I slot the key into one of the top drawers, on the left-hand side.
The key slides in smoothly and turns in the lock with a dullclick.
Pulling on the little brass ring, I ease open the top drawer. It’s stiff, but it gives to a little bit of pressure, the wood scraping. At first, all I see is the faded floral lining paper just like my grandma used to have in her Welsh dresser, crinkling and curling at the edges. But then I see it: an old wallet, brown leather curled and creased with age. I pick it up, my fingers tracing the initialsDFstamped in the corner. It’s empty. In the next drawer is a scarf of purple-checked wool, folded neatly. I turn it over in my hands, the wool still soft to the touch. The faintest smell ofperfume catches in my nose—the ghost of a scent, like a flower pressed flat between the pages of a book. The soft fragrance is a delicate counterpoint to the dry, dusty air.
The next drawer down holds an old black leather dog collar without a lead. The small circular tag is scratched and worn, a name etched into the metal.Woody. On the flipside is167 Sumner Street, above a landline phone number without an area code. I don’t know the area well enough to know how close we are to that address, and presumably dear old Woody is long gone.
Another drawer rattles slightly as I open it to reveal a couple of rings, a plain gold band and a slim signet ring with a black stone inlaid. Neither of them look particularly fancy. Each of them is threaded onto the key-ring loop of a single brass key, a door key by the look of it, attached by a thin metal chain to a key ring in the flat shape of a two-dimensional tennis ball. Maybe a key to our own front door? I need to get another set cut but it will be handy in the meantime to have an extra one for my brother. I pocket the key, making a mental note to try it later.
I pull open the fifth drawer. This has become like some strange, badly lit version of an old TV game show.What’s in the Box?! Deal or No Deal. Or a weirdAntiques Roadshowin which none of the exhibits are actually worth anything. In this drawer is a pair of glasses with slender tortoiseshell frames and rectangular lenses, the arms folded as if someone has just taken them off for bed one night, put them in the drawer for safekeeping, and forgotten all about them. One of the lenses has a thin crack across the bottom half, like a single strand of hair laid across the plastic. I take them out and extend the arms, peering through powerful lenses that have the dull patina of age and dust and old grime like everything else in here. I fold theglasses back up and put them back as I found them, checking for a glasses case I might have missed. But there is nothing else.
The next drawer down appears to be empty at first. Angling the phone torch inside, I see a dull edge of metal and glass. A watch, its thick brown leather strap dappled with age. I shine my light on it to make out the words in the center of the dial, below the symbol of a crown.Rolex Explorer. I don’t know much about watches but I know Rolex is an expensive brand. Somebody probably hunted high and low for this watch. But judging by the dust covering everything, probably not for a very long time.
I take it out of the drawer and lay it in the palm of my hand, smooth metal cool against my skin. The hands frozen at ten past eleven of some long-ago day. A year ago? Ten? Twenty? Squinting in the dim light, I can just about make out the date window, digits stopped on the twenty-fifth of the month. Engraved initials on the back above a date.EJS 11–29–75. A treasured possession that no longer did what it was designed to do and probably cost too much to repair, but nevertheless was too precious to throw away—and so it had ended up here, forgotten and lost, in limbo. I knew what that was like. Our old garage had been full of similar bits and pieces, old bikes and gadgets and toys with sentimental value.
Orjunk, as Jess called it. Most of ours had only gone to the landfill when we came to move house and Jess finally put her foot down.
I give the watch a shake. Nothing. But it certainly is a handsome piece of precision timekeeping, a real classic. Whoever EJS was, they had been a lucky person to have owned such a beauty. Absentmindedly, I wind it up and—to my amazement—the watch starts ticking again. It works.Not broken. Just abandoned, then. Put in here for safekeeping and forgotten about.
