The Yellow House

“Same Walk, Different Shoes” is a Substack community writing project that Ben Wakeman organized as a practical exercise in empathy. The premise is simple. A group of writers anonymously contribute a personal story of an experience that changed their life. Each participating writer is randomly assigned one of these story prompts to turn into a short story. The story you are about to read is one from this collection. You can find all the stories from the participating writers at Catch & Release. Enjoy the walk with us.

I’m awake but I haven’t yet opened my eyes. For a few seconds more I want to trick myself into believing I will open them to the Yellow House. Yellow sunbeams dancing on the wall, yellow honeysuckle outside the window nodding in the faint summer breeze, its scent infusing the room. I can hear birdsong. A little bit of bread and no cheese.  

A clattering, shattering noise shocks my eyes open, my half-asleep body out of bed. A heavy, wooden mirror lies face down on the dressing table over which, until a few seconds ago, it used to hang.  Bottles of face cream and tubes of mascara are scattered in all directions, innocent bystanders caught in the blast. A thick screw tucked into a Rawlplug is still attached to the wire on the mirror’s back; a hole in the plaster above dribbles dust.  It looks for all the world as though the wall has spat out the fixings.  I swear this house gets jealous whenever it catches me dreaming of the Yellow House.

The sun hasn’t yet reached this window; there’s no light on these walls.  I can still hear the yellowhammer, but there’s a bass note of traffic.  The smell of exhaust infuses the room.  

I lift the mirror and pick up shards of glass.  I’m careful, but I nick my thumb anyway and blood appears, rapid and bright.  In the bathroom I hold my hand over the basin while I fish out plasters, staunch the flow and patch up my little wound. It’s not deep, but a surprising amount of blood has Jackson Pollocked the white porcelain.  I run the tap and wash my blood into the dark hole of the sink’s mouth.  The plumbing gurgles faintly.

I make my way downstairs in the house where I live. It looks like a home. A pile of badly-folded towels on the stairs, halfway back to their rightful place in the airing cupboard; fruit in a bowl on the kitchen island, one browning banana that needs eating up; a jumble of shoes by the back door.  I spoon coffee grounds and put the pot on the hob. I never used to be a coffee-drinker but I learnt this habit from my husband, and the ritual has stuck.  The kitchen fills with the aroma of Arabica beans.  This is what a home smells like, right?

On the doorjamb, faint pencil lines mark my children’s supersonically fast creep from toddlers to teens.  We moved here a few months after my youngest was born, when our family became four, and began to outgrow my house.  The Yellow House.  The house I really still think of as home.  In my heart I knew it should be just my husband that left, that the children and I would be happy in the Yellow House where there was exactly the right amount of space for us three. He was the one who didn’t fit.  But that’s no easy thing to say out loud, in a sleep-deprived fugue state with a mewling baby and no source of income. 

The coffee pot sputters, and my plastered thumb throbs.   

*

I’m awake but I’m pretending not to be. I’m lying on my front, my face squashed into the pillow, my right arm wedged uncomfortably beneath me.  I daren’t move – the house doesn’t yet know I’m conscious.  I stay very still and concentrate hard on remembering the Yellow House.  I can picture it perfectly in my mind’s eye – it wasn’t actually yellow, but built of sandstone that shone golden in the morning light, with a rambling honeysuckle that arched over the door, so the whole place looked as though it were made of sunshine. I can recall the feeling I had when I first laid eyes on it: a benign, fuzzy sense of well-being, as though I’d drunk half a glass of champagne. I felt at home. I’d never seen the Yellow House before that moment, and yet it was as though I’d always been there.

On the day I got the key I really believed I would never leave. This was the place I had saved for, a home I could at last call my own.  I was happy.  And, happy idiot that I was, I let someone else in. The tall, dark stranger I’d been conditioned to think would complete my fairytale.  The Yellow House was a hundred and fifty years old, and not built for a man of six-foot-four.  He had to duck through every doorway, and I lost count of the times he cracked his skull on a beam.  He lost his sense of humour about that pretty quickly and when I got pregnant the first time, he started to talk about us buying a bigger house together.  I held out as long as I could. But by the time I’d given birth twice, I was too tired to resist anymore.  

I open my eyes.  A tear rolls down my nose and drips on the pillow. The house knew I was feigning sleep all along, and dragged my memory back to itself.  It’s getting sneakier. 

I try to get up, but my trapped arm has lost all sensation and I can’t push myself over. I try wiggling my fingers but it’s as though they’re not there.  My arm is no longer mine, but part of the bed. The sheet has fused with my skin; wool fibres creep through my forearm, enveloping muscle and sinew; springs coil into my bone-marrow like corkscrews.  I panic. Flinging out my left arm I grab the edge of the bed of and yank with all my strength, pulling myself onto my back.  I brace myself and look at my bed-arm… it flops beside me, motionless and heavy, but human, mine.  And then it is a blaze of pain as my nerves switch back on and my brain reconnects with my limb.  This house will be the death of me.

