The Fall of Man

Part III chapter 2

Chapter 2

Over the next few months, Eve takes great joy in every part of the preparation for their coming journey to the city. About once a week, she lays all of her possessions out across her narrow bed, so that she might better assess which items she should take. Her somewhat eclectic clothing collection is a product of extensive foraging. Over the passing years, under the expert direction of her father, she methodically ransacked most of the wardrobes in a three mile radius.

Some of the abandoned homes had previously been stripped bare, and contained nothing of any use or interest. Many more were partly collapsed or water-damaged, and anything of value had long since been lost to the encroachment of nature. Enough, though, contained clothes, preserved food, tools and other abandoned essentials to make their prolonged scavenging worthwhile. Not to mention the hours of excitement they both got from the unpredictable activity.

There would usually be no clue from outside, but every once in a while they would prize open a fully furnished show-home; a treasure trove of useful objects and irrelevant artefacts. Walking into one of these houses would be like stepping into a time capsule. Chairs were often still arranged around the dining table, appliances plugged into the wall, and curtains drawn - as though the occupants had just wandered out for a walk one morning and never came back. When she was younger, Eve had once asked her father whether Goldilocks was a good or bad girl. Either way, the bears never made it back in time to disturb the intruders, and Eve was comforted that the possessions they discovered were going to a good home.

When he prized open the poorly protected back door to Gwen’s family home for the first time, Noah entered a chilly shell no warmer than the world outside; completely still and deathly quiet. Slivers of light cut like skewers through the musty dark, and a thick coating of dust shrouded everything with a ghostly grey fuzz. Mercifully, the poorly fitted plywood security panels had allowed air to circulate, and neither damp nor rot had taken hold.

During their first few weeks in the terraced house, Noah made some rudimentary but vital adjustments. Sixteen years later, most of this remodelling remains unchanged. The immediate priority was warmth. Clambering up into the roofspace, he found that it ran unbroken along the entire length of the street, and the wind whistled from one end to the other. Hundreds of yards of prickly glass-fibre insulation were salvaged from the long sequence of poky triangular spaces. Some was laid waist-deep over the first floor, transforming it into a marshmallow-soft lunar landscape. The rest was piled in great heaps against each of the walls shared with a neighbouring house, to cocoon their compact little home and conserve every last drop of heat – a necessity if they were to survive the winter.

The front door remains boarded up, and has never been opened. Inside, the hall is piled high with chopped lumber; although firewood is abundant outside, it is often wet when it is most needed, and lies buried beneath snow and ice for at least a third of the year before winter relaxes its frosty grip. The staircase that led upstairs has been closed off with a makeshift trap-door, and the worn banisters are typically awash with drying laundry.

As Gwen had described in their long conversations, the house also has a basement – a cramped, subterranean cellar accessed via a short second staircase that is tucked underneath the main flight. Down there, Noah and Eve store all the food that they have plundered – tins and jars, mostly – in the hope that the cooler environment will preserve their precious scavengings.

Noah was adamant that their home be indistinguishable from any of the others in the row, to avoid any unwanted attention. As a result, the bedroom windows – located on the streetfront side of the house - still sit behind the splintered plywood screens that were hastily screwed into place when it was first abandoned. Cords of woolly insulation have been stuffed between each window and its protective timber skin, so they let no light in or out. The only view these rooms enjoy is of tightly packed intestinal coils of glass fibre.

Noah’s bedroom is the smaller of the two. It is Spartan in appearance; any clutter is contained by a large mirrored wardrobe that has been jammed into the recess on one side of the fireplace. A narrow bed sits within the other alcove, nestled up against the viewless window. The bed is made up religiously each morning with cotton white sheets. The walls are bare, as is the fireplace mantel. A diminutive green and purple figurine stands alone on a short black bedside table. The tatty flocked wallpaper is bubbled and peeling on the external wall from the condensation that gathers all year long on its cold inner surface.

In contrast, Eve’s room is an Aladdin’s cave of treasures and trinkets. Every available surface is festooned with all manner of possessions. Clothes spill from the dresser and wardrobe, and are strewn liberally across the carpeted floor and tall double bed. In this sea of fabrics, jewellery and assorted other accessories it is impossible to decipher where one trophy finishes and another starts.

In the middle of the ground floor is the living room. It has whitewashed walls and worn wooden floorboards that are almost entirely hidden by a patchwork collection of thick rugs and throws. Along one bleached wall, a wide window looks out towards the garden and the soft floor soaks up the natural light. The room is sparsely furnished. A large, frayed sofa and an easy chair loiter at one end, dressed in a matching plaid fabric. A low bookcase stands behind the easy chair, its shelves displaying row after row of creased paperback spines. Candles in varying states of consumption are clustered together along its top, and a dog-eared world map hangs unframed on the wall above. At the other end of the room, a sturdy pine dining table is accompanied by two fire-engine-red folding metal chairs.

A cast iron wood-burning stove smoulders tirelessly at the centre of the room. The small sealed chamber radiates warmth, maintaining tolerable temperatures in spite of the cold outside, and providing Noah and Eve with a modest amount of hot water. A tarnished steel flue runs along the Artex ceiling – grey, cobwebbed fronds hanging from every tiny crest - and punches out through the back of the house. There, it discharges discretely through a bed of gravel, to avoid sending any telltale plumes of smoke into the sky overhead.

The lounge opens out onto a long galley kitchen at the rear. A chequerboard floor of black and white ceramic tiles extends beneath battered kitchen units. The white tiles exhibit a fine tracery of boot prints that have gone uncleaned for some time. More candles are slumped on the worktop, mounted in situ with pools of accumulated wax. The glazed door at the far end of the kitchen provides the only way in and out of the house, via a small draught lobby. Beyond the kitchen, the lobby walls are shrouded in all manner of coats, waterproofs and boots.

Through the glass of the back door, the world outside is rendered in the spare monochrome palette of moonlight, and shrouded with a deep, luxurious covering of snow.