Estates and Ladders

When the sun rose shortly after five a.m. on a warm Saturday in late August, it was toasted in hushed voices by a thicket of revellers. They had topped up their flutes with lukewarm champagne and were waiting for the Hub to open for breakfast. In the other gardens forming a dotted circle around the estate, the silence was almost sentient. One man lay comatose on the grass outside Number 5; his determination to make it home after the party had clearly taken him to his previous front lawn, but no further.

Although it had been an annual event for over the past decade, Changeover Day still left a slightly rudderless atmosphere in its wake. It was the one morning a year when the estate had fourteen residents instead of fifteen, with the inhabitants of Number 15 having been cheered onwards to better things and the newest inhabitant of Number 1 not scheduled to arrive until lunchtime. Overall, the experiment in social betterment had been a spectacular success. The principle was simple: young people entering the labour market had limited means and would usually be at a severe disadvantage in their search for a home, so a new concept of estates was developed. Each estate contained fifteen houses arranged in an approximate ring around a Hub. House Number 1 was tiny and had no frills. Its garden was a strip of grass only just wide enough to accommodate a garden chair and a table. Number 2 had a balcony outside the bedroom window. By the time a resident had gravitated to Number 15, they had a gym, media room and private pool at their disposal. The concept of homes as vessels for enjoyment was bolstered by outsourcing many of the functional necessities to the Hub. This building contained a cavernous laundry room, a supermarket, a smattering of restaurants to cater to different tastes, a medical and dental clinic and a sports hall. Everything was designed to encourage community spirit and gregariousness. This was the other underlying principle behind the structure of the estates: being a sociable and generous member of the community earned you the right (revenue permitting, of course) to move up a link in the chain every year. This was why the houses were designed with a minimum of amenities: it was supposed to be as quick and easy to move house as possible. Once a resident had proven themselves to be an absolutely exemplary member of the community over fifteen years, they earned the right to ‘graduate’ from Number 15 and move to another, wholly different class of estate, where the most squalid, basic dwelling came with its own concierge service. When seen from a helicopter, the increase in size from one house to another made the estate look like the shell of a snail.

The capstone of this year’s processional was Marcel Meyerbach, universally known as Mark. Ever since his arrival as a wet but hungry apprentice fifteen years ago, Mark had wrung every drop of his inner energy into becoming an indispensable social construct on the estate. He measured out every inch of the Hub and realised that there was no choir, no youth club, no seniors’ association and no parents’ club. He felt behoven to expand the bronchi of the estate’s social structure until they blossomed with alveoli that featured each and every member of the community. He had found himself roped into becoming the editor of the estate magazine, in spite of himself this time, because no-one knew as much about the granular details of the estate’s life than he did. Tradition dictated that he wait until the afternoon before slinking into place at the top of the pyramid and moving his possessions into Number 15. The previous queen of the estate, Sandra Quillens, had been given a heartfelt and heartily condescending send-off the night before, in light of the fact that her ‘promotion’ had been held up for a year because she’d accumulated enough traffic offences to be banned from driving for six months. The residents had also teased Mark affectionately but mercilessly about how his own ascension had been delayed for a year through no fault of his own. He had repaid his detractors by putting on a particularly compassionate and useful display when Sandra finally received the official confirmation that she had been accepted by the estate forming the next social stratum upwards. It had always been an unofficial tradition for the inhabitants of Number 14 and Number 15 to help each other very publicly to move house on Changeover Day, which usually resulted in the inhabitant of Number 14 piling their boxes of miscellaneous acquisitions into Number 15 as the resident of the apex home looked on with measured patience, waiting for the removal van to arrive the following morning and unobtrusively gather all their belongings into a vehicle destined for a distant and inconceivable world.

