Our instructions for Week 5 were to describe a place. In particular, we were told to show two different characters’ perspectives of the same place.

I chose to write about a couple arriving at their new house. They’ve got different perspectives which are shaped by their contrasting mental states.

The New House

The car veered around the corner and he pointed them towards the top of the hill. Now they were on the part of the new estate where the roads hadn’t yet been completed. High, rough kerbs bordered their way like fresh dentures as they bounded along, skimming pebbles gutterwards. He felt like a pioneer. This was to be a place of opportunity, a place for a fresh start.

“Home” he said with a smile, placing the car at a jaunty angle across the driveway. He stepped out onto the newly laid tarmac, admiring how Mick and Paul had added some spots of white on the surface to break up the monotony of the black pitch.

He tossed the shiny new keys between his hands as he walked up to the door, then felt the welcoming warmth from the sun heated porch as he walked in. Kicking off his shoes he wiggled his toes as he shimmied the key in the lock. The bounce of the newly laid laminate floor felt forgiving and light as he purposefully, and exaggeratedly, stepped, heel-ball-toes, heel-ball-toes through the hallway.

She watched the dancing arse disappear into the house as she reached back to collect baby from the back seat. Walking across the driveway she saw that the fools he had been chatting up the previous week seemed to have rolled some pigeon turd into the bitumen surface of their new drive, which was already lumpen underneath her boots.

The way he had flirted with them, offering tea and biscuits and simpering while they discussed how they would mix the asphalt was embarrassing to see. Hurtful too. He hadn’t courted her as attentively.

She screwed up her eyes and braved a look at this new home. Bricks the colour of so much puke. Big square eyes for upstairs windows and a double-garaged front, its doors slightly raised to a six inch opening so it gaped an imbecilic greeting.

Her heart was heavy to see him so airy and the child weighed her arms down so. She narrowly avoided tripping on the loosely crotched cream blanket that draped down from the de-swaddled infant as she climbed the uneven steps up to the porch.

The porch itself was a hothouse, not unsuitable for the growing of tomatoes, and she feared to leave the child there for any length of time. The light inside had a blue tinge and the smell of stale tobacco. Her boots sunk into the wooden flooring of the hallway and she wondered if a new house could possibly have rotten joists. She concluded that if they could, he would buy them one.

The fool was already out in the garden and she watched as he ricocheted from border to rockery to silver birch. He disappeared behind the tree for a couple of seconds. Earth was thrown to the left. Earth was thrown to the right. His head popped out on the perpendicular and he grinned, showing the newly double-toothed gap at the centre of his face.

She leant against the lounge wall, unable to cry, and felt the warmth of her baby’s filling nappy.