Squalor Victoria

Nobody would have ever chosen to live at Dogwood Estate, but the news of its planned demolition was tough to bear. Kiera and her Mum had been allocated a new address – the ground floor of a cracked, pebbledash terrace, a whole hour’s drive from Dogwood – but had made no start on packing. Eviction was scheduled for two weeks’ time.

Kiera’s Mum had lived on the Estate for over three decades. For the past two years, she had fought, and appealed, and protested – shared petitions, and spoken at town hall meetings. But all for nothing. And now, it seemed certain she would pass every day of the next fortnight the same way: smoking in front of the TV, drinking box wine, and sleeping in the peeling leather folds of their couch.

Kiera, meanwhile, scrambled for a new job. The rent in their new flat was much higher, and her waitressing gig would be too long a commute once they left. Amidst applications and interviews, she felt the impending loss of her home in occasional drabs: the shock of pink light as the sun set beyond the concrete balconies; bottles skittering across the courtyard; music dribbling through open windows as the heat began pulsing in June.

She had spent the afternoon at a group interview – had passed three hours demeaning herself, fumbling with shaky, suited strangers to build bridges out of dry spaghetti, roleplaying as customers, and having to declare – in considered detail – what brand of chocolate bar she’d be. And the interview panel had asked her to repeat herself, to not mumble, more than once. They had asked why she had dropped out of college, and her voice had wobbled, and she had never quite recovered herself after that.

On her walk home from the train station, Kiera passed Poolfoot Meadows – an insipid sprawl of a hundred beige detached houses, each with its own grey driveway and meagre, sun-blanched lawn. She had never seen anyone outside there. It was like a model village: voiceless, its curtains drawn. She hated its sameness, and its sad, squat topiary. She hated its people, its children, its oversized cars. She hated that the residents called the police whenever kids from Dogwood took too long to wander through. And she hated that the police always came.

She approached home. The early evening hummed cloudless red, reliably starless. All around her, the flat blocks seemed to shiver, the stark concrete lines thrumming against the day’s darkling breeze. She lived three floors up, and as she climbed the narrow black stairwell, she ran her hand along its rough skin. Its bumps, its decades-old dry chewing gum; the carved initials of anonymous lovers, jagged, ululating. Stepping out onto the third wraparound deck, she was met by a figure – a body in an overcoat, angular, twisted towards her, his eyes and forehead obscured by an Olympus camera.

‘Shit,’ Kiera said, stumbling backwards. ‘Sorry!’

The figure smiled and lowered the camera. ‘No, it’s fine, please don’t worry!’

Kiera lurched forwards and back again, unsure whether she should hurry away or huddle back under the cover of the stairwell. When she clocked the figure’s face, she stopped completely. It took her a second to place him – the tall forehead, the black hair, the graceless, gangly limbs. But then came a jolt of recognition, and both faces widened with childlike grins.

‘Hamza!’ Kiera gasped. ‘What are you doing?’

Hamza brandished his camera with a soft shrug. ‘Just taking some photos.’

‘Photos of what? Here?’

Hamza nodded, and they both took a moment to survey the view below them. The innumerable doorways, the wistful yellow windows. The estate’s slopes and incisions, its broad-shouldered bulky artificiality.

They talked for a small while about the demolition, and about their plans for the coming days. They spoke briefly, feeling odd and a little self-conscious as they lingered together under the wavering light of the walkway.

‘I’m off to university,’ Hamza said, letting his hip drop, leaning his waist against the balcony edge. He was wearing a black t-shirt and ratty jeans, their bagginess exaggerating his stringy, boyish frame. ‘In Manchester. I have a mate there who's gonna let me stay on his couch until I move into halls.’

‘That’s amazing. What are you going to study?’

‘Photography,’ he replied with a fleeting wince.

Kiera congratulated him, meeting his eye, beaming and sincere. And then Hamza asked what she planned to do once Dogwood was gone.

‘Well,’ Kiera smiled, sighing. ‘We’re moving out towards Lancaster. A whole new start. I even had a job interview today.’

‘Oh yeah? What for?’

‘Oh, just an admin job at a caravan park.’

‘Did it go well?’

