I would rather not go back to the old house

It was a small house: two bedrooms upstairs, that bit of landing no wider than my hips that I used to jump across, the tiny, upright stairs, living room to the right, dining room to the left, the smell of mildew and hangovers and being young. It was not my house and the house was often cold, as though it didn’t like me much, but I quite liked it.

I often imagined the house in the months after we parted company, and once I even went there to stare through the letter box. I was happy to see that it was still the same. There was some comfort in that house, even though it was the marital home, the main marital asset, there was some comfort in the smell and the feel of the wood under my hands, and the spring in the bed and the drip of the tap in the downstairs loo. When I passed my driving test lots of years later I even drove down there once and stopped outside. Even so long later it was quite unchanged although I knew that you did not live there anymore.

I spent a long time in that house, sleeping and having sex and with my arms around your thick waist, dancing, dancing. Then hiding down the back of the sofa, hiding from your wife, my shoes thrown behind a bookcase and facing the prospect of climbing through a window and out into the night. I never actually had to make a quick escape through the back door, but there was a contingency plan in place. Once you sent me a text message “STAY AROUND THE CORNER FOR FIVE MINUTES SHE HASN’T LEFT YET” that never arrived, and she had only popped next door to pick up some post. Opening the door, you face was ashen white as you hissed “didn’t you get my text?” and bundled me into the downstairs toilet. I heard you talking with her outside the front door and waving her off, and then the bolt of the deadlock and the clink of the chain on the front door as you locked it behind her and called me out. Half dumbly shocked and half thrilled with the danger of it all, you immediately began to undo the buttons on my dress.

Looking through the letter box that time, the dark hit me from inside, as though the house had been cultivating gloom. It always was like that, Dickensian, miserable, freezing in winter, this tiny Victorian cottage that you had shared with her and smuggled me into, but I would always sort of love it, always remember it with a fondness because of the times we had shared there, the nights we had spent on the floor listening to The Stone Roses and the alcoholic afternoons in your marital bed. If ghosts are real then they haunt that house alright, the ghosts of me and you, the ghosts of broken glass and the ghost of my youth and the memories of a house that I should never have been in, but where I often slept anyway.