The flat is more crowded that he remembers. The old furniture is still there, dark wood shelves stuffed with books and papers, but there is now a secondary layer of furniture in front of it, shoddy chipboard things, also crammed full. Stacks of newspapers fill any spaces the furniture doesn’t. It’s dingy until Janet savagely jerks a curtain, letting in bright tartrazine sunlight that haloes all the dust in the air.
The kitchen cupboards are full of tinned food, some of it several years past the best-by dates. There are drawers full of light bulbs, matchboxes, cough mixture, sensible things to have on standby, apparently bought in bulk. All the rooms in the house are similarly crowded. Janet’s old bedroom is a warren of cardboard boxes (he looks inside one: instant noodles) and bin bags containing mothballed clothes.
Henry opens the door to his old room, and is overwhelmed by a smell of decay, emanating from a plastic bag of what might once have been fruit. Sifting through the bags underneath in case there are other perishables, he dislodges a large brown cockroach, which scuttles for cover. Reflexively, he steps on it, and then has to scrape the white ooze off his shoe. The room seems uninhabitable, but perhaps he’ll be able to clear a path to the single bed he last slept in more than thirty years ago.
“Do you want me to book you a hotel?” he murmurs to Revathi, and she widens her eyes.
“Are you kidding? Pass up the chance to witness a real-life Hoarders? Anyway it’s much more fun in the heartlands.”
His father’s room is no less occupied, but the bed can at least be seen, and it seems reasonably hygienic. He puts Revathi’s things in here and takes the sheets out to the washing machine. There’s no detergent anywhere to be found.
Revathi asks where the bathroom is. While she’s gone, Janet turns to him and says, sotto voce, “I’ve seen the will, by the way. There isn’t much money left, and he left me the flat.” She looks like she’s expecting a fight, and deflates a little when he simply nods.
“That’s fair. You took care of him.”
“We couldn’t have put him in an old folks’ home—how would that have looked? Anyway, we haven’t decided what to do with this place, either sell it or leave it for the boys when they want to move out. We’ll have to sort all this out.” She gestures at the mounds of rubbish, which look alarmingly permanent.
“Well. I’m grateful.”
She nods, mollified. “How are you, anyway? Everything fine with—your male friend?”
“We’re not together any more.”
“I’m sorry.” She pulls her hair back into a ponytail and turns her attention to one of the drawers. This is an improvement—it took her years to even stop wondering aloud whether her brother might suddenly switch to dating and, hopefully, marrying women. Now that they are in their fifties, she seems finally resigned to at least acknowledging, if not accepting, who he is.