Deadlines

Miranda had been given three months to live, four and a half months ago, and was tiring from the strain of living every day to the full. She had fulfilled her ‘bucket list’ of swimming with dolphins, riding in a hot air balloon, trekking the Inca trail, learning to belly dance and how to play ‘Fur Elise’ on the piano. She had seen the Aurora Borealis. The nurse had said she couldn’t donate any more blood, and the novel she’d always meant to write was already enjoying its second week in the bestseller chart. Her tattoo, a cursively scripted ‘Carpe Diem’, already seemed faded. She missed certainty and boredom.

So, she had taken to breaking into people’s houses. It was easy; she’d found the instructions on the internet. First, she’d pick a street and walk around in the morning until she spotted someone leaving their house. She’d walk around the corner or to another vantage point where she’d begin looking confusedly at a dog-eared copy of the A-Z until she was sure they’d left and all other activity in the street had ceased. Next, she’d take a pack of leaflets from her bag that she’d photocopied at the library, and post them in every other letterbox until she got to the chosen house, at which point she’d inspect the locks and peer through the letter slot to check there were no dogs. In the areas she chose, most often she could see through to the back door, and then she’d nonchalantly continue posting leaflets, which advertised the local Neighbourhood Watch with purposeful irony, until she found the passageway that lead behind the back gardens, checking no one was looking and darting down in. Counting down the boundaries to the target house, she insinuated her way over fences and through wobbly, unlocked gates, tiptoed through flowerbeds keeping to fences and hedges, took out her lock-picking instructions, printed off from a website that showed you what to do when you’d locked yourself out and had a legal proviso stating that the instructions given were by no means intended to be used by those who wished to break the law and were provided for emergency situations only, and let herself in.

Once inside, she allowed herself a good minute to take in the air; the scent of each house was extraordinarily different, ignored by its regular inhabitants who had come to know it as their own, and Miranda savoured it one would a new, rich perfume or the first breath of air in a new country. Her favourites, noted in her journal that recorded each and every housebreak, were those with a heavy base note and intriguing top notes that lingered on like an accusation of inhabitance: damp plaster with a touch of bacon and eggs; warm washing, heightened by Gardenia and a tinge of strawberry conserve from breakfast; stale bread and raw, hot just-used hoover with, almost imperceptible, crayon. Once even, a house that smelled entirely of flour, and something on the turn. The most uncomfortable, a heavy musk that hit her like a wall, and almost overpowering sweat; Miranda had given up on achieving ‘be in a loving relationship’ when she’d found out her expectancy was so short, and, for her, sex was so much an unfriendly reminder of that un-ticked box that she avoided it completely.

Next she carefully paced through the downstairs rooms, each a tableau of someone else’s life, and noticed the colours of their decoration and the number and brand of the household appliances; if anything, her journal would be useful as a census of the average home in the early 21st Century. Upstairs rooms were more risky. If she made it up an uncreaking staircase, she avoided master bedrooms, instead looking for bathrooms, and counting how many were blue and had motifs of fish. She liked making note of unusual shower curtains. Her favourites so far had included a large map of the world, and a morbid one with fake blood-spatters and the silhouette of a figure wielding a knife. The rest of that bathroom had been white, and there had been film posters framed in the sitting room. Miranda thought she’d have liked to have met the owner of that house, even if it had smelled of flour. They seemed to have a sense of humour.

Bathrooms inspected, she made her way back downstairs, unless one of the bedrooms belonged to a child; a handmade sign bearing a girls’ name, or cartoon stickers and a door quietly ajar, were too much for her to pass. Along with ‘be in a loving relationship’ seemed to go ‘raise a baby’, and Miranda had always thought she’d be a mother to a little girl. Unsurprisingly, she had never really felt broody until the day she was told she would never have the chance, that instead of a foetus her fertile body was supporting a tumour that was growing at twice the rate of a baby and was going to continue to do so, entwining her lungs and heart and brain like a bindweed until it killed her - again sating her penchant for irony, albeit darkly.

Inside these rooms, Miranda again made note of the colours and appliances – she did not approve of televisions but music systems and speakers were all right – and the cuddly, stuffed inhabitants of bedspreads and shelves. Pink bored her, white was sad and temporary, and teddies were without interest, but yellow rooms with safari creatures and midnight blue rooms with glowing ceiling stars and toy dragons topped her favourites list. Next she inspected the bookshelves, if indeed there were any, and made note of the titles and whether they were bought or library copies. She always paused here, resisting the urge to sit and read to the imaginary owner of the book. She had taken to carrying a new copy of her own obscure favourite, ‘The Phantom Tollbooth’, on each trip, and slipping it discreetly into the shelves. Mentally she ticked off ‘contribute to literacy’, and for a moment felt the bindweed squeeze.

Once happy with a house, and having noted all of its features whilst sitting in the most comfortable armchair, she took out her book of Feng Shui and rearranged furniture into more aesthetically pleasing arrangements, before taking a last look around and heading out the way she came. She wore gloves and left no fingerprints, and hopefully no other trace save a strange feeling that someone had recently been there, a contribution to that week’s bedtime reading that no one would remember having bought, and an increase in chi.

Miranda woke one day to yet another unanticipated morning and found she was, quite unexpectedly, still alive.
After shrugging off the initial surprise, she had a shower and thought about breaking into another house. Dried off and sitting at her small kitchen table with wilted flowers in a jam jar sweetly decomposing over her buttered toast, she plotted today’s target area on the OS map on the wall, and considered the apparent paradox of her situation. Her ‘bucket list’ of achievements seemed hollow in light of the scripted nature her life had taken, nothing actually achieved but ticked off to a deadline – a word whose meaning she had never considered quite so delicately before - whilst other folk continued through what they thought was monotony and boredom and regularity waking up to yet another day with the almost-certainty that they could probably make plans and expect to achieve them and then wake up tomorrow and make some more. How thus to value the time you had left, when you didn’t know you had it?

So suddenly that she nearly fell off her chair, she felt the bindweed squeeze tight and thornily, now more like barbed wire. Through the tears of pain in her eyes as she breathed hard and emptily, she noticed with delight that the previously plotted ‘x’s now spelled out a word. Jerking up from the table, she sent her bag, filled with more Neighbourhood Watch leaflets and a fresh book, to the floor, papers spilling out as she frantically got opened her laptop on the counter, clicked her email drafts folder and sent off two previously written emails, one to her publishers thanking them for their hard work, and another to her solicitor stating that her last wish was for all future proceeds from her book to go to several children’s charities. She just had time to excitedly throw on her favourite dress, and then, with a sigh and a smile, she left the house.

That evening, men in blue uniforms and plastic goggles broke open her front door, and figures in white jumpsuits wandered around her flat. She gazed at them unseeingly as they took her pulse, noting the cloying scent of dead flowers mixed with the homely smell of butter, and then listened unhearing to them admiring her blue bathroom with the willow-pattern shower curtain as others wrapped her in plastic and began to lift her out to the ambulance. On the wall, a scrawled word on a map said ‘Thanks’, and a journal stood open on the table at a brand new page.