I have tried to love it, to make it lovable. In a corner of the kitchen is a streak of custard-coloured paint, a relic of my attempt to reboot my happiness by redecorating.  I thought it would conjure spring daffodils and Amalfi lemons and make the room fresh and full of hope.  I thought it would lay to rest the ghost of the Yellow House.  My son said it looked as though a canary had vomited scrambled egg all over the walls, and I had to admit he had a point.  I’ve always liked yellow, but it was completely out of place in this room. I once I made my daughter wear a dress she hated and her usually smiling face set in a scowl that didn’t release until she was back in her jeans.  Forced to wear yellow, these kitchen walls scowled too.  Within a fortnight we’d had it repainted white. 

My arm is still tingling as I drink my coffee. 

*

I wake with a crushing sensation as though a hod of bricks is piled on my chest. I am pinned to the bed, unable to move, to shout, even to breathe.  The air is being squeezed from my lungs, my veins pinched closed so the blood is pooling in my tissues. I have no idea what time it is.  The room is the darkest dark I’ve ever experienced. Usually even at night a faint glow from the streetlight seeps round the curtains but I can see nothing and I know in that moment that the window has been bricked up.  I am sealed inside the house, and the weight of it is pushing me down through the mattress, the bedframe, the floor, swallowing me whole.

I wake with a jolt, gasping for breath, and throw myself out of bed. The clammy sheets tangle round my legs and do nothing to ease my panic.  Kicking, I tumble to the floor and sit panting and swearing.  Flat morning light bleeds round the curtains.  This bloody house is a nightmare. 

On paper it’s perfect, I know that. I knew that when my husband picked it out from the assortment the estate agent sent.  Four bedrooms, all of them ensuite; a huge kitchen-diner with a central island finished in white oak; a sprawling garden where the kids could get lost in complete safety.  We planted a maple sapling a month after moving in, talking about how we’d watch it grow with our children, and mature as we did into old age. We imagined dinner parties and kids’ parties and garden parties and we had all of those things though none felt like fun. There was space for noise and guests and music, and for arguments and tears.  And there was space for silence and separate bedrooms and for four people to move through their lives not as a team, but in isolation.

As I sit in the kitchen with my coffee, I look out at the maple, drooping slightly over the path, and it seems defeated, apologetic. I know how it feels.   

I chose to stay in this house when we divorced. I thought it would be good for the kids, give them stability.  It’s the only home they remember.  I’d tried telling them stories of the Yellow House when they were young, how as babies they’d liked me to hold them on my shoulder so they could watch the sunlight casting shadows of the honeysuckle on the wall of their little nursery. My husband had suggested I talk to the children about something that didn’t make me cry.

The kids are grown now, each a hundred miles away, in opposite directions.  I hated being alone here at first and would go out for hours at a time, jogging before work, going to the cinema when my shift ended, sometimes watching two films in an evening, anything to put off coming back to a house where I felt unwelcome.  There were three straight months when I was away every weekend. I strode around Windermere and along bits of Offa’s Dyke. I traipsed over interminable cobbled streets in York, Salisbury, even bloody Bruges. I never want to see another cathedral. Everyone said how amazing I was, coping with my empty nest­ – such an inspiration, grabbing life with both hands, seizing the day. My colleagues bought me a t-shirt for my birthday with carpe diem written on it. I could’ve cried. I didn’t want to carpe the blasted diem, I wanted to go home.  To feel at home. 

Recently, I’ve had the opposite problem.  I can’t bring myself to go out.  It started with a sensation of stickiness under my feet as though I’d stepped in gum, or glutinous tar in the hot summer sun.  I checked the soles of my shoes but they were quite clean. I took to washing the kitchen floor two or three times a day, but I couldn’t get rid of the jamminess I felt underfoot.  And so I just got used to it.  Very slowly, it has spread and now even the air has developed a treacly quality.  I can breathe just fine, but there’s a heaviness around me that saps my energy.  I move more slowly around the place these days. I think about walking down the garden path to drink my coffee beneath the maple.  But the air outside the door is even thicker, as though there’s a forcefield surrounding the house, and the effort required to pass is just too much.  I’m a fly caught in a sundew. 

*

I wake with the taste of sugar on my tongue.  I’ve been dreaming… and I’m left with the fading impression of a life-size gingerbread house, biscuit bricks pointed with apricot jam, and spun-sugar flowers climbing over the door.

As I wait for the coffee, I can still taste sugar on my tongue and I realise I’m hungry. I try to ignore it… I don’t usually eat until lunch.  But the feeling won’t go away.  It’s a hollowness, though my stomach’s not the epicentre, it’s everywhere.  In the bones of my toes, and my shoulder blades and the roots of my hair.  I am empty. 

I run my hand slowly over the white oak worktop. It’s softer than I remember, and gives slightly under the pressure of my fingertips.  I scrape away some wood fibres and pop them into my mouth.  They’re delicious… sweet and nutty, like halva.  I break off more and then kneel down so I can gnaw the edge of the counter. I’m conscious this isn’t a particularly normal thing to do, but it feels right.  I’m sure I have heard of pregnant women whose cravings lead them to chew coal, or pick at brickwork and lap up mortar dust.  And wasn’t there a Frenchman who once ate an aeroplane?  Somehow this thought is encouraging. 

With every bite a little of the stickiness around me dissolves.  I will consume this house, before it consumes me.   As I kneel, dog-like, chewing my kitchen worktop, a sunbeam creeps across the wall, yellow light twinkling prettily.   The subtle scent of honeysuckle is in the air.