Solace House by Will Maclean Extract

Read an extract of Solace House by Will Maclean.

2

3. Under night’s urging, that treacherous evening,

Reason and base lies engineered:

Mad and deluded, erring; perceiving

In tedium, infinite fears.

4. Under lone exile, desire: even now,

This house entices, surprises

Until naught remains; I see easily how

An unquiet night terrorizes.

I slept badly. My night was full of half-dreams, broken scenarios in which I was always close to humiliation, abandonment and utter defeat; I woke feeling as if I’d fallen down a flight of stairs. To cheer myself, I dragged a chair over to the window and sat watching, with a cup of instant coffee and a cigarette, as the rooms at The Ridge began to empty.

At first, I’ll admit, it was funny to me, seeing everyone leave. From three floors up, I watched, delighted, as they packed up – along with their Anglepoise lamps and stereo systems – their lurid, noisy university personas. The people they had tried out being, wearing like costume, for the past year.

And so, there went Nick Tanner, captain of the university rugby team, climbing sombrely into the black Saab that belonged to his dad, who, it transpired, was some kind of clergyman. Nick’s expression was a mask of shock; he looked for all the world like he’d been arrested. I half-expected his stern-faced father to push him down by the top of his head into the back seat. And there went Fay, shy to the point of fainting when sober, but if given more than one drink would reliably make an exhibition of herself. Fay’s mousy parents approached their daughter cautiously across the tarmac, as if she were being freed from a hostage situation, descending on her in a tearful embrace. And there went Nikki, or Nicola Molyneux as she’d now have to resume being, who had foamy-looking white dreadlocks and a nose stud and described herself as a New Age anarcho-collectivist, usually when nobody prompted her to do so. Her librarian-sensible and painfully embarrassed-looking mum came to collect her in a tiny blue Mini Cooper, which the pair of them packed up in a silence so strained I could feel the crackle of it from fifty yards away.

The amusement began to pall, however, when people who were more than simply the background scenery of my life at The Ridge also started to disappear. Phil – probably my best friend here after Marcus – an amiable ginger-haired young man who never swore, always shared cigarettes and played fragmentary Metallica songs on his acoustic guitar, was the first on my corridor to go, knocking on my door to wish me a good summer. I watched sadly as his bemused dad – looking uncannily like an older version of Phil – arrived as though through a time warp to rescue his younger self. Angela, who lived directly across from me, was next to vanish, meaning the corridor would never again vibrate to the shockwaves of her constant manufactured dramas, ranging from the terror of upcoming exams to breaking up with her on-off boyfriend, a singularly dull Classics student called Andrew.

It was easy, during term time, to sneer, yet now, it was plain to see that all of this was colour, was context, was life. It was infinitely precious, all of it: youth and folly and energy, the envy of the whole dead world, now itself dying, ossifying into the stale shorthand of nostalgia, a simplification of itself from which it would never recover. This rich combination of things – people, time, place, circumstance – would never repeat, never happen again, and its priceless complexities would be smoothed away by time, its heady and unique flavour condensed by memory into a series of images bland as flashcards; a dance, a laugh, a kiss, a song, stripped of all vitality.

And every hour, the corridor I lived on, and the hall of residence that surrounded it, grew quieter; the building around me seemingly growing larger and more imposing as its population dwindled. It’s like they’re all dying, I thought, as I shut the window. Succumbing, each one, to a disease that would take them, and leave me, cursed and alone, with the one person whose company I wasn’t sure I could endure.

Extracted from Solace House by Will Maclean out 12 May.

---

Solace House

by Will Maclean

The Secret History meets The Haunting of Hill House.

FIND OUT MORE