The Borrowed Kitchen Read online

  Contents

  Copyright

  Title

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Epilogue

  Extras

  The Borrowed Kitchen ©

  By S J B Gilmour.

  Copyright © 2012 by S J B Gilmour

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a data retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright holders.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  General digital release ISBN: 978-0-9871084-7-0

  First published in 2012 by S J B Gilmour.

  Any and all correspondence regarding this publication to:

  S J B Gilmour.

  1187 Glen Huntly Road, Glen Huntly, 3163, Victoria, Australia.

  The Borrowed Kitchen

  For Anna

  Chapter One.

  There are a few us in this part of the world. The second confessional booth in Saint Joseph’s down on Pitt Street is one. So is the study in old Mrs Howard’s weather-board house on Dawson’s Lane. You may even have one in your house and not know it. Most people have no idea when they’re in one of us, or they’d probably be better behaved. Like when Sally Barnard gave her teenage son’s best friend some “special” education in her living room, or when Jeff Riley hid his gambling dockets in the basement under his office.

  I’ve always felt a bit sorry for that basement. At least most of us get regular visits from the living. Still, I guess it’s better than seeing nothing but death like Room Nine on C Ward over at Gembrook General. Now I reckon I’ve got the best of it. I’m a kitchen. A big one.

  A haunted kitchen? No, not haunted. Possessed. I was once a living person, probably just like you. My name was Eugenie. Don’t laugh. It was a family name. I died young, while I was just finishing the construction of my house. It was to be my dream home out here in Shiprock Falls.

  Shiprock Falls is just a little pocket really. Officially, it’s in the Yellingbo postcode, and there aren’t any real defined borders. But, those who live here know when they’re in The Falls and when they’re out of it. It’s sort of half-way between Gembrook and Yarra Junction. It’s named for a small spring of icy fresh water that cascades from a split in a huge granite boulder in Kurth Kiln Regional Park, just a few hundred metres from me.

  I loved those falls. It was there, surrounded by towering mountain ash gumtrees and among the moist ferns and bushy wattles, listening to the sound of tree-creepers and fairy wrens, that my Ashleigh proposed. I said yes, naturally. With one condition: I wanted to live close to that cool rainforest for the rest of my life. As we drove back towards Gembrook, Ashleigh stopped at the real-estate sign on the property fence and rang the number. Thirty days later, the block was ours.

  We didn’t have a big wedding, or even much of a honeymoon. We’d have plenty of time for that after we got the house built, or so we thought. So, about six months after our engagement, exactly a week after our wedding, we began building. Mostly it was Ashleigh and me. Sometimes, we’d bring in a professional to do some of the plumbing or wiring we couldn’t handle ourselves, and of course we had a Master Builder from Yellingbo Shire sign off at various stages.

  A young girl from down the road, Kelly Forbes, came by on weekends and as much as she could on school holidays. She was too young to do any real work, being only about ten or so. But, she was nice enough to have around, and certainly made herself useful when she could. She’d carry and fetch items for us, do some cleaning and tidying. She was even quite good with a paintbrush. Well, good enough for us to trust her to apply the undercoats at least. We’d paid her for her time, naturally, but she didn’t seem to be doing it for the money. She just liked being there.

  It was away from home, I guess, and close enough for her parents to consider her safely nearby than were she to hang around the skate park in Gembrook, the nearest real town. There are a few farms and rural families about, but The Falls is surrounded on three sides by Kurth Kiln Park to the south and east, and the larger Bunyip State Park forest to the west. The bush is hardly a lot of fun for young girls and boys when there are skateboards and bikes to ride, and more importantly, other friends to hang out with and encourage, and likewise be encouraged, into mischief.

  My house is on sixty acres of cleared land, on a block some two hundred and seventy acres. The house itself is set back from the road by about a hundred metres. Ashleigh (he was never Ash, though every time I saw a mountain ash gum, I thought of him) and I designed every part of it. We were planning for a family of at least four children, with cows, goats and chickens, and no doubt dogs and all manner of other of God’s creatures running about the place.

  The ground floor of the house is fairly standard for the area, except that the kitchen – that’s me – is twice the size of a regular kitchen. It has a small single stove and sink on one side, under one window, but beside it and around further along the next wall is a larger range and a double sink. Along the next wall is space for a twin fridge-freezer that could store enough food for a small army. The bench along the window is wood, giving the view of the window and range a warm feeling. The island bench in the middle is granite, and it’s enormous.

  The fridge space and the bench size were my husband’s ideas. He insisted that if the bench wasn’t big enough for him to dress down a full side of beef, and he didn’t have enough room to store that meat, then the kitchen was under-equipped.