There are only two drawers left. Something small and solid rattles when I open the one on the left. The light from my torch beam bounces off dull silver plastic and it’s a moment before I realize what it is: an old mobile phone, its silver casing dulled with age. My very first phone had been similar to this one, a flip phone with a clamshell design, back when I’d thought it wassocool. Now it’s obsolete, discarded in a drawer and forgotten about like millions of others. Somewhere I had three or four old phones too, each one upgraded at the end of a contract and kept,just in case. Jess always sold hers on eBay but I liked to keep my old handsets in the event my new one got dropped or lost or stolen—even though that has never happened.
The little Motorola feels small and dense compared to my iPhone, more like the size of a small chocolate bar. It flips open with a satisfying spring, the screen on the inside blank and tiny, barely bigger than a postage stamp. Below it, an old-school twelve-button keypad and a handful of other buttons, phone icons for accept call, hang up, four arrows pointing up, down, left, and right. It can’t be that old but it feels like a museum piece, a relic of a simpler time when these things were meant only for making phone calls and sending the occasional text.
I shake my head and smile.God, I sound like my dad.
But it’s a novelty to handle a mobile with any buttons. This style of handset was so old, so out of fashion that it had actually come full circle and attained a kind of retro cool, like vinyl records and Polaroid cameras. One button on the right-hand side even has the on/off symbol, a short vertical line enclosed in a circle. Curious to see the display, I hold it down with my thumb.
Nothing happens. The little screen stays black. Of course it does—it’s probably not been charged in years, the battery drained flat long ago. The charging socket is small and circularbut I reckon that somewhere, packed away in a box, I probably still have an old charging cable that will fit.
The last drawer is empty except for the faded floral paper liner. I reach all the way to the back, a little dip of disappointment that there is nothing left to find in this curious corner of my new house.
I sit carefully down in the old armchair, springs squeaking under my weight, and run a hand down the dark wood of the dresser with newfound interest. It’s a fairly random collection of items, made strange by the fact that each one has a drawer to itself. Almost like the way a child might arrange a collection of favorite objects; each particular thing in its proper place. I lock each drawer individually and push the dresser back into its original position against the wall. We’ll have to figure out what to do with this room, this old stuff, at some point—but not today.
There is a sudden frenzy of noise from somewhere below me in the house, running footsteps on the stairs, my children’s voices rising in a competing babble, and Coco barking enthusiastically in reply.
I turn to leave and then, without really thinking too much about it, I unlock the bottom drawer again and take out the little flip phone, holding it in my hand for a second, feeling the dense weight of it, a shape familiar and foreign at the same time. The quaint, simple charm of technology that had been cutting edge when I was a teenager, but was now antique.
I slip it into the pocket of my jeans and duck as I head out.
What Ishouldhave done was close that door and nail it shut. Board over the whole side of the room, cover it with new shelves, and forget the dusty annex was ever there. Because some things are better left buried.
But it was already too late for that.
4
The brass key with the tennis ball keyring doesn’t fit the front door or the back door, or anywhere else in the house. I guess it must be from a time before the locks were changed. I drop it into the key bowl by the front door. It must fitsomewhere.
For our first meal altogether in the new house, I pick up Styrofoam boxes of fish, chips, and mushy peas from a chippie on Derby Road. The dining room table is soon spread with paper plates and unwrapped meals, salt and pepper sachets strewn about; the air fills with the tang of vinegar as we eat, mouth-watering steam rising from freshly battered cod and salty thick-cut chips. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was; lunch had been half a sandwich and an apple, wolfed down as I worked with the removals guys to bring in load after load from the lorry.
Everyone, it seems, is as hungry as me. Even Daisy tucks in without complaint, dipping chips into a large pool of ketchup as her older sister leans over to cut her scampi into bite-sized pieces. Callum has discarded the wooden knife and fork from the takeaway, holding a piece of cod like a chicken drumstick as he devours it.
Jess stands at the head of the table, holding her phone up to capture a selfie for posterity.
“Come on then, everyone,” she says. “Cheese!”
Leah pulls a face. “Really, Mum?”
“First supper in our lovely new home.” She stands with her back to us to take a picture, then another. “This is a special occasion.”
