The Dark House – by Emma Yearwood
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I have taken to leaving the ceiling fan on all night due to an unnerving premonition that the air will set like jelly and I will no longer be able to breathe. The solution – I must stir it, stir it, keep the air in constant motion.
This house is older and darker, more closed in, than I’m used to – like chocolate, like soil humus, like dog fart. I am used to light and airy spaces, where the wind rattles about and you may as well be outside; I am used to a feeling of un-containment.
In the house I have a ‘writing room’ – such a luxury, but in many ways I resent it. In truth, I would prefer my writing space to be my living space. I have become accustomed to everything being muddled together, writing mostly when doing other things, and what else is there to do in a writing room other than write?
Old houses make me think, ‘Who’s died here?’ And this house is old. Built in 1889, it’s a single-front terrace raised high above the street, the northerly wall facing directly onto the railway line. My father visits and pronounces the house as ‘solid’. He approves of the double-brick walls and the double-glazed windows. He appreciates barriers, boundaries and barricades. The house stays cool in the heat, for a few days at least, but once it’s hot it stays hot long past the change in weather, always stuck slightly behind time.
***
At dusk I walk the dog around the neighbourhood’s treeless streets to avoid the height of the sun. My mind turns to the heat island effect in cities. As the light fades, the radiating heat underneath my shoes and the dog’s soft paws becomes more apparent. Tree canopy cover can reduce the temperature of urban spaces by up to 5 degrees on hot days, but this suburb is churning. What is growing is not trees but instead ‘new builds’ – grey flimsy townhouses and stark futuristic apartment buildings, popping up like mushrooms.
The house is mine for a time in exchange for looking after the dog, a lean old greyhound who is enthusiastic about dinner, second dinner, the first 10 minutes of her 15-minute walk, and not much else.
The dog and house belong to someone I lived with years ago, one of those friends who has become more like an acquaintance over time. We ran into each other on the street by chance, the first time in years we’d talked, and now I live in his house. He has been renovating, slowly, and the process is not yet finished. There are holes in the walls; the oven doesn’t work; expanding foam spills out of the gaps around windows. When I dog-sat for him years ago, the floor of what is currently the ‘writing room’ was a hole almost as deep as I am tall. My friend had been wheelbarrowing out the termite-infested clay soil by hand.
***
Nearby the house is a new development built on the site of the old Olympic tyre factory. I usually have a deep aversion to these estates but this one draws me back again and again. I feel some kind of deep comfort in the repetitive architecture, as if I am in a dream, coming home. The gardens all seem lush – a mixture of hardy natives and textured city plants. The trees have grown fast; the nature strips are wide. I’m not sure I’d like to live in any of the buildings beyond a daydream: just looking at those abundant high-set privacy-preserving rectangular windows makes me feel claustrophobic. But there is a well-sized park at the centre of the development and a mixture of tasteful apartments and townhouses where I think the architects have tried to reflect the warehouse style of the old factory buildings – the straight lines, a geometry of repeated order slightly varied, an illusion of openness. Even the expansive bare brick walls look starkly beautiful against the darkening sky.
Out walking in the low light I don’t see many other people, a sense of solitude tip-toeing behind me. In A Horse at Night, Amina Cain writes of Italo Calvino’s feelings about low light in urban spaces: ‘… why lights in a dark city are pleasurable and why not being able to see everything is pleasing too.’ The low light of mystery, suggestion, misdirection. Of mis-seeing, misremembering, of fantasy and sexual obsession.
Amina Cain’s writing feels like sitting in a house full of dappled light. She is ‘continuously clearing it out’, the writing, that is. I like writing that evokes that dappled feeling, messy and imperfect. Meandering, full of dead-ends, unfinished ideas, unanswerable questions, vague outlines, stark singular images. Writing possessed by an eerie, slipped-on, low-light aesthetic. Writing where our bodies are not our own and our minds are shimmying away.
“I like writing that evokes that dappled feeling, messy and imperfect. Meandering, full of dead-ends, unfinished ideas, unanswerable questions, vague outlines, stark singular images. Writing possessed by an eerie, slipped-on, low-light aesthetic. Writing where our bodies are not our own and our minds are shimmying away.”
There is one room in the house that receives dappled light – the bathroom. The light pricks through the lemon tree’s lush foliage, fertilised by two steaming compost bins full of dog shit. An oasis of gentle rippling light. And so sometimes I will linger there for a while, sitting on the edge of the bath.
***
There is a strange acrid smell in the hallway. It’s not the putrid biological smell of death; it’s as if something dead has been preserved in chemicals – not death but its delay. Perhaps it is the smell of the termites returned or, more likely, what was used to expel them.
The dog is the only real ghost of the house though. A presence felt through need: a wet nose against my calf; a soft head underneath my hand; books falling off shelves; murmurs, moans and long sighs in the night; the weight of the world in her sad eyes. A being that remains elusive despite constantly following me around.
***
The trains pass by very close here. Their tracks are at the level of my eyes, as if they are passing over me. Sometimes when the sun is low, it glints off the trains and reflects into my bedroom in a flickering frenzy reminiscent of a low-budget time-travel movie. Most nights I dream of storms, the rumble of trains transformed into thunder.
My bed is full of lost pens, jabbing me in the night, clacking together and leaving sweats of navy blood on the sheets. There is a dark fuzzy patch in the vision of my right eye. I notice it only when I’m lying in bed at night and I follow it around the room like I’m tonguing an ulcer.
When I think of walls, or skyscrapers, or even the canopy cover of trees, I think of the light of day cut short by shadow; the wider world becoming narrower and harder to see; obscurity and concealment; the lost horizon of possibility. But in the dark house I begin to see the protective qualities of shadow, of small spaces, of being tucked up tight at night. Years ago I talked to a New Zealander who was writing on how landscape influences filmmaking. He said he felt oppressed by the wide open spaces of Australia. Without the mountains looking down on him he felt lost in space, floating, indefinite. The mountains were a frame for his work, and in the way of familiar things, they were cradling him as the dark house cradles me.
At the close of Cristina Rivera Garza’s short story ‘Pascal’s Last Summer’, a story about the end of a series of strange, uneven, and sometimes sexual friendships – though thinking on it, perhaps the story is really about the end of the plenitude of adolescence – she quotes Ted Hughes’s poem ‘September’:
We sit late, watching the dark slowly unfold:
No clock counts this.
The feeling that time has run out with the light. The immense comfort of that.
I think of endings and darkenings, the ‘Lights out!’ call of childhood. Nightfall, black holes, well-sealed bunkers and cupboards and submarines, biscuit tins, drains and subways. I think of caves deep below the earth where translucent blind creatures live. I think about how it feels to close your eyes at the end of the day and succumb to a setting stillness. ▼
Photo by Sleepy Zhao on Unsplash
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