Sam opened the gate, and ushered me through. Half the field was grassland, the other an irregular mess of concrete and breeze blocks. In the corner beyond the building work, sheltered by a high hedge, stood a railway carriage and, beside it, a chicken run in which several birds stopped to look expectantly towards us.
‘My house.’
‘Nice!’ I glanced around. ‘Um … where is it?’
Sam began to walk down the field. ‘There. That’s the foundations. Took me the best part of three months to get those down.’
‘You live here?’
‘Yup.’
I stared at the concrete slabs. When I looked at him, something in his expression made me bite back what I was going to say. I rubbed at my head. ‘So… are you going to stand there all evening? Or are you going to give me a guided tour?’
Bathed in the evening sun, and surrounded by the scents of grass and lavender, and the lazy hum of the bees, we walked slowly from one slab to another, Sam pointing to where the windows and doors would be. ‘This is the bathroom.’
‘Bit draughty.’
‘Yeah. I need to do something about that. Watch out. That’s not actually a doorway. You just walked into the shower.’
He stepped over a pile of breeze blocks onto another large grey slab, holding out his hand so that I could step safely over them too. ‘And here’s the living room. So if you look through that window there,’ he held his fingers in a square, ‘you get the views of the open countryside.’
I looked out at the shimmering landscape below. I felt as if we were a million miles out of the city, not ten. I took a deep breath, enjoying the unexpectedness of it all. ‘It’s nice, but I think your sofa’s in the wrong place,’ I said. ‘You need two. One here, and maybe one there. And I’m guessing you have a window here?’
‘Oh, yes. Got to be dual aspect.’
‘Hmm. Plus you totally need to rethink your storage.’
The crazy thing was, within a few minutes of our walking and talking, I could actually see the house. I followed the line of Sam’s hands, as he gestured towards invisible fireplaces, summoned staircases out of his imagination, drew lines across invisible ceilings. I could see its over-height windows, the banisters that a friend of his would carve from aged oak.
‘It’s going to be lovely,’ I said, when we had conjured the last en-suite.
‘In about ten years. But, yup, I hope so.’
I gazed around the field, taking in the vegetable patch, the chicken run, the birdsong. ‘I have to tell you, this is not what I expected. You aren’t tempted to, you know, get builders in?’
‘I probably will eventually. But I like doing it. It’s good for the soul, building a house.’ He shrugged. ‘When you spend all day patching up stab wounds and over-confident cyclists and the wives whose husbands have used them as a punch-bag and the kids with chronic asthma from the damp …’
‘… and the daft women who fall off rooftops.’
‘Those too.’ He gestured towards the concrete mixer, the piles of bricks. ‘I do this so I can live with that. Beer?’ He climbed into the railway carriage, motioning for me to join him.
It was no longer a carriage inside. It had a small, immaculately laid-out kitchen area, and an L-shaped upholstered seat at the end, though it still carried the faint smell of beeswax and tweedy passengers. ‘I don’t like mobile homes,’ he said, as if in explanation. He waved to the seat, ‘Sit,’ then pulled a cold beer from the fridge, cracking it open and handing me the bottle. He set a kettle on the stove for himself.
‘You’re not drinking?’
He shook his head. ‘I found after a couple of years on the job that I’d come home and have a drink to relax. And then it was two. And then I found I couldn’t relax until I’d had those two, or maybe three.’ He opened a caddy, dropped a teabag into a mug. ‘And then I … lost someone close to me, and I decided that either I stopped or I would never stop drinking again.’ He didn’t look at me while he said this, just moved around the railway carriage, a bulky, yet oddly graceful presence within its narrow walls. ‘I do have the odd beer, but not tonight. I’m driving you home later.’
Comments like that took the weirdness out of sitting in a railway carriage with a man I didn’t really know. How could you maintain a reserve with someone who had tended your broken, partially unclothed body? How could you feel anxious around a man who had already told you of his plan to take you home again? It was as if the manner of our first meeting had removed the normal, awkward obstacles to getting to know someone. He had seen me in my underwear. Hell, he had seen under my actual skin. It meant I felt at ease around Sam in a way I didn’t with anyone else.
The carriage reminded me of the gypsy caravans I had read about in childhood, where everything had a place, and there was order in a confined space. It was homey, but austere, and unmistakably male. It smelt agreeably of sun-warmed wood, soap and bacon. A fresh start, I guessed. I wondered what had happened to his and Jake’s old home. ‘So … um … what does Jake think of it?’
He sat down at the other end of the bench with his tea. ‘He thought I was mad at first. Now he quite likes it. He does the animals when I’m on shift. In return I’ve promised to teach him to drive around the field once he turns seventeen.’ He lifted a mug. ‘God help me.’