65 Kingfisher Avenue

She lived in a part of town where neighbours had as little to do with each other as possible and yet knew intimately the comings and goings of each others lives. The house opposite Samantha’s had been on the market for nearly 10 years. It wasn’t that it was a dreadful house, only that the legal wrangling of the siblings who had inherited it had kept the price high during boom times and frankly unbelievable during the depression in the housing market. Houses need to be lived in, even squatters, if they spend a protracted period in one place, make a hollow building homely. 65 Kingfisher Avenue had remained resolutely unoccupied and, with each passing year, when couples and young families came to survey the property they were greeted by a cheerless damp interior. The ground floor windows had been broken and replaced with wooden boards to keep the rain out. The small square of garden at the back was overgrown with dandelions, foot high coarse grass and nettles.

There had been times when the neighbours and residents complained bitterly about how this sad house was damaging the feel of the neighbourhood. Then came the long years of indifference, few living on the avenue remembered the old man who had lived there before with his two cats. It was universally believed that the place would always lie dormant, the single empty link in a chain of terraced housing. When the old ragged ‘For Sale’ sign was taken down, its absence was noted, but not registered. Like a filling which works its way loose from a nicotine stained tooth, Sam felt an uncomfortable gap, the absence of something constant and taken for granted. As she strolled back from town on a languid Saturday afternoon, she finally pinpointed the source of her unease; A small white Escort van was outside number 65 and the men it had delivered were busy crowbarring the window frame from the front bay.

"Excuse me," she said, clearing her throat, "are you sure you’ve got the right house? This one has been empty for years."

The elder man turned towards her with a broad and almost fatherly grin. He wore a grubby sleeveless white T-shirt which didn’t quite cover his paunch. Thinning grey hair was combed into a neat side parting and at over six feet tall he peered down at her, exuding the animal smell of men who work in the building trade.

"Yep, deary. It’s been bought by one of me mate’s rellies. Niece, something like that. Anyway, as we had some materials spare from the last job we did I volunteered to sling in some double glazing. Let some light into the ground floor y’know. From what I heard she’ll be moving in the next month or so."
"It’ll be nice to have someone in the place." she grinned back. Then skipped across the street to her front door, waving goodbye.
"I don’t suppose you need some new windows?" he called over to her.
"Not right now, I’m in the middle of a somewhat tricky cash flow crisis."
"Aren’t we all luv, aren’t we all?" he turned back to his friend who had splintered the wooden boards into firewood.

It was about a week after the bootleg windows had been fitted, neatly plugging the house’s facial scars, that other more subtle changes started to take place. Romantic shadows moved fitfully around inside, men in ripped T-shirts and paint spattered jeans lugged gallons of white emulsion and foam rollers through the front door. The new windows were tested, opened as far as the metal hinges would allow and from within the sound of chattering workmen, the splot of sticky paint and the garbled tinny music of an equally bespattered wind-up radio exuded from the property, accompanying the sweet smell of solvent. Fearless roofers pranced across the slanted roof, the tiles heavy, but not altogether secure, beneath their Dr.Martin boots. Crumbling tiles were secured and the woodwormy supports beneath were reinforced with bright yellow steel lintels and treated pine props. For good measure the existing wood was doused in insecticide before the musty attic was sealed up (with its new fibreglass insulation) for another 25 years. The carpenter effecting this work had brought down a couple of cobwebbed boxes and jimmied the lids off with the simple skill of a tradesman. Assorted neighbours were disappointed that they contained bundles of accounting books, receipts and cheque book stubs, an old brass embossing machine and a speckley old paperback on the magistrate system. Sam rummaged casually through the bundles and tucked into the end of one she found a sepia photograph, folded and slightly blotchy with damp, of a young lady, her black hair combed into a severe bob and her features framed by a strong jawline and heavily pencilled eyebrows. On the back in flowing black ink script was written ‘April 1934’, although it was unclear whether that was the name of the lady, or simply the date on which it had been taken.

A month of repairs was concluded one manic Wednesday as two Pickford’s vans pulled up and blocked the avenue for the whole morning. Large wooden boxes were rolled from their depths and manhandled, not always as delicately as the spray-stencilled markings on the wood demanded. The crews then loaded themselves back on board and with a couple of cheerful honks the vans departed. No-one knew when Dawn finally moved in, but shortly after the work was finished the neighbours detected signs of life and movement from within.
Months passed. Dawn chattered comfortably when approached, yet never initiated any contact and kept very much to herself. Samantha felt an empathy for the quiet young lady, who she would spy through the windows opposite, lolling in her catalogue sofas, watching Australian soap operas on TV. Yet despite loathing the rumour-mongers who seemed to proliferate around her, she unwittingly started a game of Chinese whispers, by making a simple observation to her boyfriend, Brian.
She stood by the window, undoing the clasp on her necklace and getting ready to pull the curtains to, shed the heavy clothes of the day and slip into bed next to Brian. She glanced down into the amber lit street.
"Hmmm. Looks as though Dawn’s got a late caller. Shifty looking bloke."
Brian was dozing fitfully, hoping that there might be a chance to make love once she came to bed.
"Strange," he muttered, yawning, "maybe it’s her boyfriend."
"Maybe." she replied as she swiped the curtains closed.

