63 Galahad Road (unfinished)

 63 Galahad Road

None of the staff even volunteered to come with her to view the property even though that was their job. Yet again another timeline had shifted, because if a staff member had come to view the property that day, there is no way that she would have ended up having to move into it. Maybe the council would have had to fix it up or provide an alternative offer, instead there was nowhere to turn.

So it happened that the day she was scheduled to view the property the sky poured down such a steady and dismal rain that filled her heart with such melancholy that she couldn't cry tears. Despite the rain she took the walk down Loampit Vale as slowly as she possibly could. Past the Chemist to look at the soaps in the window, and the scrap reclaim yard with the interesting and unusual items were chained up on top of the entrance gates and displayed outside the door to the Aladdin’s Cave within. It was always a place she wanted to go, but never dared set foot inside. 

Further down past the creepy multi-coloured house on the corner, with an American style veranda and where there was always an old, old black man in a bowler hat and breeches, painting with the chalky pastel paints, in a different place every time. She continued down the hill, past the Tamil grocery and video shops, under the bridge and into the Lewisham bus garage. She had to take the bus right up to the last stop, Downham bus station. The bus was not like one that she would normally catch. 

It was a single decker and short in length, with only one door, at the front to get on or off. The inside was steamy and smelt like wet dog. Jadine added to the puddles on the floor with the water she stomped off her boots and shook off the wheels of her stroller as she folded it up and into the carrying rack, with one hand all the while balancing her son on her hip. There were plenty of seats. She sat in the middle of the rows on the left-hand side. 

It was around Catford that a man got on the bus. A man so gorgeous that it almost stopped her breath. her heart thudded under her ribcage and her face flushed red. The energy of his aura radiated out around him, flooding her with waves of desire, as he walked up the short n narrow aisle and took a seat, she supposed on the back row, in the corner, yet she dare not to look, despite not looking being torture. 

This stranger was so beautiful, and she was ashamed because she knew she already had one fatherless child and every night recently that he came around she lay down and opened her legs to Linton without using any protection. Jadine sunk down as far as she could in her seat without sliding off, her son on her knee. 

She stared ahead, hoping, waiting, to catch a parting glimpse of him as he got off. Suddenly the bus lurched around the corner and into Grove Park Bus Station. Her son had fallen asleep. Jadine waited for the guy to pass down the aisle first before she got up. But he did not. The driver shouted that this was the last stop. Embarrassed Jadine hoisted herself out of the seat and went to the luggage rack to take down her pram, unable to resist the temptation and out of curiosity for wondering why he had not got off, she turned her head to look towards the back of the bus. She almost dropped the pram in surprise. The man was nowhere to be seen. 

As she found the right road the air closed in around her and she eyed distastefully the rows of grey stucco fronted terraced houses set not only back from the road but below the street level, an iron railed staircase led down alongside an overgrown sloping front garden and a concrete step with a black door. Rusting amongst the long and wild grass was an old council commissioned gas fire. A car door opened. A stocky man hoisted himself out of the driver’s seat. He reached onto the back seat for a clipboard and pen then he shut and locked the car door. He was the Housing Officer, who had come to show her around the property. 

Inside smelt funny. The light was dim. It was a gloomy house, a narrow corridor with a door off to the sitting room on the left, where the window let no light in. There was a hole in the wall (where the gas fire that was laying condemned tangled up in the long grass outside should have been). Further along a kitchen with a back door that opened onto a garden so long she couldn’t see the end, it was all overgrown, a narrow garden, partitioned off on either side by the neighbour’s high fences, like a tongue leading into the dark recess of a sinister throat, ready to swallow her whole. 

The back door step looked so 60s she could almost see the women sat with their hair wrapped up, curlers peeping through, wearing housecoats over their skirts. The younger ones sat in short skirts, while chubby red cheeked 60’s toddlers played with a ball. It was square and fitted with basic MDF cupboards and a black worktop. The walls were Artexed and painted terracotta. Upstairs was a large oblong bedroom on the front of the house, and a small bedroom to the back next to a small bathroom. The front bedroom was surprisingly bright with two large windows looking out onto the street. The atmosphere in the back bedroom was oppressive. She felt like she was being watched. 

At the top of the stairs fastened to the wall, there was a full-length mirror. As Jadine surveyed the walls of the house with tears in her eyes, all painted darkest blue with black oily marks and smudged handprints she stood on filthy floorboards, the cracks and gaps wedged shut with faded packets of crisps she gasped and managed to falter in a low voice “but it needs renovating!’ and the Housing Officer laughed. 

“It’s nothing a good scrub and a coat of paint won't fix! This is your only offer. As an applicant from the homeless persons register we only have to make you one suitable offer and this is it. If you refuse it, you won’t get any other offer and will be making yourself intentionally homeless. You have to come and sign the tenancy agreement today. I can drive you.”

 And Jadine looked up, and saw in the mirror, not the reflection of the Housing Officers back, but the reflection of an old man. And he was staring straight at her. 

The car ride to the Housing Office was a blur, it was only somewhere around the corner from the property, on the end of a dismal road next to a stretch of green grass with one solitary swing. She told them that the house looked like it needed a lot of repairs. 

They told her that she did not need to worry, ‘everything would be done by the time she moved in, and just before Christmas too! How lucky she would be settled in for the Festive Season.’ 

Jadine didn’t dare say a word. She didn’t know what she could say and inside her mind she screamed and cried until finally with the key in her hand she pushed her son in his pushchair back to number 63 Galahad Road. This time the woman next door came out. She said she had lived next door for 28 years and thishouse had stood empty for over 10 years! Many had come to look, but no one had ever come back!

