Firle by Tamara Fulcher

Firle by Tamara Fulcher

The house is cheap. The old woman who loves it so much can no longer manage the polished planks of the stairs or their precarious turn; she can’t vacuum the floors or bend to the stove and there’s a leak in the roof that she didn’t hear or see. She is being moved, to a static caravan one hundred and thirty miles away. Nearer her son, nearer the sea. They can’t take her dresser or kitchen table and they don’t know why she has three fridge freezers – two of them in the lean-to out back – but she can’t take them either. The bed too: mine if I want it. Rugs, shelves, stoneware pots with crispy tails of birthday plants.

The house is pretty. Blush render; clean frames. A woman smiles at me as I get back in my car; she is wearing a beautiful coat exactly the right size of too large. I imagine seeing her again when I’ve moved in and she would smile and we would talk, then I’d go to her house and we’d start a Friday night thing of testing drinks from a cocktail recipe book. We’d find stuff to watch. Netflix for a while, then BFI Player. She won’t have parents either, or kids. We will try to introduce our cats and film it on our phones.

The house doesn’t have a name but I would name it. I have a word already, that came into my head from nowhere, for no reason, months ago. It sounded like it should mean something, such a logical sequence of letters and easy sounds surely could not have been overlooked since the beginning of written time. I look online and yes, it was a word, way, way back when. Firle, from the Anglo-Saxon fierol, meaning ‘oak-covered land’.

The house is in a high place and there are barely any trees for miles. A few token thorns in the graveyard, and a climb of firs up the steep bank that marks where village turns to hills. Still, I can picture the envelope: my name, then ‘Firle’ on its own line underneath, over and above the rest of the address. What it is to name something; what it would be.

At home I look online for those wooden plaques lettered with scorch marks and make an iterating sequence of mock- ups before reverting to the first, a plain word in capitals with a slightly larger F. I could name a house that has lived nameless for over a hundred years and I could make another friend and I could be the next old woman to not quite die there.

Home, now, is a very lovely place. It is wrapped by a rich and ragged garden with bursts of feverfew and a single columbine, where I have grown potatoes and blue Hungarian squash, tall stalks of Brussel sprouts and a relentless feast of peas. There’s a great tit in the down pipe and a family of voles in the compost heap, which I know because I turned them over with a fork. I found lizards in the stones and a hedgehog in my bedroom one night when I fell asleep with the back door open. This is where I planted a crab apple, and a rowan, and where my cat killed a leveret and a stoat.

Home is lovely and it’s cold. Cushion moss grows indoors, at the bottom of the windowpanes. It’s so damp that once I try vacuuming the cobwebs up in the corner of the spare room and it sucks an eight-inch gash of plaster out of the wall. Once I counted thirteen slugs in the kitchen at 3am and once I found a worm halfway up the back door on the inside and in winter I can sit on the sofa and use a fingernail to scratch my name into the morning ice on the window glass.

Home is a lovely place but it is not mine. The landlord is an old man and wants rid of it now, so I have to move out. I ask if he would consider selling to me, and he says no. He is not a horrible man. He had a cat flap installed at his own expense and brings me shortbread at Christmas and did not berate me when in trying to save electricity I let the pipes freeze and burst and the ceiling cave in.

Up in the city my younger friend – an economic vegetarian – also has to move out. I didn’t use heating; they opted for no WiFi, no TV and no meat. Some of this was, sometimes, old school cool; instead of Netflix they have sixty-odd books in an old steel army trunk at the foot of the bed, and while their landlord didn’t provide an eating table they did install a bureau and an office-seconds desk. My friend is arguing with their landlord via email now, about when the bathroom lock lost its upper screw and whose responsibility it is to scrub all those high clouds of black mould off the walls.

Up in the city my older friend – who had cancer, a baby and a dead wife all at the same time – has been housed in an attic and can’t make it up the stairs in one go. They have also been told they need to move out. They will miss the view from the toilet skylight (opening it is the only way to stand up straight), eastward over morning crows and puddles on flat roofs and trees growing lovely lives in chimney bricks. They will miss the scuttlechat of mice in the stash of bags for life and the neighbours that don’t mind the sound of someone learning uilleann pipes.