Lewis Anderson, who had been congratulated so many times at the previous night’s party that he had nearly made an impromptu speech, woke up for the first time in his new home at Number 14. He stood in the bathroom for five minutes, coffee in hand, just to wallow in the underfloor heating. He cracked the gable window of his new bedroom and looked out over his neighbour’s impeccable pinstriped lawn. It was now a little after ten and the estate was gradually stirring in the direction of life. Lewis rested his elbows on the windowsill and breathed a smile at how peaceful it all was. His smile then broadened as he saw Mark stride out across his new patio, radiant and leonine in his bathrobe, with a breakfast tray in his hands and a newspaper tucked under his arm. It would not have surprised Lewis if the man had sat down and lit a cigar with a burning banknote just to mark the occasion. Lewis smirked, scolded himself for having needlessly jealous thoughts and went downstairs to fire up his new five-point range. Everyone on the estate would be quietly enjoying waking up to a sense of achievement that morning. The wheel had turned another notch and everyone’s personal dial of happiness had been turned up a degree.

Shortly before one in the afternoon, Lewis decided to drop in on Mark and bring the bottle he had forgotten to give him the night before. It would make a tidy form of victory lap for the both of them; neither had any deadlines that day, so the afternoon felt perfect for an indolent game of mutual back-slapping and indulgence from their fresh perspective from the uppermost branches of the estate’s social tree. It would also give Lewis a deeper glimpse inside Number 15, as Sandra had preferred to host her changeover party as a street event rather than inviting people into her home for the last time. 

As he strolled down the stretch of pavement between his house and Mark’s, he heard a vehicle engine from the other end of the estate. It must be the removals van bringing the belongings of the latest resident at Number 1, he thought. The sound continued to grow closer and Lewis realised that it was a high-performance sports car, driving at what sounded like a dangerous speed through the estate. He was about to turn to look when the black car zipped past him and pulled up precisely outside the front of Number 15. Two men in black uniforms got out and proceeded to ring the doorbell and hammer on the door at the same time. Lewis could hear their ‘Mr Meyerbach? Estate Police! Open the door!’ from a hundred metres away. One officer turned to him and barked, ‘Go home! There’s nothing to see here.’

The full extent of the nothing that there was to see there did not emerge until a fortnight later. An extraordinary session of the Estate Council had been called in the Hub’s meeting hall to rule on the fate of one Marcel Meyerbach, most recently of Number 15. The residents had sat through two days of increasingly lurid evidence. Their initially sympathetic glances towards Mark, perpetually flanked by the two officers, had soured into stares of disgust by the evening of the second day. The exhaustive forensic details given by the prosecution did not leave even a shard of doubt that the pillar of their community who sat shackled and contrite before them had perverted the system in the most grievous way they could imagine. It was time for the presiding judge, Councillor Jeffrey Helkes, mayor of five local estates, to sum up.

‘I am reliably informed that the defendant has invested considerable time and energy into improving this estate, and these efforts must be commended. Nonetheless, the gravity of his conduct makes any return to his previous position in the community impossible. Marcel Meyerbach, it has been proven before the Council here today that you committed the offence of forgery, in that you produced a letter claiming to be from the Ellerwood Estate, informing Ms Sandra Quillens that she had been accepted into that Estate. You did furthermore send said letter to Ms Quillens, falsely causing her to believe that she was to change over. It has been proven that your reason for acting in this manner was that you had learned that Ms Quillens was not to change over by her own merit for the second consecutive year, and you refused to let your ambition to move into Number 15 be thwarted. It has further been proven that you held Ms Sandra Quillens, who, thanks to the quick action of our esteemed constabulary, is with us in Council today, against her will in the attic of Number 15 for a period of eleven hours. Your intentions with regard to Ms Quillens can only be deemed to be nefarious, in light of your plans.

‘A custodial sentence might seem the only possible solution in such a case. But this would run the risk that you would serve your sentence, and return to the community, and claim a similar status to the one you enjoyed prior to your incarceration. It is therefore the verdict of this Council that you shall live on the estate at Number 1 for the remainder of your life. You may never change over or move to another estate. You will be refused access to the Hub of the estate. You have the rest of your life, however long that might be, to watch your neighbours succeed by their own merit, just as you have been sent right back to square one through your own greed. Even in prison, a man may make friends, but I feel confident and right in saying that from now on, sir, you shall have none. Take him away.’

As the door clicked closed behind him, Mark found himself standing in the same hallway he had seen with youthful excitement fifteen years before. He ducked his head under the beam as he made his way upstairs, lay down on the single bed taking up almost all of the bedroom and closed his eyes.