She told her that the people who lived there before were filthy and had 3 Alsatian dogs. They had been evicted. Then workmen came, and the gas fire went in the yard and the house was shut up but no new occupants. She asked if it had been done up nice inside. Kerrie shook her head dumbly trying to take all this information in. She told her she could come inside, see for herself, nothing was done. And the neighbour came inside and then looked at Jadine and shook her head saying 

“You poor poor thing. What are you going to do?” 

To which Jadinehad no answer to give. 

Back in the hostel they told her she had seven days to move out. It was so definite. So, she called and hired a man with a van from the Free Ads and packed up all her stuff into 7 black bags and her square £70 ex rental TV from a shop up Rye Lane. At the house the man’s eyes showed shock teemed with pity and surprise when she opened the front door and let him in. “They gave you this?” and he told her he would bring her a settee that he was picking up from a house clearance later on that day. He said he would bring it round. He wouldn’t take her £20. He said, “You’re going to need that more than me.” 

Then the engineer from Transco came. Looking at her and around at the house incredulously. He told her that the boiler had been condemned and that he could not turn on the gas supply. He said the entire boiler needed replacing and that they should never have given a house in this state to anyone. And again, she didn’t know what to say. 

Then things got even worse. She realised that the radiators were not even properly secured to the walls and in some rooms could fall right over if you pulled on them. She realised that the light fittings that hung from the ceiling were missing the part in which to put the bulb. She called the council and reported it. They gave her a non-priority band call out appointment. So, she realised that by now, everything was closing up for Xmas, it was in exactly one week. So, she knew that no one would be coming out to fix anything between now and the New Year. She realised that she was going to spend her first few weeks alone, like dormice in a burrow, with her infant son, no heat and no light. She also found the house was infested with cockroaches. 

One-night Linton came and made her pregnant. Afterwards he got into bed next to her, still dressed in all his clothes. He tossed and turned for a while, shouted at her to get her arms from around him, cussed her when she cried, then he got up and left. 

He was much worse than Marsha’s boyfriend who Charmaine had cussed about when he had bought her the £5 shoes! I hadn’t seen Charmaine for a long time, not since she got evicted with her babyfather Darren from the hostel and placed into much nicer temporary accommodation. We had just sort of lost touch with each other.

The only room that was habitable was the sitting room after she had scrubbed and scrubbed the floor with a big brush, a whole packet of washing powder soap and hot water yet still the strange odour persisted. She had been given a grant of £1200 to buy furniture from the Social Fund, so she bought a blue carpet, a cooker, fridge and washing machine and a bunk bed. The two mattresses were laid out on the floor in the sitting room next to the sofa the man had brought as good as his word, although it was a mustard brown colour, and leaked black dusty stuff out of the back. 

She put a double duvet cover up at the window and discovered it was semi opaque at night when the streetlights outside came on, It was so dark those short late December days it almost felt like perpetual night. She felt like she could be seen as much as she could see out when the TV set cast down the only light in that house. 

The first night her son began to have fits. He had always slept through so happily and so calmly, this was totally new. He was, it seemed asleep, but he was writhing and thrashing all over the place, screaming, his eyes rolling in his head. Jadine was so scared, every night seemed like hours he was frantic, before he was calm and stabilised into a clammy sleep. In these hours before dawn Jadine lay watching old shows on the TV under her duvet, too scared to sleep before her own nightmares came. 

In her dreams she saw cockroaches, hundreds of them, crawling all over her, all around her. Then Linton would come in. Pick one up and crush it with his hand. He always told her he was going to get something to kill the cockroaches and that he would be back. But in this nightmare he never came back. Then she would be looking, searching for him. Sometimes she would catch a glimpse of him, in a crowd, with other girls, but never able to get close and all she was left with was the cockroaches. 

Sometimes she dreamed that upstairs in the long rectangular room above there was the old man from the mirror, sitting up on a rocking chair. She could hear in the night when she wasn’t asleep, the rhythmic thud, bang, bang, on the floor as the chair creaked back and forth. Sometimes she saw the mans reflection in the mirror at the top of the stairs, and always she felt his presence, watching, hating, growing stronger and stronger with every day. Angry oh so angry that she had moved into his house, filled with evil the banging got louder, the presence got stronger, the nightmares got longer.

She awoke in the night terrified. The TV turned on full volume. The remote control was nowhere to be found, she searched high and low, that TV was impossible to turn on or off or control in any way without the control. It's the middle of the night, frantically she's searching, pulling all the toys out, turning the sofa cushions upside down, pulling the place to bits looking for that remote control. Finally she finds it, right behind the sofa on the floor against the wall. There was no way that TV turned on, on its own. Heartbeat racing she turns the volume down and tries to lay back down and get comfortable on the mattresses on the floor. 

Suddenly there's a shadow at the window, a silhouette of a figure so tall it must be at least 7 to 8 feet in height. It’s leaning looking inwards hands pressed up against the glass, the duvet cover hung at the window is thin, terrified Jadine hides under the duvet, trembling it takes every bit of strength she has not to scream and scream and scream. I’ve got to get out of here.

The next thing she knows its morning and Linton arrives. He has his own key. He has a plan for me to get money to ‘fix up this house’ 

Jadine stood on the overgrown grass to the side of the path that led down to the front door and watched as everyone carried all her stuff out and all the lady's things in. Suddenly she thought. She called out to the lady as she went back up the stairs to the van 

"Excuse me. sorry..."

The lady turned round

"I didn't ask...your flat...it isn't haunted; is is?" 

She looked taken aback. She laughed. Then she composed herself and said "No. No, nothing like that at all. Suddenly suspicious, Why? This house isn't haunted is it? 

Jadine smiled "Oh no, of course not! Then she turned around and took one last look at 63 Glahad Road.