The kids are all in Jake’s room – Leon’s old room. The boys are doing Playstation. Chloë is sitting on the floor with a Scrabble set, throwing the letters at the bed as if they’re darts. She scowls at me, multiple body piercings clearly still dominating her thoughts.
But they all gaze at Leon with real interest and he looks back at them.
‘Hi,’ says Raph.
‘Hi,’ says Leon.
Leon looks at the boy in his room and Raph looks back at the boy in his and it’s as if two childhoods momentarily collide. The kids can’t decide how to react – is he a grown man or a little boy?
Chloë is the first to find something to say. ‘Is it the same?’
Leon looks around, from windows to door, to mantelpiece. ‘Kind of. It’s smaller.’
‘You’re bigger.’
Leon considers this as if he’s only just thought of it. ‘It may be that, yes.’
I tell him how we used to bring friends up to see the amazing Tottenham Hotspur wallpaper.
‘How come you were allowed to have that?’ asks Raph straightaway.
Leon laughs. ‘What, the wallpaper?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I don’t know. I just was. My Dad … and then I grew out of it I suppose, as I hit fifteen. It would have become embarrassing if we hadn’t moved.’
The kids keep on playing, glancing shyly at Leon. I get him to tell me exactly how the room was, where all his stuff was. He says he had the quarter-size snooker table right in the middle, the table on the wall that you could let down and had a train track running on it – the chest of drawers just at the end of his bed.
‘If I had a friend to stay, they slept over there,’ He points to the window corner. ‘There was a Madonna poster over my bed just here.’
Jake registers this with a faint flicker of amusement.
‘Jake likes Madonna,’ says Raph.
‘No, I don’t.’
‘He doesn’t,’ agrees Chloë, ‘he likes Britney.’
‘No, he doesn’t,’ says Raph, ‘he likes Warhammer.’
‘Because he’s a nerd,’ says Chloë.
I tell them That’s Enough.
Leon smiles. I find his openness and enthusiasm very touching – the way he makes no attempt to be above any of this. In the room, he’s just another kid who remembers exactly how it felt to live and sleep and play in here.
I don’t especially want to drag him out of his old room but neither do I want him to feel he has to stand there any longer. I show him Jonathan’s study – the loft we converted – and though he glances at the view, you can see he has no interest in being in this meaningless bit of post-Pidgeon space.
We go down and finish our drinks and then I put some pizzas in the oven for the kids and he doesn’t seem to want to go so I give him another beer. He looks through the photos that John gave me – bends his head and really studies them. He seems absorbed, amazed.
‘Just totally weird to look at these pictures while actually sitting here in the house,’ he says, shaking his head.
The kids eat their pizza and show off. They all talk at once, throwing questions at him. It’s finally dawned on them, I think, that he really did live here.
‘What school did you go to?’
‘Wix’s Lane Primary.’
‘Not Macaulay?’
‘Macaulay was for the posh kids.’
‘Did you used to play on the Common?’
‘All the time, yes.’
‘What’s your sister called?’
‘Lucy.’
‘By the way, do you still support Tottenham Hotspur?’ Raph asks through a mouthful of Roasted Vegetable Pizza.
‘Kind of,’ says Leon, and Raph nods sagely.
‘I may switch from Liverpool,’ says Raph.
‘Just like that?’ says Chloë, laughing at him.
‘I’m just thinking about it,’ Raph tells her hotly.
Leon finishes his beer and gets up to go. I ask him if he’ll come again with his girlfriend perhaps? Or maybe when his Dad comes over? He says he’d love to. ‘It was really good,’ he says, ‘seeing all this. It really meant something.’
As he leaves, I notice Chloë watching him intently.
‘Wasn’t he lovely?’ I say as we load the dishwasher.
‘You never asked him about the ceiling falling in.’
Leon Pidgeon’s my first – the first person to come back to this house – and he’s been relatively easy to find. But I wonder who else I’m going to be able to discover and lure back.
A Costello or a Blaine or a Spawton descendant perhaps? Will I ever track down Vincent Dias or Veronica Ricketts, whoever they are? And if I do, then will they even want to come back? People are unpredictable about that kind of thing. Some do and some don’t want to go back and, especially now I’ve tried it myself, it’s something I can understand. The past can be an unexploded bomb best left untouched.
I’ve been lucky with Leon – he seems to have only good memories of the house; and anyway, if you’re only thirty, then childhood is perhaps still close enough not to be too much of a leap. But are the others going to have the same interest in going back into their adult pasts? I suppose it will all depend on what those pasts were like.
There are two Pidgeon photos I return to again and again.
‘hair all slept-on, reading a story to an absorbed toddler’
John, unshaven and sleepy, sitting by the old brick kitchen fireplace and cradling a very small newborn baby against his shoulder. And John again, lying back in bed this time, hair all slept-on, reading a story to an absorbed toddler in a yellow babygro.
We have photos of Jonathan doing exactly the same things. Shattered and unshaven, holding a day-old Jacob in a chair next to the same fireplace. The sleepy-ecstatic time after the birth of a baby. And lying back in bed in the same lilac and blue bedroom – a small baby sprawled on his chest.
‘the sleepy-ecstatic time after the birth of a baby’
Different men, different babies, different lives perhaps but eerily identical experiences played out again and again against the same backdrop. And only the house knows.
You think your life is the first – of course you do, you have to – but it’s not, it’s all been done before. We all go through the same motions, in the same way, in the same spaces.
You walk a baby up and down the room in the middle of the night, knees caving in with exhaustion as you desperately try to soothe it back to sleep. Someone else has done