“Why don’t we all go to Shetland,” one of us says. One of us is always imagining a fairytale. There is a small courtyard in mine, and sash windows, and a broad, level sill for the cat to sit and survey. There is a river at the bottom of the garden (it doesn’t need to be big) and I play in it with any children I know, and if my river isn’t big there’s a big one within walking distance and we go there to fish with magnets and I take fruit cake wrapped in a tea towel like the rabbits in Enid Blyton always did. When the cat is not on the sill she is spread on the courtyard stone or looking for voles or there is a spindle tree and she is in its shade. In winter my friends come bearing birthday plants and we read in silence together, warm by the stove.

“Shetland hasn’t got any trees.” One of us argues: that can’t be true, surely it must. We look online; not many, but it does. “The trees were cut down for firewood and sheep,” one of us reads.

“I asked my landlord if I could buy my house,” I say.

“Ha,” my friend replies. “What would you have done if he said yes?”

“Oh,” I tell them, imagining a fairytale, “he would have knocked sixty grand off the price. You know, because it’s me.”

We are eating. A dog yaps in the stair. “What Shetland lacks in trees it makes up for in darkness and light.”

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Way back when, my father taught me to drive. This was in the south, near where Firle was once a word. He would pick me up in his Triumph Acclaim at 5am and have me drive all the way to London, or we’d head to the Isle of Sheppey where breakfast would be mashed potatoes in a pool of green sauce that he called “liquor” and I never knew what it was. My father could do things. He had negotiated the purchase of a single battery hen when I wanted one as a pet, and he had built a portfolio of rental shops and homes worth over a million pounds. He also had a

separated wife, and two girlfriends, then another wife, then in a last hurrah another one in France.

We would also drive to random places and find estate agents and he’d ask them what we could see right then and there and they would just give him the keys. He didn’t want to buy; this was just a secret smartarse thing he liked to do. He would stand in the gardens and list the calls of birds. Inside, we’d open all the cupboards and close them all again, and we’d go upstairs to look out of all the windows in turn. Then we’d drop the keys back, and I’d drive home, and my father would go away again.

People behaved badly in the homes that he owned. One painted everything black, as if he was the man in the song. Another took all the doors when he left. One did not pay rent for a year, so my father broke in at dawn and shook him in his bed.

I have a five-year journal with space to write eight lines per day. I went to view a house that I can’t buy, I confess, and I don’t write where it was in case someone reads it when I am dead and looks it up online and finds out when it was for sale and marketed by whom and calls to let them know I was a fraud.

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I am a good tenant. I rent one place for sixteen years and never call unless it’s an emergency. In sixteen years I never paint or hang a photo on the wall. I sit quietly while my landlord argues with the boilerman who says it needs replaced, and protest politely when my rent is raised to cover the cost. Other tenants come and go and they are not like me. Above me, for a while, is some Russian’s son, sent to Scotland to circumvent the draft to Chechnya. His Russian friends come round to game and shout then they call cabs to go to clubs at 1am and later they come home with Russian women and all of them shout in the street. I watch them from my window, fascinated by the women’s perfect legs and how much noise one can choose to make, in otherwise silence.

For another while I am above a woman who cannot hear her own TV and turns it up and up. I hear it perfectly, in my own bed. I hear it and hear it for night upon night until I am angry, then I go downstairs and knock hard on her door. She opens it, shows half her face, and of course I am polite but with an angry face. She didn’t know, she turns it down, and the next day comes upstairs to apologise. She laughs and says I made her cry.

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There is land everywhere I look and I wonder what it would be to just turn up and live. An imagined fairytale that mixes 9th century Viking land grabs with that guy in America whose car broke down and he simply wandered away and lived in the woods for twenty-seven years. What if I just went out, with a huge and very expensive tent. There must be places no-one would even care.