  Ashleigh died a few days after we moved from the trailer in the driveway and into the two completely finished rooms. It was the first day of winter. Friday, June 1, 2007. He’d taken out one of the lovely redgum steps because it squeaked and was replacing it with another that I thought was bound to squeak as well. I didn’t care about a few creaks and squeaks. He did, so I didn’t argue. That evening, as he worked on it, I’d gone out to fetch firewood from the shed. I returned to find him lying at the bottom of the stairs, all bloody and twisted with a chisel still in his hand.

  I don’t remember calling the ambulance. When they arrived, I’d gone numb. Cold. I barely registered them and the police as they checked me over, and asked questions and then eventually left with my husband’s body.

  At the top of the stairs, they had found a spilt tin of thinners. Halfway down, they found one of the loose steps. They guessed dizzy from the thinner fumes, he’d overbalanced, gone to step on a step that wasn’t there and then tumbled. From the blunt-force wound to his head, and blood stains on the stairs lower down, they reasoned he’d died instantly. His death was ruled an accident. No post-mortem was performed.

  The next day, I picked up the mop. Once I’d cleaned up the blood, I had what I call my Forrest Gump moment. Instead of running across the land, I spent every waking moment finishing the house. I picked up my husband’s tools and went right back to work. I don’t think I even cleaned the blood off the chisel.

  Other than the nice folks down at Gembrook Hardware and Stockfeed, I don’t think I spoke to another person for two months. Young Kelly Forbes came around a few more times, but even she began to avoid me. I guess I could have made more of an effort to engage her, but I wasn’t of a mind to engage anyone at all. I’d probably have kept on that lonely life if it hadn’t ended. Of course when it did end, my chances for conversation really dried up.

  When I died, t
he kitchen itself was nearly finished. The tiles were down, the walls painted and most of the windows were installed. One large window remained unfinished, but I’d wanted to get a light fitting fixed before I did anything else. Perhaps if I’d been more thorough, like my Ashleigh had been and not started one job before finishing another, I might still be alive. Of course, if I’d been like Ashleigh, I’d have made sure to get more rest instead of working on the house until I could barely see straight.

  I’d have been more alert. I’d have made sure to turn the power was off at the mains (I was sure I had turned it of. Obviously I was wrong), not just at the wall when I was putting in that last light fitting.

  There was a flash and I felt as though I’d been hit by a train. I was knocked clear off the ladder. As I fell, the top of my head struck a carpentry horse so hard that part of my skull and frontal lobe stayed on the beam like a lump of hamburger with a curly brown fringe. There was a burst of blood from my head that sprayed all over the floor and up one wall. A small glob of gore even flew up and splattered against one of the windows. My body came to rest on the freshly-laid terracotta tiles. Without any pressure in my veins and arteries, the blood just oozed out of the top of my head into a large sticky pool.

  Pretty sad, huh? First the husband, then the wife and only a few months between them. So there you have it. One minute I was on a ladder, the next I had cupboard doors instead of arms and legs.

  It was then, right there at that precise moment when I became a kitchen, that my emotions came back. Misery, anger and grief were the main ones. At first, I railed against my new circumstances. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. All I could do was watch my dead body drain of blood, stiffen and begin to decompose. My body lay there for nineteen days before a courier in need of a signature noticed the smell.

  A cleaning crew came in after my remains had been taken away. They couldn’t get the blood out of the grouting between the tiles, so all that winter, I had the delightful reminder of my demise right there on the floor in front of me. Finally, some workmen arrived. They ripped up the tiles and put fresh ones down, finished the light fitting I’d died working on, and put up plastic sheeting over the empty window frame. I know they worked on the dining room and the en-suite off the master bedroom as well, but how good their work was, I’ll never know.

  But, judging by the workmanship I could see, they were a bunch of incompetent goofs. I could have done a better job with one hand tied behind my back. The tiles weren’t nearly as straight as the ones I’d laid, and the plastic sheeting over the window frames began to give way the very next afternoon. But, they were honest enough I guess. I remember hearing their supervisor checking that they’d put all the tools and equipment I’d left lying around into the shed. They could have stolen some of it I suppose. Heck, they probably did, but at least I know most of it was stowed away properly.

  The thing is, even if they’d been a crew of Michelangelos, it wouldn’t have mattered much. The blood and gore is gone now, I know that. But, I can still see it. There’s a puddle of it on the floor and an arc of it over one wall. There’s also a large glob of it on the window. It’s not in colour, like everything else I see, which is how I know it’s every bit as much a ghost as I am. As I possess this kitchen, haunting it, if you will, thus am I haunted by the dull grey stain of that which was once my own lifeblood.

