She’d used a ruler to draw a perfectly straight square in the middle of her paper with a black pen, adding a square door, two windows and a roof.
‘That’s it?’ Kalani asked.
‘Yes, and you know why. So we can move on, please. You’ve been to my house; you know it has about as much soul as a service-station toilet. Laurie, what have you done?’
I looked at Laurie’s picture and had to smother a smile. She’d scribbled all over the page, in as many different colours as there were in Hattie’s pen pot. On top of the mess, she’d stuck pictures chopped out of Hattie’s magazine stash. Shoes, plates, phones, and of course pigeons, to name a few. Right in the middle, peeking out from under a pile of clothes and crockery, sprawled inside a hand-drawn hamster wheel, was a woman who looked uncannily like Laurie.
‘My home is chaos. How does it make me feel? Like I’m being smothered in other people’s expectations. Drowning in their petty dramas. On and on and on it goes, and still I never get anywhere. I dread seeing that lovely, sea-green front door I bought last year in the vain hope that walking through it might make me feel a bit less like entering a fiery furnace of other people’s crap.’
‘Excellent job, Laurie,’ Hattie said. ‘Who’s next?’
Kalani had tipped everything out of one of the cardboard boxes containing the other art materials. She had lined the huge box with foil, and made a shiny, foil-covered bed, chair and bath out of card. In one corner was a tiny pipe-cleaner person with black paper hair stuck on the top and draped in a red piece of fabric, synched tight where the waist would be.
‘I did have another dimension to add to my piece,’ Kalani said, before kneeling down and shaking the box, so that pipe-cleaner Kalani slid about, bumping into the bed and the chair. ‘There I am, rattling about in all my pointless riches. Some nights, I’d give anything to have a pigeon pooping on my limestone flooring. It’d be a welcome distraction to have something to argue with.’
‘Can we swap houses, please, Kalani?’ Laurie asked. ‘I mean, not forever but maybe a year or ten?’
I was last. I’d spent almost half of the thirty minutes trying to decide what to do, leaving me fifteen minutes to frantically stick pictures onto a sheet of paper.
‘This is how I feel about home,’ I said, pointing to the numerous images of different homes stuck along the side of a road I’d drawn in felt-tipped pen, twisting all over the page until it doubled back on itself and ended up at the beginning.
‘Tell us about it,’ Hattie said, softly. I think she knew what it would cost me to share this.
‘This is where I grew up.’ I pointed to the first brick house, which so closely resembled the home I’d grown up in, a tear had dropped onto the picture as I’d stuck it down.
‘Are thosegraves?’ Deirdre asked. ‘In the garden?’
There were, indeed, three tiny graves that I’d half-hoped would go unnoticed.
‘My parents. And my sister.’ I tried to swallow back the painful lump in my throat. ‘They aren’t buried there, but, well, they were my real home, not the building we lived in.’
Everyone was so still, so quiet, they could probably hear my heart pounding, so I kept on talking.
‘Home, for a long time, has been wherever work took me. I have friends who I stay with when I need a few days off, but, really, home has been me, and Muffin, and most recently here.’ I showed them the last house on the road before it reached my original home again, which vaguely looked like Riverbend. ‘And I’ve curved the road back to where it started because, I don’t know. I’ve seen a lot of homes over the years. Stayed in a fair few of them. Some bursting with love, others crackling with hostility. But here, for the first time, I’ve begun to feel that maybe I should find a permanent home again. One day. To have friends who know me living just around the corner, or a butcher who slips a slice of bacon in with my beef because he spotted I’m making some changes. To have a local café where my friend serves me “the usual”. I don’t know.’ I shrugged. ‘But I know I can’t do that unless I facethishome, the first one, and what losing it did to me.’
Hattie handed me a tissue, and it was only then that I realised I was crying. It was my turn to be enveloped in the beanbag huddle – although we kept it short, as there was still part two to complete.
One thing I didn’t point out on my artwork was a scrunched-up bouquet of roses at the foot of each grave.
Before the rest of the session, Hattie instructed us to grab our art and carry it down the studio staircase and across the lawn, behind the kitchen garden to the fire pit.
‘You guessed it, Gals.’ Hattie chucked a match onto the pre-built fire as she spoke. ‘Chuck those old, ill-serving, too empty or overcrowded homes into the flames. You’ve outgrown them. Burn those bad boys!’
So we did. Hattie went first, ignoring our pleas that however disturbing her painting might be, it was far too exquisite to burn. Thankfully, they didn’t take long to crumble into ashes because we had more arting still to do.
It was no surprise when Hattie explained the second task. This time, think about what wewantedhome to be, to feel like. For us, and anyone we shared it with. She showed us a second canvas depicting Riverbend, this time with a clean, bright third floor to match the rest.
We got to work.
Deirdre’s home was full of chintzy fabrics. There were chickens in the garden, and twin babies tucked up in a cot. A large bed had a big bump underneath the covers.
‘My unspecified husband and me. Having fun. Maybe making more babies. I want a home that’s so full of affection, I never once have to worry about finding my man with Heidi Sprag in a disabled toilet. And here,’ she pointed to a wall, ‘are all the photos of our amazing adventures.’
‘Is that someone mud-wrestling?’ Laurie asked, peering closer.
‘I was running out of time!’
We all agreed it was wonderful.
