Daisy gives her best cheesy grin while Callum leans around behind her, his tongue sticking out. I hold up my plastic cup of Prosecco in a toast at the far end of the table.
Jess takes a couple more then sits down and Leah leans over her, index finger swiping quickly through the pictures.
“Not that one,” our elder daughter says, swiping through the images. “Or that one. That one’sawful. You can post the last one if you absolutely have to butdon’ttag me in anything.”
Jess smiles and gives our daughter a peck on the cheek. “I wouldn’t dream of it, darling girl.”
Daisy stands up in her seat. “Let me see, Mummy!”
Our youngest grins at the sight of her own smiling face on the screen, the novelty of a selfie still fresh and fascinating to her four-year-old eyes. The rest of us return to what remains of our fish and chips as Jess types rapidly on the phone before the chirrupingpingof an uploaded post.
I study a stack of cardboard boxes as I sip my Prosecco, the sweet bubbles fizzing on my tongue. Without curtains or carpets or any decoration, under a single bare bulb, the high-ceilinged room feels echoey and unloved—like a space that has been empty for a long time, waiting to be filled again. Long cardboard boxes stamped with the black and yellow logo of Robinson Removals are piled halfway up the window that looks out onto the drive. Coco, our golden retriever, has made a bed on a pile of old dust sheets stacked in the corner. There is one solitary picture in the room: Jess has dug a framed weddingphoto out of one of the boxes and put it in pride of place on the mantelpiece, the two of us looking ridiculously young on the steps of the registry office. Jess laughing in a cream and scarlet silk dress and me in a three-quarter-length coat, waistcoat, and red cravat, an outfit that had been volcanically hot on that July day almost a decade ago.
Leah looks impossibly cute in the picture, our little bridesmaid in cream silk, clutching her mother’s hand. Our eldest child had been a surprise, conceived only a few months after we first met and already seven years old by the time we got around to tying the knot. She had loved every minute of the wedding and insisted on wearing her bridesmaid dress every day for the following week. Jess had never been able to bring herself to sell it or give it to charity—as far as I know, the little dress is somewhere in the house now, among the dozens of boxes and crates and cases waiting to be unpacked.
Our cat, Steve, jumps up onto the chair next to her, his chin just at the level of the table as he stares hungrily at each of our plates in turn, his ginger nose twitching at the smell of fresh fish. Jess slices off a chunk of cod beneath the batter, holding it out for him as he leaps off the chair to receive it, chewing noisily and purring at the same time.
“I thought the big lad was going on a diet?” I say.
“He’s had a stressful moving-in day.” She picks off another slice of the white fish and drops it down to him. “Haven’t you, Stevie? Particularly as he’s not allowed to go outside and explore for another week.”
“The vet did say he was chunky enough as he is.”
Jess gives me a mock frown. “Are you fat-shaming my ginger son?”
“He’s going to struggle to get through the cat flap if he gets much wider.”
She scratches the tomcat’s big blunt head.
“Don’t listen to the nasty man, Stevie. You’re perfect as you are.” Steve purrs in response, blinking contentedly under her hand. “It’s bad enough that you make him wear this collar.”
The red collar, with the words “Please do not feed me” stenciled along its length,had been a vain attempt to dissuade our old neighbors from giving him treats.
I grunt. “Not sure it made much difference to all the little old ladies he used to visit.”
“In any case,” Jess says, “he doesn’t evenhavea new cat flap yet.”
“It’s on my to-do list. Just need to dig the right tools out from whatever packing crate they’re in.”
“And how long is your to-do list?”
“Slightly longer thanWar and Peace.”
“Be quicker to tick things off if you spent less time in your new secret room up on the top floor.”
“I’ve hardly been in there at all,” I say, hearing the note of protest in my voice. “But itiscurious.”
“Not a priority though, is it?”
I shrug; it’s hard to explain. And I know my smart, logical, pragmatic wife wouldn’t understand, but while the little hidden room is certainly not a priority, it’s instead that most frustrating thing: theunknown. It’s an unanswered question, it’s disorder, it’s opaque—it’s all of these things. With no obvious reason for being there, the obsolete phone offering a tantalizing hint of howlongit has lain undisturbed. It is the very definition of chaos, and it’s crying out for me to put it in some kind of order. To make sense of it all. It’s just in my nature, Isuppose. It is how I have looked at the world for as long as I can remember.
“I’d like to figure it out,” I say. “That’s all. It’s our house now, our home, and I want to know everything about it. From top to bottom.”
“I like your cute new mobile, by the way.” She gives me a playful smile, indicating the little flip phone on a side table in the corner. “Very retro.”
“Found it upstairs.” I’d plugged in the old Motorola to charge earlier, more in hope than expectation. “It’s pretty much the exact same handset I had when I was nineteen. You had one too, didn’t you?”
She shakes her head. “Mine was a Nokia.”