‘Yeah, I think so. It’s just a stop-gap, obviously. I’m planning to work in Early Years eventually – a nursery or something,’ she said.

‘Well,’ Hamza declared, ‘we should celebrate. Fancy a drink?’

Kiera, reflexively, went to decline. She hadn’t spoken to Hamza for the best part of a decade – not since their early teens. And she felt absurd in her Mum’s old navy pinstripe interview suit. But she remembered, warmly, how impulsive he had been, even when they were kids. How much she’d always loved seeing him tearing through the courtyard, or knocking on her door on weekends, beckoning her to play outside. How excitable and curious he had always been. The odd, small pain – like a rough stone in her side – of having watched him drift out of her life.

There was something, too, about the impending levelling of their shared childhood home that weakened her reserve – that chinked at the polite boundary between them. And then she remembered what awaited her at home: her Mum, and the tinny howl of the television; the coffee table littered with stained glasses, ash and blister packs; the smell of close, clammy, restless sleep; the total wordlessness.

So Kiera agreed, and they headed down a level to Hamza’s family’s flat.

It looked exactly as it had when they were kids: the deep purple wallpaper, the bowed bookshelves in the alcove, the chipped oil burners, the yellow fabric couch – even the Elvis Presley clock above the TV, his hips gyrating on a pendulum.

His family were out – at his grandparents’, Hamza said. The living room was filled with moving boxes, so he led her to his bedroom, grabbing a bottle of rosé from a kitchen cabinet on his way. In his room, Hamza poured the wine out into two plastic tumblers, while Kiera sat at his desk and took in the curated, cluttered riches all around her.

The last time she’d been there, the cream breeze block walls had been plastered with posters: Star Wars, Spiderman, Lord of the Rings. Skateboarders and minor noughties rockstars. Now, affixed with string and tiny clothes pegs, there hung countless rows of photographs.

‘Are these yours?’ she asked, and Hamza nodded, sipping from his glass. He sat back on his bed – his shoulders and neck crooked against the wall, his legs stretched taut and ankles crossed on the flattened carpet – and watched as Kiera studied the ramshackle display.

They were all snapshots from their town. From the estate, mostly. Trees, benches, doorways indelible. Its rugged mortar, its familiar cracks – its impassive, proud hostility. Forever monochrome. As though the window sills and alleyways and crooked aerials were all only memories already. He had an eye, Kiera thought. He could imbue concrete with feeling. Nothing with everything. There were pictures of his friends, too. Huddled in awnings, sprawled out on park benches: spilled cans and Bluetooth speakers, side fringes, kisses and silver-toothed laughter.

Hamza and Kiera sat together in his box-room reliquary, and drank, and traded memories from their childhood.

‘Remember the water fight?’ Hamza said. ‘We must have been nine, or ten. All the kids on the estate got involved.’

Kiera smiled. It was a Saturday afternoon. A heatwave. Their friends used balloons and water guns and jugs and bowls, and they’d hurled water from balconies, and even some of their parents and step-parents had waded into the fray. ‘It went on for hours,’ she said, remembering the white gossamer patter of water against the sky.

They reminisced about birthday picnics: tattered blankets and beach towels spread out across the courtyard paving stones, weighted down by homemade fairycakes, ham butties, crisps, penguin bars and panda pop. How the bread in the sandwiches always melted like play-doh under their blackened fingers. How they passed the fizzy drink bottles from mouth to grubby mouth.

And they remembered bonfire night – how older friends and siblings would smuggle them boxes of fireworks, and they’d set them off from the darkened crooks of the estate. The screech of rockets as they clattered hell-bent across wet pavement, or charred walls and hanging flowerbeds in their rowdy ascent. How they’d hiss and surge and bulge and shatter, and she and Hamza and the other kids would squeal, sheltering beneath walkways to shield their faces from drifting ash.

‘We burnt through your hat one year,’ Kiera said, pouring herself a second glass of wine.

‘I remember. I loved that cap. The embers tore a hole right through it.’