It would have to have trees. I’d need tools, and I’d have to learn coppicing, and if it had some open, well-lit ground I could start a market garden. I’d need a river, or at least a stream, and the cat would need to be happy and still come home to me. I could take my journal but not my shelves and shelves of books, and I decide I would start a community library before I left.

It would have to have trees. I wouldn’t have cocktails or friends or anything other than boots and no shampoo and everything would smell of woodsmoke, I would smell of woodsmoke, my hands would smell of ash and my elbowpits like earth and roe deer would snuffle round my tent at night. I would be an obligate vegetarian (I don’t know how to hunt) until I learned to fish, because how hard can fishing be, it’s just a stick with a string and something on the end that fish might bite. I would need a very good knife and for it not to slip.

I would learn all the trees. I would make charcoal and learn how to make paint and when each eight lines of my journal was filled I would write on stones and write Firle on the inside of my tent, and I wouldn’t be bloody paying for anything. I know what blueberries look like and why can’t you eat nettle soup every day, and sorrel, and dandelion leaves, and apparently you can make coffee out of acorn dust and with all that time on my hands surely I’ll be able to dig an animal trap, a pit with sharpened stakes that looks like something out of the Vietnam war and a rabbit would fall in but wouldn’t get impaled and I’d have to get down there and corner it and it would buck and buck and buck.

I wouldn’t be homeless. I would walk and walk in fields and woods and find roe deer skulls with pretty horns and my cat would be animate, filled with ancestral memory to the ends of her fur. Somewhen I would make a plan for death which would entail another pit and some type of sliding mechanism whereby I could pull earth over me to bury myself.

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My younger friend calls me stupid for buying two lottery tickets and two for Euromillions every week. “You don’t have to be poor and an idiot,” they say. “You can just be poor.”

I reply, “You won’t mind so much when I buy you house.”

“It’s ridiculous. What if the doctor said this disease had a one in thirteen million chance to survive. The relative number of winners is so small that effectively nobody wins at all.”

My older friend puts tickets in my Christmas card. I would buy a house for them both. I would also buy lots of houses and give them away. My imagined fairytale is advertising an ordinary rental arrangement, and I would show all the people round, and some would apply, and I would choose the nicest ones and right at the last minute I would say, Oh by the way, this house is yours and it’s free. You have a beautiful baby and you are nice and I am rich and spreading joy through secure housing. They would splutter and look at me and they’d go back outside to stand in the garden and think about everything you can plant when you live somewhere forever.

“How many times are you going to do that?”

Loads, because I’ve won Euromillions and I have one hundred and sixty-five million pounds. I open the calculator on my phone. The population of Scotland is a little over 5.4 million, rounding slightly down. About 35% of which are renting their homes, or somewhere around 1,890,000. The average house price is edging close to £190,000 but let’s buy cheaper and round it down to £150,000. With my winnings I could give houses away about 1,100 times. “Which is also stupid and unrealistic because you are going to spend stuff on yourself. You’re going to buy some insane coat or pretend you’re an equestrienne in the Hamptons for a month.”

“You won’t be bringing that up when I’m about to buy you a house.”

I will buy them both a house and one for myself and I will buy more houses and give them away, maybe not 1,100 times but perhaps somewhere around five hundred, enough to get on the news where I’ll be acerbic and a bit vulgar but in a witty and admirable way, kind of shouting at other rich people to buy houses and give them away, and I’ll call it ‘Going Geldof’ because that’s kind of catchy for headlines, and the person interviewing me on the news would ask,

Is this a completely unconditional offer? To which I would reply, I am only asking that everyone who gets a house also plants a tree.

I can’t make them, I’d add. But if enough rich arseholes are giving houses away and everyone is planting trees we could make this back into an oak-covered land.

Some of the papers would use ‘Go Geldof’ and others would tell the whole world that my home is Firle, that I named it and it is mine, forever safely mine.

My older friend asks me to buy a house for their baby, if I ever can.