Waking Dreams

It wasn’t going well.

I was beginning to think that being an estate agent wasn’t for me. It had seemed like the type of job I’d be suited for; I'd dreamed of showing a couple around a house, dazzling them with fascinating architecture, stories woven into the carpet of the bedrooms or the wood-panelling in the study. Or of helping a single mum find the bedrooms for her kids she never thought she could afford or the young entrepreneur find the office space to get their business off the ground. But, in typical fashion, I had only pictured what I wanted to see. The reality was a lot more…dreary.

Every day, I watched my colleagues work with the speed and dazzle of the reflective fish in our shallow office tank. Meanwhile, I was increasingly relegated to the back, the bottom feeder whose numbers were gradually slipping.

And it didn’t help that I couldn’t seem to shift that house.

Everyone had been tripping over themselves to get it when it first came in. I had naturally presumed I wouldn’t even get a look at it; the hot properties usually went to Kim or Ravi, people who very clearly had ‘the drive, the passion’, or at least were very good at pretending they did. But not this time. I flinched a little when the email pinged into my pitifully empty mailbox. The subject line from my boss read ‘Looks like your kind of thing…’, but I knew what he meant. Last chance.

He wasn’t wrong about it being my thing, though.

It was the kind of house that I had ached to sell. Long, arched Victorian windows, complete with snug window seats, dark wood panelling, and even a few hand-crafted stained glass windows. It had two bedrooms and was in an area that I knew well since I had gone to uni there. Overall, it was a great house. I couldn’t believe my luck.

When I turned the keys in the front door, I could practically feel my fingers buzzing against the metal. Walking into the house was at once exciting and calming, like the sense of coolness that comes after a shock of static electricity.

I smiled.

The wooden floorboards groaned under my feet as I made my way through, ticking off the rooms as I went: snug, check, kitchen-diner, check, main bedroom, check, spare bedroom…sort of check. The spare bedroom was an oddly shaped space, tucked away on the first floor in the eaves, with various cubby holes for access into the narrow attic beyond. But it had exactly the kind of charm you’d expect from that house and I immediately imagined it as a kid’s bedroom, where the sloped ceiling became the top of a princess tower and the small windows looked out over mystical lands instead of the overgrown garden.

Yet, despite my utter confidence in the house, each and every interested buyer fell through in one way or another. It wasn’t like other unsellable properties which ended with a polite “It’s nice, but…”: the garden is too small, the neighbours seem weird, the road is too loud, I don’t like the paint colour. No, with this house, I ended every viewing with a sense of hopeful expectation, only to find out later from Jan the receptionist that the buyers had pulled out. They all gave vague, unlikely excuses and never called again.

I frequently found myself gazing out from the kitchen at the mature garden as it was slowly overtaken by weeds and falling leaves, and wondering…why? Was there something about this house? A feeling that lingered with them and made them not want to return? It never even got a second viewing.

“Could I see it sometime?” My wife, Kate, asked on a Tuesday evening, when I had gotten home late from work again. She was balancing a plate of fajitas topped with gherkins- a recent pregnancy craving- on her belly while she watched tv. She looked up at me from the sofa with wide, curious eyes.

I think she could feel it too, that I was drawn to this house. It was why I was coming home late more often than not these days. Maybe it represented the last lifeline to my career or…maybe it was something else.

I hesitated.

“Sure.” I said eventually, when the pause had grown too long. “Only, we should go on a Saturday. There’s quite the nightlife in that neighbourhood during the week. Apparently, the uni kids are still as wild as we were back in the day.”

Kate laughed. “I can’t imagine you being wild.”

“I had my moments.”

— 

Kate looked up at the house, at the neat, gabled roof which had given me that same inspired look when I first saw it. She glanced around at the neighbourhood, down the streets I had known as a student. “It seems perfectly nice around here, maybe it’s not as wild since you’ve been gone.” She nudged me playfully.

I rolled my eyes, and let her into the house. Falling into my role, I explained the square footage and renovation possibilities. She was laughing at me- at my ‘professional voice’ as she called it- but she was smiling too.

I directed her through the kitchen and into the snug, which had a nice view of the street and surrounding houses. She looked over at me, thoughtfully stroking her stomach.

“You know…”

I glanced over at her. I knew that cheeky look in her eye. She had that same look when she predicted I was going to propose right before I did. She had always prided herself on being able to see right through me. But sometimes, I could see through her too. And I knew what she was suggesting.

“No, Kate.” The more she looked at me, the more I began to feel a surprising sense of panic rise in my throat. I swallowed. “You don’t even know it around here.”

She looked around the room, where the late afternoon light was catching dust in tight beams.

“But you do, and I think I could like anywhere for this house. It just feels…right. You know? And we have been looking for something a bit bigger.” She rubbed her stomach, shrugging. “Oh, I don’t know, maybe it’s the hormones making me sentimental, but it feels like maybe it’s come to us for a reason.”

She wandered away to have another look upstairs, trailing her hand along the bannister. I watched her go, then made my own way to the kitchen. Looking out at the garden, her words echoed in my head.

Maybe it’s come to us for a reason.