* * *

"I don’t suppose that you could give me a hand, there’s smoke coming out of my tumble drier and I haven’t got the foggiest idea of what to do about it."
Brian always felt uncomfortable when people asked him for favours. His hand was resting on the handle of his car door.
"It’s okay, if you’re busy I’ll see if I can find someone else to give me a hand." Dawn looked despairingly at him and sighed deeply.
"Don’t worry, I wasn’t going to do anything important." he found that it was hard to refuse the diminutive woman in the diminutive dress.
As he strolled nervously through her hallway and kitchen then on into the utility room at the back he found the sparse furnishing of the place a welcome change.
"Lovely house you’ve got here, pine, IKEA I believe."
"Oh yes! It was one of the first things I did when I earned some money, my brother drove me out to the IKEA warehouse store, just off the motorway. I’ve been doing one room at a time, lots of bright colours and trendy metal candlesticks. Just before I moved I did a couple of really big, elaborate jobs and then blew all the money on a beautiful bedroom, you can have a shoofti after we find out what’s wrong with this thing." she banged the white enamelled metal on the worktop.
Brian found the cause of the trouble without having to resort to the precision of his watchmaker’s training.
"I think that this might be the cause of your problem." he plucked a charred and mangled bra from where it had adhered to the seal, "There seems to have been quite a bit of smoke, these other clothes smell quite. . ." he ran out of words as he noticed that he was sniffing at a lacy nightie.
"Bugger!" she snapped, "Now I’ll need to spend a fortune on new undies."
Brian put the undergarment back in the machine nonchalantly and then turned to face her.
"Come on, I’ll show you the bedroom, it’s my pride and joy you see."
Brian found his mouth was dry and when he rasped his reply all he heard was a miserable squeak. His eyes focused inexplicably on the line of her hair, where it had been brushed back from the temples. The neatly combed hair was held in place with kirby grips and hairspray which he supposed smelt unpleasantly of nail varnish, as Sam’s did when she sculpted it before going out. he followed her back into the hallway and then up the stairs. The thought of Sam’s coiffured hair lodged in his mind and diverted his attention from the legs of the woman he was following upstairs. The varnish of the banister was patchy, at odds with the freshly knocked together flat packed furniture around the place. It reminded Brian of the green enamel paint on old bridges and at railway stations. He collided with her softly at the top of the stairs. She giggled.
"You were away with the fairies then."
Her profile, bathed in shadows, turned. She raised her fingers, the spectre of her hand to his cheek then fluidly moved it to the lightswitch, an unnatural motion that she achieved without looking. A forty watt bulb instantly illuminated them both.
"I bought that painting when I was fourteen" she motioned to a frame, "I liked the way the water-colours swam into each other. There was one which had a lot of reds and oranges but as I was reaching out to take it I just felt that it looked sort of. . . cheap. So I bought this one."
"It’s. . . very nice." proffered Brian, he gazed at the blooms of colour which stained the thick paper, but he was not a man who was moved by the line or the curve. He did think that it was a pity that the handiwork was sealed, protected behind glass. Frozen, despite being two-dimensional there was something very tactile about paintings, he always wanted to press the drawings as though when he felt the materials and left his invisible fingerprints, permanently on their surface, that he was giving a piece of himself to the history of the work.
"I could look at it for hours," she sighed, "there are so many layers to it, the sea, the sky, those smudges, are they people in the distance? Are they holding hands? Are they struggling? It’s better than TV."
"It’s better than Channel 5, I’ll grant you." said Brian.
She looked at him tenderly and he was deeply embarrassed by the intimacy of the expression.
"I’m being daft." she laughed, "You’re busy and I can tell that you don’t really want the ‘guided tour’."
"I had a friend that this would’ve fascinated. They always wanted to be an estate agent, so that they could look at other people’s houses and glimpse behind the public facade. It’s never really interested me that much, sorry." Brian escaped. They descended the stairs, a far less emotionally charged manoeuvre.

Brian laid a hand on the front door latch and chuckled.
"You seem to have really sorted this place out, I think that everyone on the street had just sort of assumed that it’d fall in on itself."
"I know a lot of very kind men who were all very willing to help out."
"Pop ‘round for a drink sometime, we’re in most evenings and Sam always loves talking soft furnishings so I reckon you’ll have a lot in common."
As he pulled the door open Dawn leaned forward and resting her hand steadily on his shoulder gave him a tender kiss on his cheek, which flushed. Then they turned together, peripheral vision catching sight of the person who was walking up to the front door.
"David?" said Brian.
"You two know each other?" Dawn asked, but to no-one in particular.
David sort of nodded and seemed to be attempting to retreat, unseen, but knowing he had been caught he tried to act casually. It was evident to him that after Dawn’s indiscreet question there was no way he was going to be able to feign a mistake or ignorance. Then he suddenly felt defensive, he’d just seen his friend being kissed, brazenly, across the street from his girlfriend, by a woman of ill-repute. If anything, Brian should be making excuses!
But instead Brian just turned to each of them in turn,
"Look, sorry, I’ve gotta run," then to David, "Tsch, it’s funny the coincidences that life deals, eh?"
And with that he was strolling guiltlessly away.
"By the way, feel free to pop in for that drink any time." he called back to Dawn.
David just gaped, how shameless could Brian be? Surely Samantha didn’t approve. Then Dawn ushered him inside.
"What’s that burning smell?" he asked, as she shut the door behind him.