My wife has found a man called Mark who can build cupboards in the bedroom above the kitchen: the bedroom the middle one moved out of; the one my wife wants us to move into.
“Across the whole wall?” I say. “Why?”
“It will double our storage,” my wife says.
“It would be cheaper to throw away half our stuff,” I say.
Mark never says things like this. Mark says: “Yeah, that’s no problem” and draws a picture of four floor-to-ceiling cupboards – two with drawers inside – on the back of a scrap of wallpaper.
“What kind of handles?” my wife says.
“Any kind of handles you want,” says Mark. “It’s no problem.”
For obvious reasons my wife would much rather discuss home improvements with Mark than with me. I have a long list of problems related to handles.
During one of their conversations about ceiling lights – Mark says we can have any sort we want – my wife mentions the mystery room. She takes him into the garden to point up at the little round window under the peak of the back roof.
“We’ve never seen the inside of that room,” she says. “We don’t know what it is.”
I first noticed the window about a year after we moved in – or rather, I noticed that I had never seen the view from that window. It’s some kind of void, but there’s no access to it.
“That’s odd,” Mark says.
“We don’t know what’s in there,” I say. “Probably a skeleton in a wedding dress.”
“Or treasure,” says Mark. Yes, I think, if you will insist on seeing the bright side.
“Anyway, it should be no problem to get up there,” Mark says.
“Really?” My wife says.
“We’ll cut a hole in the ceiling, have a look,” says Mark. “Then we can put a hatch in.”
“Oh,” I say.
“We can even put a padlock on it,” he says, “if you’re worried about zombies or whatever.”
The night before Mark is to arrive with the wood for the cupboards, I cannot sleep. I think of all the possible things that could be in the mystery room that are neither treasure nor remains: a water tank full of drowned squirrels; a hornet’s nest the size of a Mini; unexploded ordnance from the second world war; a battered chest guarded by snakes; toxic spores; rotten roof beams.
My wife, it transpires, cannot sleep either.
“It’s exciting,” she says. “Think of the storage.”
I’ll admit the idea appeals to me. Last summer my sisters made me take a load of stuff from my dad’s attic in Connecticut. I had to pay for an extra suitcase to get it home. It’s still sitting in a pile in my office – old photos, letters, report cards and newspapers clippings. I would love to have an attic of my own to shove it all in.
“Then we could seal up the hole,” I say to my wife as we lie there in the dark. “And make all those precious memories the problem of the next sucker down the line.”
“Mark says he’ll put a loft ladder in,” she says. “He says it’s not a problem.” I think: of course he does.
The next morning Mark is busy measuring and cutting and removing the old skirting board, in preparation for the cupboard installation. It is not until afternoon that my wife comes out to my office shed to find me.
“He’s done it,” she says. “Come on.” I steel myself for the worst: piled bones; asbestos; a colony of protected bats; a mouldering taxidermy collection.
The hole Mark has cut in the ceiling is just large enough to fit a human head through, with a small folding ladder set up below it.
“Go on, take a look,” he says.
I climb to the top step of the ladder and place my palms against the ceiling either side of the hole. Then, after a pause, I hold my breath and straighten my legs.
I am instantly overwhelmed by brightness.
“There’s a light up here,” I say.
“Yeah,” says Mark. “I flipped the switch and it’s come on. The bulb is still good.”
I turn my head slowly from side to side, like a periscope: bricks, joists, roof tiles with daylight leaking through. I crouch until my head is back in the bedroom.
“Well it’s just a loft,” I say. “An empty loft.”
“That’s the thing,” says Mark. “It wasn’t even sealed up that long ago.”
That night I scroll through the website of an online loft ladder emporium, with mounting confusion.
“They all have different opening sizes and maximum ceiling heights,” I say. “They range in price from £69 to over a thousand.”
“Just order whatever kind you like,” my wife says. “Mark says it’s no problem.”
