more faded out than she remembered, but perhaps her mind had filled in the details. The one of the young boy and motorbike, with his scowl and quiff of attitude as if he were older than about fourteen, she could not put her hands on. They drank some wine after they had spent the evening throwing mess out to make way for Will’s dad and brother to get through to examine things, and went to sleep finally full of what seemed, when they weren’t actually looking at the place, possibilities.

“See?” said Will with a grin. “It’s like we’ve always been here already, isn’t it?”

The following morning, Abbie woke up early to the sound of birdsong again, very close by since the indoors was partly outdoors due to decayed window frames and broken glass here and there. Will must have already got up, so she wandered through to find him, calling out. The living room definitely looked clearer, she approved, then noticed another scattering of photographs, like dead leaves, which she had missed. She picked them up to look as Will came back through with two steaming mugs of tea.

“Dad must have set off at the crack,” he said laughing. “But he can’t find us. Useless on Google map. I’d have thought Callum would be able to.” He texted quickly back with the address and postcode again, telling his dad to let his brother do the internet map reading. “What?” he asked Abbie, noticing her expression.

“Look at these,” she said in puzzlement.

Will came over. The May trees featured in the garden again and underneath them was a blurry image of a couple of people, out of focus.

“They must have moved,” he said. “Is it them again or someone else?”

“I’m not sure,” answered Abbie. “It could be, one’s taller than the other but they’re both sitting. Right where we were last night,” she added.

“Well, I expect people did, don’t you?” he answered. “That’s the spot you would sit in out there.”

“Yes,” she agreed. She turned other photographs over but they were all overexposed, or had faded away altogether in the daylight they had been open to all this time. She put them down again. “Let’s get on a bit, shall we? Then go to the pub for lunch with your dad and Callum later.”

“Good thinking,” agreed Will.

They ate the packet croissants they had bought yesterday for breakfast and got on with creating a spoil heap outside ready for the skip when it arrived. It was a long time into the morning now and Will called a halt, declaring that it was really time his dad and brother had found their way by now.

“Maybe they stopped off for a snack or something on the way,” suggested Abbie.

“Maybe,” shrugged Will, picking up his phone and then tutting. “No message! I’ll text them again. No, I’ll ring them.”

He put the phone beside him to ring out on speakerphone, sitting next to Abbie on the dusty old couch where she was again looking at the photographs she had put down earlier. Will idly picked one of them up.

“How weird!” he said. “It looks like us!” A back view of a couple in the garden looking out at the gate showed people very much their height and build, in a faded black and white snap. At the gate was an indistinct image of a youth wheeling a motorbike away. Will turned over the picture. On the back, in faded pencil it said, ‘With Duncan, 1962’. “Only obviously, it isn’t us. Good old Duncan again. What?” he asked Abbie, who was picking others of the pictures up and looking strange.

“Well…these pictures were all faded out or blank  before. Now they’ve got things in them. And…I think that is us!”

“Oh don’t be daft!” retorted Will. His call had not been answered and he picked up his mobile to text again. “Where the hell have they got to?” he frowned. “Well let’s crack on again. I’ll give Mum a ring in a bit if they don’t turn up. Must be some change of plan. You know what Dad’s like. Probably got a call out to a job and went there first if they couldn’t find this place.”

“Yes,” agreed Abbie. “I suppose so.”

She looked again at the images on the table. The two figures in the little snaps, at a bit of a distance, could fancifully have been them, or anybody really, just like those other ones she had picked up before. A cold thought came to her that ‘Alan’, like them, had not actually known Duncan, but been caught up in a photograph with him. Why she thought that phrase ‘caught up’ she didn’t know, but somehow, she didn’t like it. The detritus of the rooms, as she looked about now, seemed more layered, things from perhaps not just one person’s life but brought in. Books included some quite recent paperbacks, dog eared now in the litter. And in the kitchen, that newish kettle had still worked, hadn’t it?

“Will? Who was selling this house at the auction?” she asked.

“Er – dunno. I never met a person. It was just up as a cheap derelict lot handled by the place itself. I only wandered in by chance.”

“I think we should go down to the village and look for your dad and your brother,” she suggested.

“No, what if they turn up here and we’ve gone off? They won’t know it’s the right place. We’ll stick. We’re here now.”

Abbie had to agree, with great unease, that they were. But would they every be able to leave again? Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself. This is 2022 not 1962, and they were hardly likely to be supernaturally with ‘Duncan’ in some old photographs, were they? But when she looked again, those two figures were even more like a back view of herself and Will, and they appeared to be seeing off a person who had got away…didn’t they?