An excerpt from Nightbathing
There's a wild place just over the road where rules are so long forgotten they cease to exist. It's a solitary house on a busy suburban road, a main road which creates a hem along the city's southern boundary. Whilst the wild place is cheek by jowl with the life and movement of the city: a steady neon blur of cyclists and hot white headlights, there is no doubt as to its utter isolation. Not joined to any of its neighbours the slightly rotten little house brittles and cracks from neglect, yet far from being abandoned, it is teeming with children rampant as weeds. They climb the walls and lean far too far out of the upstairs windows. The house itself as unkempt at the kids with its grubby grey concrete render and the long spiky grass which grows between cracks in the driveway. The house is loud but unnoticed: screaming into a vacuum. It is as feral as a thing built of brick can be.
There are two boys and a girl living at the feral house, at a guess I'd age them between eight and eleven. The girl's long black hair obscures her features and splays out in wild loops and tangled fingers like the ugly roots of a cheese plant. It doesn't rise and fall gracefully as she jumps and hops, nor does it blow in the wind, until that is, it seems the wind has already passed. It's forever catching up with her, held back by the gritty weight of its dirt and knots.
The girl is often the recipient of a ball to the head, thrown from the bedroom window aggressively by a brother. The windows are the defining feature of the house design - that kind of bay window which wraps around a corner creating a turret from which to lookout, and it's from here the battle cries of the boys resonate. It's hard to picture the family without giving them muddy-faced war paint and a conch. It's those windows found only on the north side that gives the house an unnatural imbalance as if it is the remaining half of a whole. What happened to the other half of the house? It’s as if the south side of the building, in reality just the other semi-detached never built for whatever reason, had actually been swallowed into a sinkhole, parents and all, and the kids were left alone; cursed to live on the edge of fear and the edge of the hole. They only lean out of the windows in that wild way they do to tip the balance - to steer away from the void and to keep their castle from crumbling.
Although there are great patches missing from the hedges in the garden I can only hear the yelps and hollers of the children. I peer a little from across the street to try and catch a glimpse of their Stig of the Dump existence, but I don't cross the street for fear of falling in.