The front room at number 9

Text 1: Linden Road, by Noor Halloran

An original short story extract.

For six years Mr Abelard at number 9 had been, as far as anyone on Linden Road could tell, the dullest man alive. He wore the same brown cardigan in all weathers. He put his recycling out on the correct day. He nodded to people but did not speak, and when the children’s football went over his fence he returned it in silence, the next morning, placed carefully on the doorstep like a delivered egg.

So when his cat got stuck on the garage roof and Mo, who was fourteen and good at climbing, was asked to fetch it down, Mo expected the inside of the house to be brown too.

It was not.

He saw it as soon as he came through the back door with the cat squirming under his arm. The kitchen was ordinary enough, but the door to the front room was open, and through it came light, a strange, full, northern light from the big window, and colour. Colour everywhere. Canvases stood against every wall, three and four deep, some as tall as Mo himself. One was propped on the dining table, still wet, gleaming.

Mo put the cat down. He forgot he was holding it, and it dropped and stalked away offended.

They were paintings of the street. Linden Road, over and over, but not as Mo had ever seen it. The bins outside number 4 burned orange and violet like a sunset. Mrs Chaudhry’s washing line was a row of flags, blazing. The lamp post at the corner was a thin gold figure bending over the pavement as if listening to something. And there, in the biggest painting, was Mo himself, younger, in his old red football shirt, caught in the middle of a shot, one leg high, the ball a white blur leaving the frame, and the whole air around him crackling with blue and yellow, as though the ordinary afternoon had caught fire.

He had no idea how long he stood there. Long enough to hear the kettle, and then footsteps, and then Mr Abelard in the doorway with two mugs, in his brown cardigan, looking at him.

Neither of them spoke. Mr Abelard’s face went slowly red, from the collar upward, the way a page darkens when you hold it too near a flame. He looked, Mo thought, more frightened than Mo had ever seen an adult look.

“Please,” said Mr Abelard, very quietly. It was the first word he had ever said to him. “Please don’t tell anyone.”

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