An hour passed, maybe longer, and they grew tipsy, and traipsed on through memories of scuffed knees and sleepovers and swiped, shared cigarettes. They batted names back and forth – Hamza’s best friend Jonny, who joined the army right after school. Kiera’s school pal Amber, who cycled over most weeknights to choreograph dances they’d later perform for Hamza and his friends. Early crushes and roaming cats and odd old men, and Josh – their old friend Josh, with long hair, who used to share his gameboy – what had happened to him? The ends of Hamza’s mouth turned down in a wan smile, and he told Kiera – briskly, softly – that Josh hadn’t taken the news of the demolition very well. That he’d struggled to picture what might come next.

Then Hamza talked about Manchester again. He told her about his student digs in Hulme, and about all the photographs he planned to take of the city’s countless, crumbling bridges and tower blocks, its innumerable modernist relics.

‘They love that shit on photography courses,’ he said. ‘They want to feel like they’re slumming it.’

Kiera rolled her eyes. ‘I’ve never been, you know. To Manchester.’

Hamza lurched upright. ‘Seriously? Oh, Kiera, you have to come! As soon as I’ve moved in, you can come crash at mine. We’ll go on a proper night out.’

‘I can help you take photos of bins and shit, too,’ Kiera quipped, aware, all at once, of her tipsiness.

Hamza stood and grabbed a camera from the shelf above his desk. As he leant over Kiera, she could smell him: fruity wine, sweet musk and cool evening air. He placed it in her hands and told her to give it a go. After he’d shown her how to pull back the wind lever, and half-press the shutter to focus, she ushered him backwards onto the bed. She held him in the centre of the viewfinder, surrounded by his photos, like a bird in a tumbledown nest – fledgling, almost outgrown.

Hamza laughed, and Kiera stepped forward so his face filled the vista entirely. For a moment, she lingered on his laugh lines, his dark lashes, his crooked teeth – the face she’d known since she was small. The homeliness of it. The knowledge that he was vanishing, soon, too.

Then he batted away the camera, and betrayed his drunkenness by rolling off the bed. ‘We need more drinks,’ he proclaimed, grabbing her hand and leading her to the bedroom door. Kiera laid the camera on the bed, and followed him outside.

He held her hand the whole way, clumsy, his fingers wrapped around her knuckles. And as they crossed the estate in the humming summer darkness, Kiera felt their memories brush past them like reeds. Memories of ice cream vans, of snowfall in March, of house parties and shrieking lovers’ rows in the courtyard. The sudden, looming loss of it all bludgeoned her. She felt a brutal, grasping urge to crush it all to her chest.

So as they came to the edge of Dogwood, to its last, dim-lit row of windows, each clouded by yellowing net curtains, and out beneath the outermost walkway – rapid footsteps echoing faintly, wistfully above – Kiera stood still. And Hamza, still snagged on her hand, came back, and turned to her, and neither of them spoke a word. A sad smile passed between them, then a kiss. A long one – fevered, idiotic – as if making up for lost days, Kiera’s head pressed against the rough concrete wall, the smell of piss and moss and lager oozing out from its pores.

They walked on towards the newsagents, half-dazed, words rattling out of them like hiccups, like sleeptalk. Hamza was hurrying, she could tell, eager to get them both back to his breezeblock bedroom before his family came home. And as they talked, they looked breathless at one another’s faces – the flushed skin, the erratic brow, the freckles, the sudden magnitude of lips – baffled by the strange luck of having refound one another – to have found one another in the first place.

They crossed the street, passing directly beside Poolfoot Meadows. It was dozy, cats yawning through the chinks in thick curtains, the smell of woodburners peppering the air.

‘I fucking hate this place,’ said Kiera. ‘Don’t you?’

Hamza nodded. ‘Bunch of posh pricks. It’s probably the kind of thing they’re going to build over Dogwood, too.’

They walked on a few more moments, Kiera’s blood beginning to spit. She grabbed Hamza’s arm. ‘Come this way,’ she said, pulling him across the yellow knoll that rolled down to Poolfoot.

‘What are you doing?’ Hamza asked, laughing, his shoes scuffing against the Meadows’ pink gravelstones.

‘Just looking around,’ Kiera replied. She fixed her eyes on a house close by, and – dropping Hamza’s arm – headed over to it. It was identical to all its neighbours, with a silver-painted door and a parched, overgrown yucca plant beside it. In the driveway sat a huge black four-by-four, with a clamp attached to the driver’s wheel. The entire house looked hollow, no sound or light dripping through.

