With Love from the Suburbs

I’m making a series of work based on everyday life in the suburbs: observing my kids, our surroundings, and something else too, time passing. I’ve always found the idea of the suburbs fascinating in books and films in their rhythms, aspirations and longings. What you see and hear of your neighbours’ lives brings a blurring of private and public, with overlooked back gardens and overheard arguments. After moving so frequently over the last decade, when we finally got the keys here my husband said: “Right, that’s it, you’ll have to carry me out of this house.” And it felt like a morbid thing to say, even in jest.

Around us are young families and elderly people. On one side, the house is empty, with its owner residing in a care home. On the other lives a bachelor who occasionally leaves with his rucksack to buy food from the local shop. Both gardens are overgrown, attracting many birds and foxes. The empty house has lights on timers. Sometimes when I sit on the back step in the late evening, an upstairs light clicks on, and I imagine I see movement. But my imagination gets the better of me.

When my 5-year-old son plays basketball at the front I put a bicycle D-lock on the gates. It drives my teenage daughter crazy: “What, do you think he’s going to get kidnapped or something!?” I’ve never been able to get what happened to James Bulger out of my head. This case in particular was covered on the news when I was a child and stayed with me. Years later as an adult, listening to the radio in the bath, I realised his father was talking, being interviewed about what had happened to his son and how his life had played out afterwards. I sat in the water listening until it turned cold.

But it does feel safe here. People have moved into the house which overlooks our kitchen window and garden. I looked up from cleaning the sides to see a red-haired man watching me while brushing his teeth. I carried on like I hadn’t noticed. I guess we will have to get used to each other.

I have become used to certain sounds: our gate, our neighbours’ gate, the wind when the windows are on half-lock and the birds when they are sitting on the chimney. They may as well be in the same room. But despite the growing familiarity there is an eeriness I can’t place. Last night I listened to PJ Harvey while I cooked. She is also from Dorset and still lives there. Her song “Last Living Rose” always gives me a wave of homesickness.

‘Let me walk through the stinking alleys, to the music of drunken beatings, past the Thames River, glistening like gold, hastily sold for nothing, nothing…’

There is a magpie making a nest in the tree in our garden. In the morning it watches me cagily as I move around the kitchen. It’s not me she needs to worry about; it’s the boys with their Nerf guns. Ever since a crow ate raw mince from our shopping bag at the park, Finn has hated birds. I must admit it was pretty gross seeing mince dangling from its beak. I learned the other day that the utility room area on the side of the house is called a “lean to”. I thought this was beautiful and it reminded me of that scene in the film Donnie Darko when Drew Barrymore’s character says “cellar door” is the most beautiful combination of words in the English language.

The lady in the house opposite our bedroom had a cat called “Oscar.” At night I would hear her call him in: OSCAAAAAR. Some mornings I would open our bedroom curtains to be faced with her standing there, with Oscar in her arms, looking out the window. They both had black hair. Then everything went quiet, her curtains stayed closed, and the calls for Oscar stopped. I heard then that she had died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage in her home, and Oscar has been rehoused elsewhere. The house is now empty but sometimes boxes appear in the windows.

I cycle my daughter’s little purple bike to pick up the kids from school. I’m sure I look ridiculous, but I’ve stopped caring: people will make up their mind about me either way. Most of the houses are the same, pebble dash and boxy. It makes me think of that Malvina Reynolds song “Little Boxes”. I am starting to like the predictability of it. The speed humps on the road are fun: we are not dead yet after all.

‘Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky, little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same.’

Playing Ball, 40 x 50 cm, acrylic on canvas