Home Improvements

They had been a happy family for many years. There was an uncle who lived in a dark cupboard: he didn’t wear clothes anymore and walked about on all fours. His eyes had turned inwards from not needing to see for so long, so when he looked at you there was no iris, only a lens of grey albumen. The only time he saw the sun was on his weekly walk to the playground, leashed: so he couldn’t attack the mothers. Granny was very tiny now. She had always been small: but small for a grownup woman, not small compared to anything. She was now so small you could hold her in your hand. If little granny curled up to sleep in your hand you might notice that she weighed the same as, and resembled in her spool-like self-embrace, and took up about the same room, as a fossilised ammonite, and she was almost as old. She lived in the skirting board and appeared only occasionally at the hole, like a mouse tempted by a piece of cheese, for tablets and tea. Uncle and granny didn’t take up much room. The rest of the house was taken up by “the principal four” as they sometimes called themselves, often when there was an argument between one of the principal four’s spokespeople and uncle, or granny. “We are the principal four!” was a phrase that had been used more than once in exasperation or consternation at cupboard uncle or tiny granny, should their presence feel burdensome. The principal four, who in most ways were quite ordinary, consisted of A, the mother; B, the father; Little A, the daughter; and Little B, the son, Little B was the youngest. He’d never learned to talk, which had been saddening in the early years, but, notwithstanding, for many years since they had all been very happy, and the children very well behaved. 

It was only when Little A and Little B enlarged considerably in their early teens that the trouble began. A had secretly hoped that one of her children might possess the same genetic abnormality that had caused her mother to shrink. Her reason for hoping this was the case was so that the house could stay as it was. But, with everyone larger, a new room would have to be added. B had talked about a loft extension for many years, but A had resisted. Now A was on board with the project, and B’s aspiration became A’s. 

The house was small anyway, and weakening around them. The staircarpet was scuffed and threadbare with a decade of constant spirited clippety-clop from feet bare and shod. The kitchen appliances were in a state of charred disrepair. There was black mould in places, hidden only by curtains. And why had the bathroom cabinet never been fixed? The door floundered from the lower hinge whenever it was opened and looked pathetic, the earwiggy and mothy greenhouse needed to be deconstructed, the green and aged trampoline in the garden needed to be restored, and about half the gardenshed’s ungainly cluttered contents were begging to be vaporised to oblivion. But the loft extension was the first of the home improvements that they made.   

From their shared room, Little A and Little B (though they were not so little anymore) found the steady and more or less constant stream of builders from seven in the morning until five o’clock in the afternoon invasive and intolerable. But the noise was the worst thing about the project, the drills and saws and hammers and clunks of laboriously lifted article upon article against floor and wall. How many mornings were upset by raucous footsteps! And did those footsteps need to be so raucous? Barbed every step with rowdy humour in voices as raucous as those footsteps? 

It took an age, but the loft extension was eventually built, and there it suddenly was: a new room, the house expanded, the two upstairs rooms and bathroom of the original construction now joined by a third. Uncle crawled up the stairs, little A holding the leash (she was the one who usually took uncle for his walk) and he sniffed around the room, inspecting it warily. Then he hurried downstairs, suspicious and misanthropic like a monitor lizard, and slithered back into his cupboard. A brought tiny granny up on her hand to see the new loft extension, but halfway up the new set of stairs granny decided that it was all a little too overwhelming, and began making her high-pitched distress call, demanding to be returned to her skirting board hole and to be given a cup of tea with diazepam dissolved in it. Little A and Little B were apathetic, not convinced that any of the rewards the loft extension promised were worth the hassle and disruption of its construction. 

The original plan was to move one of the children up to the new loft bedroom, but having spent a pleasant, soft while bent into downward facing dog in the new loft room, B decided that he really liked the room and that he and his wife would make it their own. How much he liked this place, how fortunate it was to discover that, a little to his surprise, he adored this new room: the sunlight spoke to the interior in golden notes, that slant of heavencolour glowed like a spell. The elevated aerial view of the surrounding gardens through the new skylights was very agreeable. In A and B moved, deconstructing and reconstructing the big double bed. Little A being the eldest got the change of scene, and moved into her parents’ old room promptly. Laying down in the bed for the first time in the new attic room, A was as enthusiastic as B about their new sleeping space. She wished morning might never come, that never again would she have to descend, to go back down to the rest of them. The bloody rest. 

Little A and Little B saw each other at the breakfast table and discussed the new state of affairs rather contemptuously. Little A didn’t much like her new room. Little B didn’t speak but he did communicate, using not mandible manipulation but a little tin telephone on a hook. There were two components to the telephonic apparatus: the mouthpiece, and the earpiece. Two receivers, one a red cup, the other a black stethoscope-like object. Using Little B’s apparatus his thoughts could be listened to. A and B spoke to one another over empty plates, only Little A replying aloud. But where were their guardians on whom they depended for fare, usually so punctual to the breakfast table? 

Little A set out uncle’s bowl of buckwheat and granny’s morsel of branflake, and climbed the stairs to the upper landing. She stood upon the brink of the new set of stairs leading up to the new, untrustworthily pristine, not-yet-marked attic room. Little A found that she dared not climb them. How she loathed them, with what antipathy she loathed them, they were hostile, uninvited, intrusive, imposter stairs. They and the room their zigzag incline rose to meet were anathema to this house. This happy, singular home. Little A called up the stairs: 

“Mum! Dad! Breakfast!” 

