The House That Was Eureka Read Online Free PDF Page A

it must be a six-month lease. Unless they got scared, and broke the lease.
    Noel laughed, then stopped laughing, considered it seriously, then laughed again.
    He sometimes wondered. It was true that tenants didn’t tend to last long next door. Six months, a year maybe, and one lot had broken their lease. But how much it was due to something weird, and how much to the odd bits of weirdness that Noel sometimes put on; and how much it was due to the house being cruddy, and how much to the despot being a shit of a landlady, Noel just didn’t know. Plus there were factors such as general high mobility in inner-city areas.
    The weirdness, though, had started seriously. Or at least seriously in Noel’s mind. When he was about six, Noel had overheard tenants in the despot’s room, complaining. They were a young couple, with no kids, just starting out.
    A bell rang. Ring-ring.
    Run and run, Noel
.
    Fetch and carry
.
    Run in and see, Noel
.
    You might be needed
.
    Run and run, Noel
.
    The bell has rung
.
    Noel climbed out of bed, making himself take his time, forcing himself to relinquish the speed he’d been trained to; then put on his duffle-coat as a dressing gown and obeyed the despot’s call.
    The first thing Noel noticed as he walked into the room was the light. There was a lot more of it than usual. It poured in through the window, illuminating the despot on her bed. The blind was right up. Usually she only had it up a fraction. Sometimes days would go by when she wouldn’t allow it up at all. Noel couldn’t remember ever seeing it right up.
    ‘Good morning, Nanna,’ Noel addressed the despot. ‘We’ve got the blind up so we can perve on the new neighbours, have we? It’s a shame we can’t see more...“Backyard Glimpses”, I think that’s how they’d describe it in a real-estate ad. Like “Harbour Glimpses”. Though I must say there’s a panoramic view of the scullery roofs.’
    The despot had the back bedroom, the room that Sammy had in the house next door. Her high, hard, narrow bed was pushed up against the window so that she could peer out if she wanted to and check that no one was coming in her back gate and down the side passage. Though she could see a bit of her own yard, and a bit of 203’s, most of the view was of the flat corrugated-iron roofs of the two adjoining sculleries, a metre and a bit below her.
    ‘But what did you wish, oh Grandmother mine?’ Noel continued, looking curiously at the despot. There was something about her this morning.
    The despot said nothing, but kept her eyes fixed on Noel. She was as Mum would have left her before going to work: propped up on her three pillows, fully dressed and lying on top of the neat counterpane. Fully dressed right down to stockings and shoes, though she wouldn’t move all day except to go to the toilet. The toilet was right next to this room, and the despot officially hadn’t gone further than that since the last stroke, five years ago.
Officially
hadn’t, according to what Mum and the doctors believed, but Noel had surprised her a couple of times when he’d lobbed into the house unexpectedly.
    Once he’d found her downstairs, pottering on her two sticks through the gloom and junk of the scullery.
    Once he’d found her up on the balcony, staring down into the street.
    He hadn’t told Mum: what was the point? If Mum knew she sometimes wandered, Mum would spend all day every day at work imagining broken legs or a stroke on the stairs.
    Similarly, he didn’t tell Mum that she could talk. If Mum knew about the little conversations, the whisperings with the despot’s mates, Mum might think she was going loopy, and worry more. Of course, she wasn’t just
going
loopy, in Noel’s opinion: she was over the hills and far away. In Noel’s opinion too, she’d always been like that, even back before the stroke. But she always presented a very sane aspect to Mum and the doctors. Grumpy, but sane. Perhaps afraid they’d put her away. As if Mum