31 October 2012
The final limb was thick, twisted and green, but the chainsaw tore through it hungrily. I let go of the top safety leaver with my index and middle fingers and let the machine hang by my side. Stupidly, I'd forgotten that Nan's petrol chainsaw took a while to slow down, and the edge of the blade caught against my jeans and nicked the skin on my calf. Blood welled and flowed as it inevitably does, dribbling over my white socks and trainers and to the floor. The postman fainted. As little spatters and trainer-patterned prints of blood began to mark the pavement outside Nan's house...my house, I felt sick with embarrassment and...you know... blood loss. I dragged the chainsaw sheepishly out of its nest of hedge cuttings and went in.
I had been trimming the monstrous hedge which ran all the way along the front of the houses in the hilltop terrace, once probably planted to hide the earth slope in front of the houses, which sat four or five feet above the the path, or offer protection from the bitter winds up here. Now the flat-topped hedge had grown so far over the pavement that the path was only just wide enough for a stressed mother forcing her way through with a pushchair, but not wide enough enough for her stressed boyfriend to walk beside her. It was after this stressed boyfriend threatened to break my fingers if the hedge wasn't trimmed back that I decided to cut the hedge. The hedge had other ideas. Liking the plentiful sun and rain of the hillside, it had become dense and interwoven, and squatted, year after year in front of Nan's house...my house: the hollows and tunnels inside being a favourite breeding ground for randy cats.
I turned off the street and up the drive, closing the iron gates behind me. In a few minutes, when he regained consciousness, the postman would stuff the mail into a ridiculously undersized postbox set into the gates themselves. I hurried up the drive to tend to my leg. On my right were steps up to the front garden ( a slabbed courtyard which led to the front porch, ) but instead I walked up the bricked slope to yet another gate. Beyond this was the garden and the back doors. Taking the nearest, I went through the room I had earmarked as my office and then from here into the kitchen.
I set my leg up on the refectory bench beside the long, oaken table. Peeling aside cloth, I realised it was worse than I thought. The jeans were truly ruined and I'd never get the stains out of my white socks. I shook my head, and pinched the bridge of my nose. I knew I was lucky that Nan left me this big old place in her will, but clearing it wasn't easy. She had rails and rails of dresses which I'd pushed into my modest-sized car to take to the town's little charity shop. The dresses reeked of violets and mothballs, and now so does my car. At the shop, the charity volunteer looked at me as though I was odd. He glanced at he dresses and then at me. "These aren't mine, " I laughed a little too hard. "Obviously." The volunteer looked over the top of his spectacles. "You'd be a size 18 at least." I smiled grudgingly, and dropped the dresses to the floor. And then there was the wallpaper. Textured wallpaper clung to the walls..AND ceiling in some rooms ... Stubborn as the hedge, refusing to peel off the wall. In such lurid colours. Either orange and brown with fuzzy leaves inlaid, or huge pink and red flowers. The decor of nightmares. Nan had rented rooms out on the first and second floors, giving her a stable income, but given the impact of the wallpaper, unstable tenants. There was the hedge, the wallpaper, an unfathomable oil heater and solar panel array, yowling, breeding cats and the Zombies of course. But the undead flesh-eater part was a bit later. First came the fog, the jars and the longest of nights.
The Perfect House for Floods and Zombies: Chapter One • Opuss № I