Free Life: An Exploded Diagram by Mal Peet Page A

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    Then they were all together in the kitchen, which suddenly felt as small as a shoe box.
    George looked from one woman to the other. Win smiled at him. It was a shocking event.
    She said, “Well, yer a dark horse, ent yer?”
    Ruth wouldn’t meet his eye. She looked down at the floor, and he knew.
    The first of September was a Friday. Bill Ling gave George the day off and lent him the flatbed Morris lorry. George spread a tarpaulin over its oily floor and drove to Thorn Cottage. It took an unimaginable amount of time to dismantle the cast-iron beds and bring them down the narrow staircase. The stuff from the front room weighed a ton. He didn’t want any of it; he wanted them to lie on bare floors, eat off bare floors, until he could afford new things, modern things made of bright metal and plastic and Formica that had no miserable history. At midday Willy turned up, grinning, at the wheel of the laundry van, and they loaded that, too, with sheets and towels and table shrouds and the Sparling dinner service, the pieces clad in newspaper, like gray abandoned nests.
    They unloaded it all at 11 Lovelace Road just before the weather changed. George drove the lorry back to Ling’s yard and collected his bike. Rain fell as yellow beads from a sallow sky. He rode back into Borstead and stopped at the Feathers. He shook himself in the entry like a wet dog.
    The landlady lifted her painted eyebrows at him and said, “The usual, George?”
    “No,” he said. “A whiskey. Make it a double.”
    “Celebrating, are we?”
    “Aye,” he said. “A new life.”
    He lifted the glass and drained it.
    The landlady expressed mock disapproval.
    “If I’d’re known it was that important, I’d’re joined you.”
    George pulled a half-crown out of his pocket. “Do, then,” he said.
    She poured two more drinks but refused his money, laying her fat hand on his.
    “Thas on the house, George. Cheers. Here’s mud in yer eye.”
    When he got back to Millfields, the rain had drifted out to the North Sea, leaving the sky a tipsy festival of russet and bruised purple. He got off the bike and admired his new house from the other side of its glossy wet hedge. Its bland face was drenched in evening color. His young son was standing on the path. He picked the boy up and planted him on his shoulders.
    “What say, young Clem? You like it here?”
    The child said, “When’re we gorn home?”
    He carried the boy to the front door and found it locked. They went around the back. Ruth was at the kitchen sink, rinsing unpacked plates. There was a faint roaring from somewhere.
    “Clem,” she said. “Come’n feel this! Hot water from the tap!”
    George jockeyed Clem to the foot of the stairs and paused to look into the larger of the two front rooms. It had been turned into the Sparling Museum. Win, with a yellow cloth duster in her hand, stood inspecting it: the glass cabinet of grim ornaments; the mausoleum sideboard surmounted by the long-dead squirrel; the murky oleograph of Christ as The Light of the World; the squat occasional table obdurately awaiting an occasion.
    On Monday a man from the council came to see that they were settled and to hand over the rent book. From him Ruth learned that Lovelace was pronounced, correctly, as “Loveless.”

I LIVED IN that house for the next thirteen years, and in all that time I spent a total of maybe ten minutes in that front room. For some reason, Win lit a fire in its grate every Christmas morning; otherwise, it went unheated. In the bitter Norfolk winters, the room radiated cold like the exhale of a grave. Eventually, George rigged up a heavy curtain on a pole over its door, sealing Win’s past more firmly in its modern exile.
    Gradually, as I made cautious friendships on the estate, I came to realize that almost all the other houses had front, or “best,” rooms similar to ours. And always the same one — on the right as you came in the front door. (Not that anyone used the front door; in