  So what’s it like being a kitchen? I don’t have much in the way of tactile senses, except that I can tell if it’s hot, cold or humid because my drawers and cupboard doors move differently, but I can’t really feel it. My hearing is excellent, which is sometimes annoying because it’s not like I have hands I can put over my ears to block out sounds. Come to think of it, I don’t have ears either. My vision comes from whatever point I like – normally the ceiling – so long as it’s inside the boundaries of the kitchen. The larder doesn’t have a door, so it’s really more of an enclave, so that’s included.

  My sight is not just limited to daytime either. When I’d been alive as you are, I could only see where there was light to pass through my retinas and onto the nerves at the back of my eyeballs. Unrestricted by such mundane limitations, I can now see quite well, even through the darkest of night. It’s only then that I don’t see the spectre of my own blood. Still, as much as the night-time doesn’t remind me so of my death, I prefer the day. That’s when I see things in colour.

  I like to view most things from my ceiling. It gives me the best all-round view, though sometimes I watch out through my window. I can see most of the front part of the property, and down the dirt road a ways. I can even see a little way into the bush on the other side. There’s only one mountain ash in my field of vision, and it’s right in the front yard. It towers like a mighty monarch over all the manna gums and stringy-barks along the roadside. My husband had wanted to cut it down to allow more sunlight into the yard, but I’d told him if that hundred-and-fifty-metre giant went, so did I.

  I could stare at that tree all day long. If I angle myself right, I can see through the glass without any of the grey shadow of my blood obscuring my vision. Just as well because there isn’t much else to see. Traffic? Huh. Maybe eight cars a day tear up the dust on our dirt road. There are only two other properties on Soldiers Road. There’s the Forbes family about five hundred metres further down. About two kilometres further still, there’s the Jamieson Orchard.

  I’d like to be able to see into the rest of the house, but hey, you can’t have everything. Sometimes, I can feel the rest of the house though. My hinges and joins feel different; stiffer here and there, if someone’s in particular rooms, doing particular things.

  It took a few months to get used to my new circumstances though. At first, I hated it. I mean, who wouldn’t? I was dead. I was stuck in the very limited confines of a kitchen, and I had no way of communicating with anything or anyone. Nothing I’d been brought up to believe about what happens after death was happening. I wasn’t in Hell. I certainly wasn’t in Heaven. Purgatory? I was pretty sure if I was in Purgatory, there’d have been more souls with me, or at least someone to greet me to tell me what was going on.

  And so I simply sat unoccupied with nothing to do but watch the dust blow in through the gaps in the plastic. For months, nothing happened at all. I assume that was because the estate had to go through probate and such. I was to have inherited from my husband, but being dead, I guess it all went to my only living relative, my older brother Neill.

  Dear me, I didn’t envy him having the job of all that paperwork, and I was usually quite good at such things. Neill was hopeless. He could never remember birthdays, his credit cards were always a mess and oh dear, you should just see the sorry state of his tax papers. I hope now he has the funds to pay for it, he’s got some help from an accountant.

  Then, slowly, things began to change. A property maintenance crew came in to slash the grass, which had grown up like a wheat-field of weeds. After that, once a month, young Kelly would come by and trundle around the property on Ashleigh’s old ride-on mower. I looked forward to that. The place would look so lovely after she’d finished, and I got to watch her in snapshots, growing and maturing. She went from a scrawny kid, all knees and elbows with sticking out ears, to teenager with curves. Every time she came by, I’d hold out that little bit of hope that she’d come inside, but she never did. The closest she came was when she finished her work, she’d wait on the porch for Jim Johns the real-estate agent, to come by with his little envelope, inside which was a cheque for her time.

  With him, Jim would sometimes bring potential buyers around for viewings. Jim was a wiry little man in his late fifties. He’d lived in Gembrook all his life, and if anyone had a chance of selling an unfinished house in which someone had died with the market depressed as it was, it was him. For three more years, I watched him bring customers through the house. Each time, no matter how he changed the story, I watched their faces change when he told them how the owner-builders had died. Full disclosure is a bitch. No sale.

>   Eventually, one day in mid-spring 2011, that changed too. It was one of those warm clear mornings you sometimes get. There was no breeze at all and there was no frost in the air. Just the act of standing in the sunshine could make you believe that summer really was on the way and you’d never be cold again, even though you really knew it was more than likely going to get down to near freezing once the sun went down again.

  They were young newlyweds and they came in without Jim. Sometimes, he let interested parties have a look at the house if he was busy or simply couldn’t be bothered dragging himself out for what he thought would end up as just another dead end.

  They explored almost the entire house before they finally made their way into me. I had listened as they examined the upstairs. It comprised of four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a lounge and a study. At the rear of the upstairs part of the house, there’s a deck. I loved that deck. From it you can see right out to the southwest all over the Bunyip State Park. The steps from it lead down to a small porch. From that porch, you can either go up the stairs, or in through the back door to the sun-room and then the rest of the house.