The House That Stayed the Same

The estate had been called The Willows when they built it, though there were no willows. Just clipped hedges, PVC fences, and composite doors that all looked mass produced. In the rain the tarmac took on a flat shine. The LED streetlights kept a second daylight nobody asked for. Her house was the third in from the corner. Two parking spaces. One oil tank. A satellite dish pointed at nothing you could see.

She opened the door before I knocked. The chain on, then off, then briefly on again as if the decision still needed rehearsed. The hall smelled of floor wipes and something sweet that wasn’t food. Laminate flooring. A beige rug worn down a path the exact width of her feet. She held herself stiff, as though loosening would make everything inside her spill out.

“You’re late,” she said, though I wasn’t. “Shoes.”

I took them off and lined them beside the others. His boots were still there, polished once and allowed to dull gradually. She wouldn’t move them. People had stopped trying to convince her to. Some things were allowed to remain as evidence.

In the living room the TV was on with the volume low. A quiz show stabbing colour into a grey day. The cushions were plumped to their original shape and looked untouched since the factory. On the bookcase sat a teapot he had bought in Lisburn. She didn’t use it now. It had become the kind of object grief preserves instead of shares.

I asked how she was. She said “Grand.” In Northern Irish that means stop asking.

On the sideboard lay her lined up non-negotiables. The same butter. The same biscuits. The same painkillers. Today’s tablets were in a little dish beside the remote, uneaten. She had set them out to prove she had control over something.

People say Banbridge is handy to everywhere. That is the best they can think to say. The bypass hums whether you pay attention or not. From her window you can see the neighbour’s washing line. Ten identical grey socks in a perfect row. She spends a lot of time watching the small things now. If the window cleaner is late she rings and informs him. If the bin lid is left ajar she goes out and presses it down. The estate runs on rules and she finds in that a kind of oxygen.

He used to sneak variance into her lists. He would buy two types of bread and claim he forgot which was cheaper. He talked strangers into telling their life stories in the queue for ice cream. After he died the house filled and then emptied and then the visits drifted until they barely existed. Not because the family stopped caring. Caring became an argument she always won. It was easier to ration it.

She pointed to the photo of him at the barbecue, laughing at someone out of frame. I remembered being there. He had been that kind of man whose presence filled the air around people and turned everything lighter. Gone now, and the room almost resents that it still holds proof he existed.

We sat. The radiators ticked. A gull outside complained against the rain. She asked after the family and I gave the edited versions of everyone. Who moved. Who was sick. Who was tired. She nodded, not kindly or unkindly, just as if tallying.

On the table beneath the TV lay a notebook with tomorrow’s list. Bread, butter, bleach, tissues, batteries. She wrote times for leaving the house and times for returning. Structure as armour. When people did come, they arrived as small disruptions to a schedule that protected her from having to feel anything without guardrails.

I offered to fix the loose handle on the back bedroom door. She said there was nothing wrong with it, then said it was loose, then said it had always been that way. She asked me whether I ever think the handles in my own house might be loose and how would I even know. He used to stand behind her and pull faces that made everything liveable.

The TV went to adverts for mobility scooters and funeral plans and things that assume the audience has already given up on hope. She watched in silence. The rain pressed into the estate in sheets. The houses looked like identical containers for identical small existences.

When I stood to leave she touched the ribbon on the teapot without looking at it. “Don’t bring me anything next time,” she said. “People bring things, then they don’t come back, and I’m left with the things.”

I said I would bring nothing and still come. She looked at me like that was impossible.

In the hall she checked the deadbolt, then the handle, then the deadbolt once again. At the door she reached for my sleeve and stopped midway. Dry fingers frozen in a gesture she abandoned. “You’re thin,” she said. “You’re not eating.”

Outside the air felt metallic. A courier van idled and reversed, unable to find one door among many identical ones. Somewhere a baby started cry-screaming through a wall that was built too thin for privacy. In the next garden a child’s trampoline lay wet and unused.

When I drove away I saw the curtain pull just a fraction lower. It would close fully by five because that is the time it closes.

At the roundabout toward the bypass I pulled in near the substation and sat for a few minutes with the engine off. The rain softened to drizzle then thickened again without conviction. I thought about him. His laugh and the way he used to make people feel part of something warm without effort. I thought about how the only route left back to him is through that house with the laminate flooring and the rules and the teapot that has not been used since.

Some of us will keep coming because guilt has its own gravitational pull. Some will stop because this kind of sadness corrodes slowly and privately. The house is not empty. It is full of systems that keep her upright. She has his stories but she has flattened them for storage. She has not kept him alive and she has not let him go. She has placed him somewhere fixed, like an object that must remain exactly where it is so nothing else falls apart.