But I am wrong. When we enter the kitchen, I see it has been burnt out, not renovated, sections of the kitchen and hallway black, the paintwork and wall bubbled and charred.
I don’t recall having seen a burnt-out building on any of the surrounding streets but there are a lot of houses around here, and for all I know the house could look pristine from the front.
Blue’s paws dip in shot, delicately hopping from one wobbling board to another as the floor drops away dramatically either side of us. We back up slowly, and find that beneath is nothing but rubble and rainwater.
I fast-forward out of the burnt house, and other buildings flash past, taller and grander than our street. Who are these people—what do they do to afford all this?
The glowing glass extensions here rise several floors up, mezzanines, balconies, giant artworks suspended over open multiuse areas. I feel a yawn of need inside me, desire for these houses, these lives. I fast-forward again, hoping for interaction or access to one of the showstopping houses. But then I find something even better.
We are high up on the roof, the sky wide open, the clouds pink and peach, across London’s skyline. In the far distance, the red blink of the lights atop Canary Wharf just visible.
We stare out at it all, our domain, the wind tousling the fur at the top of the screen. It looks so peaceful up here. Blue’s world is so peaceful.
Our view jerks up, a seagull, flying low. We watch it, then the camera dips to look over the roof parapet, down at the street below.
The view is sickening, three floors down to the pavement beneath, where a woman with an infant buggy passes by.
I wonder if it is Matt’s sister, Grace, dropping off Isla. But Isla’s buggy is pink, not green.
The street below looks familiar, but then they all do from this angle.
I pause the video and scan the cars on the street below, looking for one I might know. Then I spot something I recognize, an old cream-colored camper van under a tree, in the bottom right of the screen. I walk past it on the way to the shops. That’s Gleeston Road. Two streets away.
I press play and we continue our journey along the front of the top-floor windows of Gleeston Road.
In the first window, a fifty-year-old woman works at her desktop in an oppressively bright home office. She does not look up as we pass.
Two darkened windows go by, then a light: a top-floor playroom, toddler twins sitting cross-legged on a ladybird rug watching aDisney movie, mesmerized, their young mum asleep on a beanbag between them.
I recognize her, having seen her several times making her daily trek to the park with her heavy-looking double buggy. No wonder she’s tired. I’m tired just getting up to feed Blue and letting him out. I promise myself I’ll say hi to her the next time I see her in the coffee shop queue. She looks like she could use an adult conversation.
But we have moved on: an empty spare bedroom, just visible past the sun-reflecting window, which momentarily blinds me.
Then the next window, a home gym, a large sepia wall print of a young, shirtless Arnold Schwarzenegger staring back at us. Weights sit in neat racks; a few machines are plugged into the walls.
The window in the next house is open. Blue stops. Inside, lurid seventies chintz furniture, which is odd, given the design-conscious area we live in. I pause the video and inspect the image.
This is one of the rare unrenovated houses in the area, I realize. The owners must have been in there since the seventies, and left it unchanged since then. A time capsule: the chintz faded, the carpet a bright pop of threadbare tangerine.
I fast-forward, and we move on and down walls and through gardens until I catch another human face.
I press play. It is a woman in her back garden. Early thirties. A small trowel in hand, gardening gloves on.
We are watching her from back on the wall.
She is bent over when she sees us but straightens to take us in. She smiles, says something, but we do not approach. She is amused by our stubbornness. She’s beautiful: long, curly dark hair, dungarees, cheeks red in the heat, with an Oxfam charity shop lanyard around her neck. This could be Lucy Kiefler, she volunteers at one of the local charity shops. Which would mean, if she is, that somehow we are back on our road, at Number 22. Our route was bizarre and entirely nonlinear.
I pause on Lucy. She doesn’t look broken—she looks happy. I glance past her to the house; it is not in disarray, but in fact appears to be the coziest house on our street, with its quaint, cottagey design. I press play again and Lucy returns to her digging as we move on.
I scrub forward, a road, another street, back gardens, a dog, trees, trees, trees, then I stop suddenly when I see something I recognize.It’s a low basement window. I shift forward. It wasn’t in my mind; this basement is real.Shit.
It’s the window where I saw the woman with the bruised face. A burst of apprehension detonates inside me. I let the footage run.
We approach the window. I grab the laptop screen and pull it close. Inside the basement room the woman has already seen us arriving.
She smiles at us. I see now the full extent of her injuries. Her lip is split, the skin tight and pinched around the wound, but she is pretty.
She has pale-blond hair, cut unevenly, and soft blond lashes, and blond eyebrows that almost disappear in the light as she moves toward us.
