Where Salt House Had Been

Eli came to the old house site with a thermos, plain biscuits and shoes that suggested he expected the ground to disagree with us.

I had called it research when I asked him. Bex had called it a date with supporting documents. Both descriptions made me nervous, so I brought the map and concentrated on the documents.

The safe path climbed away from the harbour before turning towards the old foundations. Below it, the Old Steps dropped to the water, blocked by a locked barrier and a sign explaining why the barrier was not a suggestion.

“We're not going down there,” I said.

“Good. I promised Grandpa I'd help with the boat tomorrow, and he gets impatient when people schedule avoidable injuries.”

The site of Salt House was smaller than I'd imagined. A low wall remained, with a public bench placed where the front room might once have been. Grass covered the ground. A rabbit watched us from a patch of thistles, considered our documentation and left.

I held up the photograph.

“The steps should be here.”

“Different angle.” Eli moved beside me, careful not to look over my shoulder so closely that I would have to notice. “See the reflection in the window? She's facing more towards the headland.”

He was right. When we shifted to the other end of the wall, the horizon fitted behind the photographed house.

“The pear tree would have been behind us,” I said.

“There were pears in the weather?”

“A smell. One petal.”

“Could it have kept that?”

“A capture can keep particles from the air with the conditions, if the material holds them. Not memories. It doesn't know whose garden it is.”

“So it isn't haunted.”

“Probably not in a way that pays rent.”

We sat on the bench. The sea looked pale beneath a thin cloud cover, with boats moving slowly enough to make leaving seem like a very relaxed decision. I knew this was mostly a trick of distance.

Eli poured tea into the thermos lid and a second cup he had remembered to bring. I had brought a notebook, two pencils, a map, the photograph and no practical provision for being outside.

“You've done research before,” I said.

“I've met my grandpa. Everything becomes longer if you don't bring biscuits.”

He told me about moving away when he was nine, first for his mum's work and later to a flat closer to his school. They had returned to Morrow the previous year after Stan fell and needed help with the shed. Eli had been happy to come back and then surprised by how few people still knew him in the uncomplicated way children know a boy who once put a crab in a pool.

“It's strange,” he said. “You remember exactly where you belonged. The place remembers somebody shorter.”

I traced a crack in the bench with my thumbnail.

“I've never really lived anywhere else.”

“Do you want to?”

“I want the course. I don't know if wanting to stay here is the same as not having properly pictured leaving.”

“You don't have to hate a place to go somewhere.”

“I know that.”

He didn't answer immediately. The wind lifted the edge of my map. He held it down with the biscuit packet.

“Knowing seems to be doing a lot of work for us.”

I smiled.

We walked around the permitted edge of the foundations. There was no hidden room, no abandoned box of answers and no ghost waiting to explain Grandad's intentions. Just nettles, a patch of old tile exposed where the grass thinned, and a view Mae had once seen on mornings when she was late or bored or annoyed with her parents.

That helped more than I expected.

The photograph had made the place look complete, a whole life waiting to be carried away. Standing there, I could imagine the other days outside the frame: bad plumbing, arguments about shoes, the effort of bringing shopping up the steps in rain.

On the way down, I slipped on loose grit. Eli offered his hand without grabbing. I took it, steadied myself and held on for two steps longer than the path required.

Neither of us mentioned the extra steps.

At the harbour, he asked whether I wanted another cup of tea. The thermos was empty, which we discovered only after agreeing that I did. We stood looking at it, then laughed so hard that a passing dog became concerned.

“I'm glad you asked me,” he said.

“To come?”

“Yes.”

My sensible answer would have been that he had been useful with the photograph. It was ready. I could feel it waiting to make the afternoon safe and technical.

Instead I said, “Me too.”

He smiled, and the whole slope of his face changed.

When I got home, Bex asked how the research had gone.

I sent her a photograph of the empty thermos.

Excellent methodology. Limited supplies.

She replied with so many question marks that I put the phone down and went to help Mum set the table, not because she needed another pair of hands but because I needed a room where nobody could see my face while I smiled at nothing.