The smooth sounds of Nina Simone’s smoky voice filled the space around them. At least his father, Jacob, wasn’t trying to hold a conversation with him anymore. Connor felt the car grind to a stop and the air fell silent as his father turned the engine off. He took a deep breath and looked up at their new home grudgingly. They were parked in front of a three-storey red-brick house, with a balcony running across the front and a garage to the side. It occurred to Connor that there wasn’t a chance in hell their car would fit in that tiny space even though it was smaller than their car back home.
Without speaking to his father, he got out of the car and walked around to the boot to grab the suitcases. He may as well get on with it. No turning back now. The door to the left of their house opened and a girl came trudging out, head hung low, carrying a black sack; she put it in the wheelie bin and disappeared back inside without looking up or saying a word. Connor’s father was still getting to his feet. He pulled himself up and surveyed the area, leaning on his cane with a nostalgic smile on his face.
‘Keys?’ Connor said.
Jacob rummaged in his pockets and pulled out a hefty lump of keys, tossing them to Connor – not to where Connor actually was, but further, enough to make him stretch, to make him work for it. Grabbing them, Connor walked up the steps and let himself into the house. It smelled old and empty.
Jacob wasn’t far behind him, the sound of his left sole followed Connor as it gently scraped across the floor with every other step.
‘Get us a beer from the fridge and let’s christen this place.’
‘Is there even any electricity?’ Connor clicked the light switch and the hallway lit up.
‘Uncle Joel came and sorted things out for us, said he put some brews in there.’
Connor noticed his father’s voice changing already; he had always had an accent that was different to him and the people back in California, but now all traces of any American at all had virtually disappeared. As if Connor didn’t feel different enough.
He went into the kitchen, a small and dingy room with a metre square window facing onto a garden that looked overgrown and untouched.
‘What’s outside?’ he asked as his father appeared behind him again.
‘Who knows what the olds did to it. Looks like they let it go though. Dad used to spend hours in that garden, in that shed right at the end; he spent more time in there than in the house.’
Jacob put his hand on Connor’s shoulder, it was a touch full of force; controlling, making sure his son stayed close. Maybe he was trying to stop him from going outside.
‘I wish I could have met them,’ Connor said, knowing that would unsettle his father. Any suggestion that growing up with just a single dad wasn’t enough for him, that somehow he was missing something from his life, was like poking a raw nerve.
Jacob let go immediately. ‘Well, I left for a reason. You didn’t miss much.’
Connor waited for his father to be distracted before grabbing a can of beer. He unlocked the back door and stepped outside onto a decked platform. He then made his way down some wooden steps into a wild and unruly mess that came up past his waist. Everything was washed with a cold blue light as the sun faded behind the rooftops. Hacking his way through the stinging nettles, pampas grass and bushes with his arms until he got to the end of the garden, he looked back at his father who stood by the back door. Connor was grateful for the distance between them as he clocked his father’s disapproving stare.
He pulled on the door of the shed. The wood was swollen and cracked, but he kicked it a couple of times and jarred it loose. Inside, it was dark and dingy not unlike the house, full of stacked boxes and crates. Connor ventured further, the sparse light cloudy and full of dust.
The boxes nearest the ground had been saturated at one point or another and the bottoms were blown, a mulch of paperwork peeking through the holes. He poked around inside one or two. There were some photo albums and a couple of his father’s school reports. He found a small red exercise book, shiny with a black wreath emblem on the front. Inside, some of the pages were stuck together and the words blurred, but he could just about make out that it was a story of some sort. Connor thumbed through it, wondering what his father might have written about in school, what stories he could have possibly told. He couldn’t make out the writing very well in this light and so he tossed it back in the box. The air was thick and the more stuff he disturbed, the more dust he could feel in his mouth. Leaving the shed, he pulled the door behind him. He might come back and look around here another time.
Next to the shed, there was a large tree with strips of wood nailed horizontally to the trunk that went up into the branches.
‘What’s this?’ he called out to his father who had already pulled up a chair outside with a box of beers to the side of him. They had been travelling for a few hours and so it was nice to be outside, even though it was cold. He couldn’t begrudge him that.
‘Is that still there? It’s a tree house. Or it should be. Your grandfather built it. About the only good thing he ever did.’ He knocked back the beer. ‘It’s probably fucked. I wouldn’t go up there if I were you.’
Ignoring his father’s advice, Connor climbed the makeshift ladder, careful not to spill his beer. He couldn’t see his father on the decking anymore. He kept climbing until his hand reached what felt like a platform. He pulled himself up onto it and, sure enough, he was inside a tree house. It smelled musty and there was a hole in one of the corners, but something about it felt good. Connor moved slowly across the floor, unsure how safe it was. There was a window, but it was filthy. Connor pulled off his jacket and tried to rub away some of the thick dirt that obscured his view. He picked up his beer and splashed the window with the liquid, then rubbed hard with his jacket; it was already smelly from the travelling so he didn’t mind getting it a bit grubby as well.
He managed to clear a fair bit of the muck off the inside of the window. Opening it, he slid his arm through to the outside and wiped that as well. It was smeared and kind of disgusting, but at least now he could see outside. The tree house looked directly into the neighbour’s back garden and onto the rear of their house. Connor smiled as he saw a couple, presumably his new neighbours, kissing against the countertops in the kitchen.
He looked around the tree house and felt a little glimmer of hope. There was no way his father would make it up here – he had a place where he could be by himself, without his father’s watchful eye, without the hand on his shoulder, without feeling like he was to blame for everything that was wrong in the world.
Connor shuffled back against the wall and sat down with his beer in his hand, thinking about the different things he was going to have to get used to here in England. His father had always maintained he would never come back, but when his parents had died and left him the house, it seemed like a logical move after the incident back at home. If Connor was honest, he needed a change too. He couldn’t carry on being the person he was in California; people had started to notice that he wasn’t the same as them, and he couldn’t stand that.
He pulled out the Zippo his father had given him as a gift for his sixteenth birthday and struck the wheel with his thumb, watching the flame flickering in the light breeze that ran through the empty tree house. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it before peering through the window again. The woman next door was up on the countertop now, her legs wrapped around her partner’s waist, his trousers around his ankles. Upstairs, he could see into what looked like a girl’s bedroom; she was sitting at her dressing table, with a lamp on. It was the girl he had seen earlier when they arrived. As Connor watched, she undid the plait in her hair and started to brush it out.
The loud pops of fireworks in the distance unsettled Connor, and he saw the sky to the east flashing pink. People had already started to set them off in the run-up to Bonfire Night. Looking back at the girl, he could see a blank expression on her face which was reflected in her dressing-table mirror. He wondered if she could hear what