BEFORE AND AFTER
I told the window cleaner story for years: first to friends at dinner parties, then to strangers. It was a perfect slapstick moment. We inherited the house in the suburbs from David’s grandmother after she died in her bed from a long illness. No one had cancelled the window-cleaner, and when he was polishing the first-floor windows, he saw her corpse from his ladder. I liked to say he came this close to joining her wherever the dead go. That was the kicker; it never failed.
What a dump. You smelled fungus and stomach acid as soon as you walked through the door and instantly you knew someone had lived their last days here. The garden was a mess of fencing scraps and fox shit submerged in waist-high grass. I feared toxins, imagined rushing to hospital with tetanus or toxoplasmosis, David holding my hand in the ambulance, unable to hold back tears at the prospect of losing me.
Still, I didn’t need grandeur. It was a house with a garden, and I had never had either. I could start a new life here. The first night, we ate on the floor and had sex on a bare mattress. Then we got to work stripping linoleum, carpet, and wallpaper. David sanded and polished floorboards and I painted, turning sideways in narrow spaces where my belly didn’t fit. I bought paint with names like Phantom Breath and Marine Fog – soft, swaddling colours. The door I painted a poisonous green. On weekends we went to car boot sales to haggle over furniture that needed only a bit of work. The stall keepers would eye my stomach and perspiring forehead and give us discounts. Those were