Kiera pressed her face to the front window, and narrowed her eyes to peek through the slats of the blinds.

‘Kiera!’ Hamza whispered, still a few paces back. ‘What are you doing?’

She waved her hand, batting away his words, and continued peering. Through the dusky shadow, she could make out a low, sagging couch, a throw crumpled artfully over its backrest, and a stream of cushions in careful disarray. The room was spotless, cream walls lined with books and abstract, listless artwork; comically large Taschen tomes stacked tastefully atop an oval coffee table. The living room unfurled directly into a dining area, its table and low-strung lamps overlooked by a broad oak cabinet bursting with records in plastic sleeves. The back wall was constructed entirely from glass, its gaze cast wide across a high-fenced garden, gasping under asphalt and sad potted trees.

‘Let’s go,’ Hamza urged, hovering at the end of the driveway. He was still smiling, still flushed with drink and excitement.

‘Okay,’ said Kiera, though she stood fixed, squinting, trying to imagine who might live there. Who could earn enough, who could call it home – find it warm, find it interesting. Who could possibly withstand its staged loneliness. She tried to conjure a picture of them: the long meals they cooked, the gorgeous clothes they wore, the luscious, bold way they answered the phone. Their petty anxieties. Their easy dreams. Their graceful lack of shame. Their obliviousness and wordless pride.

Hamza called out to her again, impatient now. ‘Come on, Kiera. We look dodgy.’

Kiera turned around, her breathing barbed by want and by hate. They overwhelmed her like hunger – a feverish urge to grasp and to take and to shock. She didn't look at Hamza as she approached the house’s front door, nor as she yanked off the ring doorbell and – throwing her head backwards – laughed a childish, cackling laugh.

‘Kiera!’ Hamza hissed. ‘What the fuck?’

But there was no stopping her. She crushed the doorbell underfoot, then began kicking the metal letterbox screwed into the brick. Its clatter as it careened across the driveway was leaden and piercing.

She strode over to the thin plot of shrubbery, all the while blanking Hamza who, stumbling backwards, was half-whispering, half-wailing at her to stop. She grabbed the sharp leaves of the yucca and tore it from the earth in panting rips. Then she did the same to the rotten saplings surrounding it, and kicked over the ludicrous, dome-shaped potted topiary along the driveway, causing the soil to spew out, the pots to crack.

She reached down and picked up a shard of ceramic from the ruins, and headed over to the parked four-by-four.

‘Kiera, no!’ Hamza cried, as lights in neighbouring houses clicked on, curtains twitching. A man's voice bellowed from a nearby doorway, his words unintelligible, his tone deadly. Kiera pushed on, unreachable now, spellbound by grief, dragging the shard along the car’s doors and windscreen. The alarm wailed instantly, and, with bleeding hands, she tore off the wipers, then kicked hard against the flash lights until the glass shattered inwards.

More voices yelled at her now, voices hurled from silhouettes hinged spectral in doorways. She turned for a moment and found Hamza had left her, was out of sight already. It left her sick and relieved – unimpeded, free to drag the shard along the car windows, then over across the mottled grey skin of the front door. She carved jagged incisions, vicious words, wild lacerations of contempt. 

After tearing a drainpipe away from the brickwork, she searched around in the purple summer darkness for a large stone. She grabbed one from the end of the driveway, and hurled it at the front window over and over, each time denting the glass a little deeper, relishing its cartoonish groan.

She was brandishing the stone above her head – skin searing, tears scorching her eyes, certain this time that the pane would smash – when she heard the sirens approaching. They were guttural and close, causing her arms to fall limp. She dropped the stone and wiped her face with her sleeve. And as she turned to meet the sharp, sobering shouts of the policemen, she didn't speak. She heard nothing. She was gone, exhausted, removed from herself, her mind wild with lost things – with fireworks and concrete and childhood bedspreads, and soft sacred visions of balconies battered by rain.

*

 Madeleine is a writer and museum professional based in Manchester, UK. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Argyle, Litro/Crayon Magazine, Hemlock Journal, and Fairlight Books. In 2024, she achieved third place in a short fiction competition held by Confingo Publishing.