There was no reply. 

“MumDadBreakfast!” she said with increased haste, and desperation. 

There was a reply: “Go away” a voice whose sleepy summoner she couldn’t determine said. 

This was out of character for both her parents. 

“It’s breakfast time,” Little A cried out. 

“We don’t want to come down,” her father said. 

“…don’t want to leave this room,” mother agreed. 

“But you’ve got to!” Little A exclaimed, perturbed by her parents' apathy to the world outside their new bedroom door. 

Little A went back down to her brother, more in dejection than anxiety. She rejoined him at the table from which he had not strayed. She said: 

“They don’t seem to want to come down,” 

Little B made no response. He sat opposite his sister quite blankly for a while. They didn’t know what to do. Without their parents lending their ordered authority to the scene, in all its inarguable supremacy, the two younger family members began to entertain and then believe more strongly in a kind of freedom that was theirs. It seemed a sad freedom at first, but quickly turned into a marvellous one. 

Then Little B giggled. Abandoning his apparatus and on light crepuscular feet, he bounded over to the skirting board where tiny granny had not yet stirred. He slipped his fingers into the hole and plucked granny from her quarters, mischievously. She woke with a miniscule start and wailed in distress as she flew through the air between Little B’s fingers. It was too early in the morning for such activities, her calls protested, in vain. Little B whisked her through the air, over to a bookcase next to the piano which no-one played anymore. On the middle shelf there was a record player with a row of ageing, warping vinyls beside. Some classical quartet was on the turntable, the words in the centre were too beige and blanched to read, but Little B could see a milk-white dog with brown floppy ears inserting or beginning to insert his head into a gramophone. Little B put granny on the black disc, near the centre but not on it, far enough from the circumference so she wouldn’t be hit by the stylus. Granny seemed confused as to where she was, she looked about anxiously, unable to get up off her backside. Little B smiled wickedly. He turned on the record player and it came on with a brief buzz. The record started spinning, at thirty-three rotations per minute. 

Little A and Little B took great pleasure at first from their grandmother’s incapacitation on that giant rotating plateau, a discombobulating landscape of pure motion. Little B edged his finger towards the speed dial. He moved it to forty-five. The record suddenly accelerated with a jolt to a rate of twelve more rotations per minute than it had previously been achieving. Tiny granny spun and spun on the record, her distress call beeping all the while like morse code with no gaps: a miniature, plaintive, vexatious tinnitus, her mayday. With the increase in velocity, so intensified the laughter that poured from the jaws of the two terrifying cathedral-sized grinning grandchildren whom tiny granny had never really understood and never really liked. They stood over her, their obelisk-like forms wheeling, disappearing and reappearing with every revolution, the sound of their laughter a profane pandemonium. Little A was drunk on the amusement. She reached for the speed button, and pushed it to seventy-eight. 

She knew the record would spin faster if she pushed it in the same direction her brother had done, but she didn’t know how much faster. Little B tried to warn her with his apparatus No, you mustn’t! but he wasn’t able to do so in time. The sudden burst of speed ripped terrified tiny silver-pale granny from the record surface. With ricocheting strength she was thrown against the mantlepiece, and then rebounded onto the floor, leaving behind a little purple shape of blood on the eggshell painted rim. Little B killed the record player. 

Little A laid a finger on her to test for a pulse: tiny granny had no pulse. She and her brother picked tiny granny up and held the drained, ancient, lifeless little body in their palms. They sat in their own reticence, morosely, full of pain. They passed the minute corpse back and forth to each other. Little A suddenly felt so broken, so baleful, feeling the furred softness of the little body, peering at the little greying handful of death she held in her hand. The body, growing cool, changed hands. 

“I wish mum and dad were here,” she said. 

Little B nodded in agreement and two big tears began dropping from his eyes, in their deviant, unkillable courses. Little B was still holding tiny granny in his hands. 

“Put her on the ground,” Little A said. Her brother obeyed. “Let’s go up and get them,” she said. Her brother agreed. 

They climbed the stairs and found themselves on the threshold of the house’s new, ominous section. But they were unable to proceed upwards, towards the door of their parent’s new bedroom, their new special sacred bedroom. Little A and Little B looked at each other and shrugged, how badly they felt repelled by the rising passage, so dark and daunting, so sombre, so adult, so treacherous, so darkened, lit only in tiny shards of light escaping through cracks. 

“Granny died,” Little A said, quite loudly. No reply. “Granny’s dead,” she said again. Nothing. 

Suddenly Little B spoke, he’d never spoken before: “We killed granny…” Nothing once again. How could they not react to that! Little B’s first words, after all this time. 

The siblings, finding themselves unable to go on, went back downstairs. They found that uncle had ventured from his cupboard. They didn’t realise what had happened at first, but uncle had discovered tiny granny’s body on the floor and eaten it. His own mother. What a small meal she was. Uncle was unleashed. He was never unleashed. He lunged at the two children and managed to incapacitate, apprehend, and eat them both. 

Upstairs, A and B were oblivious. They loved their new room. It was such a beautiful room, and their bed was wonderful in it. 

They stayed there for twenty-one years. They became skeletons, at which point an estate agent forced entry into the silent, seemingly abandoned house, hoping to sell it. As he climbed the second set of steps towards the attic door, he remarked to himself how impressed he was with the loft extension: how it looked newer than the rest of the house and would push the price of the house up considerably when he put it on the market.