We sigh and we make angry little fists. Spying a gap, we take our chances, surging forward, fingers crossed. Sometimes we sound the horn. Occasionally our rage boils over, uncontainable, grotesque. We have reached peak traffic at our house. Gridlock.
I want to move. My husband doesn't. Finish your book, he says, and then we'll talk. Our children want us to plan a holiday. No, I say. No more travel, not until we've moved. No one is budging. It is an impasse. And so in the pursuit of peace I make promises. Okay, I say, I'll put my head down. Knuckle down. Buckle down. I'll stop looking. Stop banging on. Start writing. Good, says my husband. About time. Except that I don't. My promises are empty. My word worth nothing. I seek his weak spots. See, I say, when he makes grumbling noises about having to watch Peaky Blinders on the iPad because our daughter is playing horses on the living room floor. See how great it would be to have more space. Where are you going, he asks on a sunny Saturday. Oh you know, I say breezily, just for a walk. What are you doing, he asks on a stormy Sunday. Oh you know, I say blithely, just need to run a few errands. And I sidle out the door, waving bye-bye with one hand, checking my carefully plotted timetable of open homes is stowed safely under the waistband of my leggings with the other.
An open home will tell you everything and yet nothing about its inhabitants. At one I attended recently I asked the real estate agent — as I am wont to do, both because I am nosy, and because it seems like the sort of question a discerning buyer would pose — why the seller was selling. It's a bit of a sad story, he divulged, delighting in his dominion as doorman, simply spilling over with his role of secret-keeper. It's just a father and his boys, he whispered, all faux-reluctance, feeding me the lowdown as if through a dropper. Had she died, I wondered, wandering through the rooms; barbells in a corner of the lounge, half a bottle of Jack Daniels on top of the fridge. Or had she just run off, this missing woman, escaped this blokey wasteland?
Most homes I dart through on my surreptitious weekly expeditions are notable only for their blandness. Partly, I know, this is because real estate agents counsel you to clear away your crap. Partly, though, it's because there is a particular uniformity to modern homes, a sameness I don't remember from my childhood. Art purchased, not because it provoked some visceral reaction, but in the pursuit of financial gain, or, worse, because it matches the sofa. Houses decorated from top to bottom with a singular look, a look only obtainable because furnishings are now as fast and as faddish as food and fashion. I get it; out with the old, in with the new, and all that. When we renovated our house it felt like a clean slate. My friends marvelled at what I got rid of and I worried that perhaps I had been wasteful, but I kept the decades-old cast iron pans, the inherited dining table, anything bought out of love. It was only the ugly, that which had been purchased to fill a fleeting, perceived need, that I turfed.
My husband lived in the same house until he left home. We've been here 14 years now and I am hungry for change. When we move it won't be to start again, as I think he fears, but to keep on keeping on. Taking fresh paths. Opening new doors.
