The packing takes two days. At the end of the first day, my office has been stripped of everything except the desk. I carry a kitchen chair up the stairs, and I sit there, pretending everything is normal.
That night, my wife, the oldest one and I go to the Thai restaurant over the road. The conversation is dominated by last things: nearby places we might not happen across for years to come; people we might see again as soon as next week, or as late as never. We over-order, just in case.
“I don’t want to move,” my wife says.
“It was your idea,” I say.
“I know,” she says. “I’ve changed my mind.”
“You talked the rest of us into this,” the oldest one says.
“I’m freaking out,” my wife says.
“It’s exciting,” I say. “I’m excited.”
“Shut up,” she says.
When we wake up the next morning in an empty bedroom, its former furniture indicated only by indentations in the carpet, the removal van is already outside.
“I’m not leaving,” my wife says.
“What you’re going through is normal,” I say. “Irritating, but normal.”
I have work to do, but no place to do it. I end up sitting on the floor of the youngest one’s room, hunched over a keyboard, while he sleeps. When I next look up, he’s gone, along with the bed.
As more stuff gets carted away, we gravitate to the kitchen, standing because there is nowhere to sit. The middle one bounces a tennis ball against the bare white wall, while the dog and the cat mill about anxiously. My wife and I are wearing rucksacks containing essentials, in my case an iPad, my diary, a phone charger, spare socks and a clean pair of pants. I was too late to rescue my toothbrush, which is in the van, somewhere.
The table goes. The enormous kitchen dresser I collected from Aldershot last week disappears while my back is turned. The men work around us, occasionally stopping to consult.
“Is this going or staying?” one says, pointing to a bookcase.
“Going,” I say.
“Staying,” my wife says.
Eventually, they come for the pots in the garden.
“These two are staying,” my wife says. “That one can go. And the honeysuckle has to come. It’s got my mother’s ashes in it.”
At 3pm, we load the car with a few odds and ends, the dog, a cat in a cage and a tortoise in a box. It is my intention not to take one last look around the empty, dusty rooms of the house we’ve lived in for 24 years, but the removal men strongly recommend it, so I do. I pick up a few coins off the floor, and a pair of bent tweezers. My stomach feels as if I’ve just drunk something very cold.
Our three hulking sons wedge themselves into the back seat, their most important possessions stacked on their laps. My wife has the car in gear before I’ve got the passenger door shut.
“You’ll have to be the one to come back at 6 and hand over the keys,” she says.
“OK,” I say.
“Once I’ve gone, I don’t want to see this place again for a while,” she says.
“The future, please,” I say, pointing ahead. “That way.”
The next morning, I wake up in a tiny room made of cardboard boxes. They surround the bed on three sides, stacked two high. Daylight streams in through a skylight. The dog is lying across my knees and the cat is asleep next to my head. Under the pillow, my right hand is cramped and partly numb. When I lift it up, I see that it’s clutching my phone. According to the screen, it’s 5.24am.
I sit up and look over at my wife, her face half concealed by the duvet. Eventually, she opens one eye and stares back.
“Pinch me,” I say. “I think I’m in Acton.”
The eye rolls dismissively, and then closes. It’s a fairly disappointing response to a line I’ve been saving for three weeks. I wonder if it’s too early to wake up the youngest one, and try it on him.