— 

I was still gazing out the window while I listened to the soft cooing of Kate upstairs, playing with brand new tiny hands and squishy cheeks, just beginning to dimple. I tried to imagine her, our little girl, growing up in this house, getting to know each nook and cranny, every tree and flower bed…

Kate came downstairs, carrying the little girl on her hip and starting me from my reverie. Both Kate and the baby were scrubbing the sleep from their eyes. Kate grinned tiredly at me.

“You were right about that nightlife, after all,” she said, yawning. 

I looked back at her, confused. 

“What? You didn’t hear it?” She asked. “You sleep even deeper than I thought…”

She pulled open the fridge, clearly waiting for me to ask what she meant, but I didn’t respond. My gaze returned to the window. Eventually, she sighed and gave in.

“There was shouting or yelling or something, in the middle of the night. I couldn’t figure out what direction it was coming from.” She rolled her eyes and chucked the baby’s foot playfully. “I guess that means term has started. We’ll probably be hearing from the freshers for the next month. But they better not wake this little one or there’ll be hell to pay.”

She grinned cheekily at the soft, dimpled face in her arms, then looked up at me.

“Or we’ll stick daddy on ‘em, won’t we?”

She gave me a playful wink and I felt the rising panic return. I turned away.

“I think I’ll do some more gardening today,” I said, taking a deep breath.

Kate raised her eyebrows at me, but said nothing. I had been spending a lot of time out there: trimming hedges, pulling weeds, digging up flower beds. She hadn’t commented on it, but I got the sense she thought it was good for me, that it got my mind off work, and she didn’t want to discourage me.

The next night, I heard it too.

I could see why Kate had thought it was yelling and it was, sort of. But lying there in the middle of the night, it sounded more like…moaning. It rose in pitch, higher and higher, then stopped and started up again, low and guttural. I glanced over at Kate. It hadn’t woken her this time.

I got up, peeking into the cot on the way out of the bedroom, and made my way downstairs. Kate hadn’t known where the sounds were coming from, but I did. I knew.

— 

When I was at university, this house was abandoned. We used to walk by it on the way to the student bar, and I always found myself drawn to it, to its yawning, empty windows. My friends would laugh at me and tell me to keep up, but I always took one more glance before we rounded the corner.

I had wanted to be an architect, originally. That’s what I planned to do my degree in, before I switched to business. Kate says I could have done it, and I know she says it to make me feel better, but it just serves as a reminder that I hadn’t. Maybe I could have, but I hadn't.

A part of me hated myself for bailing on it. And that part grew bigger the longer I was at university. I was surrounded by people who had taken a risk, followed their passion. Even if they had daddy’s money to fall back on and I didn’t, I still felt separate from them. The more I tried to push the shame away, the more it dug deeper into my abdomen, like it was settling in for a long stay. I lived in fear that someone would find it out, pull it into the sun to stare and laugh at. 

Until someone did.

Maria. She was one of those people who was always around on a night out because her art degree never had early morning exams. One night, as I was sitting on the sofa in some student house holding a can of cider, she came in. No one else was in the room and, for a moment, she just stood there, watching. She had this way of cocking her head while she looked at you, like she was listening to stats about you being fed through an earpiece. It made you feel…exposed.

Looking back, it seems silly. But I was desperately afraid that she would figure it out, that I was a turncoat against my own dreams. And Maria was not someone who you wanted to know your secrets; you were never quite sure what she would do with the information when she found it.

“You’re studying business, right?” She asked on this particular night as she cracked open a can of pre-mixed gin-and-tonic. She glanced at the telly in the corner which was playing an 80’s horror film that the host had insisted on putting on. Then she glanced at me.

“Do you like films?”

“Uh, sure.”

She nodded.

“What about art?”

“It’s fine.”

“Uh-huh. Architecture?”

I hesitated. For one split moment, I hesitated. She grinned.

“Yeah, me too.” And without another word, she walked out. I sat there, exactly as I had been before she came in. Except now my face was hot with shame and…anger. What gave her the right to see through me like that? And what was she going to do with the information?

One night, when a group of us were on our way to the club, I lagged behind to look at the house. I listened as the shouts and jokes of my friends grew more distant, less insistent. And then I was alone…until I wasn’t.

She had come back- I knew she would. Fascinated by my fascination, she had doubled back around to see what I was so interested in, and to log it away for future use. She studied me as I studied the house and, for the first time, I realised something.

I was in control of what other people knew about me. This girl was a voyeur, obsessed with staring into the hidden things in other people.

But what she didn’t realise was that, sometimes, those things stare back.

— 

In a way, I buried my dreams in the back garden of that small, beautiful house. And they had kept her company until, one day, I was drawn back too. Was it them who had brought me here? Or her? Oddly, I couldn’t tell. They both felt the same, in death, like their existence had been made of the same stuff.

I had panicked when Kate first suggested we move here, but the more I thought about it, the more I realised I liked the idea. Every time I showed the house, I had felt her damp, dirty fingers reaching out to me, clutched around my murdered dreams.

And now, I get to see her, and them, every day. And to know that I’ve won.