The House I'd Already Lived In

For six years I had a filler dream: wandering a house that does not exist. A staircase with a landing window at knee height, absurd and charming; a long upstairs hallway with a plaster crack shaped unmistakably like a heron; a kitchen where the afternoon sun struck a copper pipe and threw a coin of light onto the ceiling. Familiar, boring, mine. I assumed my brain had built it from bits.

When we finally had a deposit, the search was long and disheartening. Fourteenth viewing, a tired 1930s semi the agent apologised for in advance — 'needs love' — and I walked in and the staircase turned, and there was the landing window at knee height.

I want to be careful here, because I know how memory flatters itself. So: standing at the bottom of the stairs, before going up, I said to the agent, 'There will be a crack in the hallway plaster upstairs, long, shaped like a bird with its neck out.' She laughed politely, the way agents do. My husband, who had heard about the dream house for years without much patience, stopped laughing before she did.

The crack runs along the upstairs hallway, and it is a heron — neck, beak, one trailing leg. The agent stared at it, then at me, and asked, sincerely, whether I had viewed the property with another agency.

We bought it, obviously. The kitchen does the thing with the copper pipe and the coin of light on June afternoons.

Six years of dreams and I have found only one difference between the house I invented and the house I own: in the dreams, the cellar door was in the kitchen. In reality it is under the stairs. Except — the surveyor's report noted a bricked-up doorway in the kitchen's east wall, purpose unknown, sealed decades ago. I think about that more than I say.