The Kraken

I think my house has tentacles. I hadn't noticed them before, but perhaps that is because houses are good at keeping their tentacles hidden. They put them under floorboards, behind skirting boards and through foundations. You can live quite happily for years without knowing they are there. It is only when you try to leave that they become apparent.

I have been trying to leave for months. Every time I think I have finally wriggled free, something curls around an ankle and pulls me back. At first I thought this was conveyancing. I no longer think this. I think I have been living on top of a Kraken.

The house has had hold of me for most of my life. I grew up here. I left. I came back. I left again. I came back again. For a long time I regarded these as decisions I had made myself. I'm beginning to reconsider.

There is something peculiar about trying to leave your childhood home at fifty-nine. Most houses know only one version of you. You arrive as an adult with furniture and boxes and the reasonable assumption that you are the one taking possession. This house knew me before I knew myself. It has watched almost the whole thing. It knew me when I was small enough to have no choice about being here, and it is still here now that I have finally made one.

It also has the advantage of geography. I can stand in one place in this house and see the exact spots where three members of my family died. There are bodies in the garden too. Pets, admittedly, but bodies nonetheless. Several of them. The distinction probably matters more to us than it does to the earth.

So when I say this house contains my history, I don't mean that in the decorative sense. The history has coordinates. I can point to it. Here. There. Just there. There are parts of my life that have disappeared everywhere except here.

People talk about houses holding memories as though this is a lovely thing. Sometimes it is. Sometimes a room produces somebody you loved with such clarity that for a moment the intervening years collapse. But houses are indiscriminate archivists. They don't only preserve the things you would have chosen to keep. They keep the lot. They don't distinguish between what you treasure and what you spent years trying to forget.

There are places here where I can be fifty-nine and nine at precisely the same time. A doorway can do it. A particular angle of the light. The view from one room into another. People who haven't lived here for decades remain surprisingly easy to find. People who are dead haven't entirely left either.

The house keeps copies.

Perhaps it keeps one of me.

I don't know quite when a place stops being somewhere you live and becomes something you belong to. Perhaps you don't notice it happening. A grip is much easier to maintain if the thing being held doesn't know it's being held.

Packing has changed surprisingly little. There are boxes now, but the rooms still look much as they always have. Most things remain where they have been for years. For all the talk of leaving, the house itself gives almost no sign that I am going anywhere. I don't think it has accepted my departure yet.

A tentacle tightens. I remove it and another appears. Then another. For months I have had the peculiar experience of almost escaping, which turns out to be considerably worse than not escaping at all. Every apparent escape has produced another reason I cannot quite leave.

I am still here.

Every morning I think perhaps today. I don't even decide to think it anymore. The thought is simply there when I wake up. By late afternoon the grip has usually tightened again. At night I lock the doors of a house I am trying to escape from.

The tentacles themselves have become increasingly ridiculous. The early ones were substantial things: memory, family, obligation, history. Those took years to remove. The latest have been made largely of paperwork and unanswered emails. A creature that has survived beneath an old house for this long is unlikely to be defeated by paperwork.

This week I finally signed the documents to sell.

I signed.

It changed nothing.

A date has appeared: 1 October. The people at the top of the chain have agreed to it. We have agreed to it. Until everyone agrees, it is only a date on a piece of paper.

I don't think the house loves me. Love is too comforting an explanation for possession. Nor do I think it is trying to keep me because it will be lonely when I go. This house has seen too many people come and go for sentimentality. Some left through the front door. Some did not.

Nearly sixty years is a long time to have a hold on me.

Perhaps that's why the Kraken has only become visible now. There was no reason to show itself while I remained here willingly.

And I am pulling now.

I have spent so long trying to get out that I haven't thought very much about the exact moment when the resistance finally disappears. Eventually there must be a last tentacle. Eventually I will remove it and wait for another to reach for me. None will.

Then I will get into the car and leave.

The house will still be here. It will look exactly as it did. Brick, windows, roof, garden. Nothing anyone driving past would think twice about.

And nobody looking at it will have any idea how hard I had to pull to get free.