Alma Cogan by Gordon Burn

daughter, obviously had theatrical ambitions at one point. There’s a grainy Spotlight -style portrait of her wearing the copper ring, Juliette Greco hair and exaggerated cow lashes which were de rigueur in certain circles when she was young. She is gazing heavenwards out of the left of the picture inresponse to the lensman’s no doubt husky request for ‘misty eyes’. Make magic with that face .
    Ruth, the elder daughter, is the breeder. Pictures of Ruth’s compliant, button-nosed children hang in velvet frames in several of the rooms. If I think of the children as being – how shall I put this? – dead, of having retreated from, rather than moved forward into their lives, that is partly the effect of the Polaroids, which have become sun-bleached (the light here most of the time is hallucinogenically bright), giving the young flesh a green, loose-on-the-bone, sickeningly disinterred look.
    But it is also partly the fault of the faded burgundy velvet which surrounds these snaps and the grime-stiffened pieces of ribbon to which they are attached.
    In the days when I was still noticing them – still noticing everything that I now accept as just everyday domestic clutter, mere atmospheric fill – I was tempted several times to remove the pictures or turn them face to the wall. What stopped me is the thing that has always stopped me making any kind of even minor change in the years I’ve been dug-in here.
    It pleases me that, with the exception of a couple of personal eccentricities which we will no doubt take a turn around later, there is hardly any more evidence of my existence in the cottage today than on the day I arrived.
    The names and numbers in the book that lies by the telephone are in Mrs E’s hand. It is Mrs E’s recipes that are written on plain four-by-five cards in the tin box in the kitchen. I sit in Mr and Mrs E’s chairs, sleep in their bed and eat my meals from their plates with their knives and forks. My clothes hang next to the few items of clothing of theirs that their children, for whatever reason, have decided not to let go.
    I lie in their bath at nights listening to the riotous knocking and screaming in the pipes which, on the rare occasions they were away from it, must have formed a part of their memory of the house. Lying in bed in the dark, you can still hear mouse claws clicking in the rafters and the reassuring noises of the house settling around itself.
    They have laid claim to it in so powerful, apparently permanent, a way that, although in many respects it was blindingly obvious, it came as a shock the first time I realised that other people had lived in Kiln Cottage before Mr and Mrs E.
    ‘Know what this is?’ Bob Brotherhood asked when he broke off from pottering in the garden and came in for a cup of tea one day. He was sitting in his favourite ‘elbow chair’ with his cap flattened across his knee. His country colour as usual was alarmingly high. He was rotating the tiny leather clog off the bureau in his chipped and worn old fingers.
    (My thoughts immediately flew to the clog-shaped hole it would have left in the collected dust, and the bad report he’d put in to Mrs Brotherhood when he got home. He has an unusual attachment to the cottage and misses nothing to do with its well-being and maintenance.)
    ‘Found it in the wall, I did, when I was helping knock through here, time I was a boy. Put there years sin’, so they say, to ward off evil spirits.’
    The cottage was originally three workers’ cottages. The original tenants were apparently jobbing gardeners and journeymen carpenters, masons and tailors, washer-women and domestic servant girls, all topped-and-tailed, incestuously shoe-horned in together.
    The conversion to a single dwelling accounts for the surprising changes of level you now find between rooms; going upstairs, in some instances, can leave you standing no further from the ground than where you’ve started.
    The cottage is wedge-shaped and built sideways