The Knock-Through
What the Earth Refuses | 1 of 10
What the Earth Refuses is a sequence of ten stories. Each one is set somewhere in the UK, following ordinary people in the middle of ordinary shifts and changes. In each one, something happens that shouldn’t be possible.
This is the first.
The Knock-Through
They bought the house in October. It was a mid-terrace Victorian on a street off Mansfield Road in Nottingham. Three bedrooms. A narrow hallway with an original tiled floor. The living room at the front had a bay window and good light but at the back of the house someone had put a partition wall through the old kitchen-diner. It had divided what would have been a large open space into two small dingy rooms. The windowless dining room was barely big enough for a family table and the kitchen was cramped with cupboards and appliances.
On the first viewing, the estate agent walked them through and stood in the narrow dining room talking about potential. Meg looked at the partition wall from both sides and saw an open-plan space that could hold a table for six. The added space along the wall could house bookshelves. There might even be room for a small island of kitchen cupboards where the wall currently stood. The room was already there. The wall was in the way.
Rob had made a list of jobs on his phone. He added things to it and reordered the urgency in the weeks leading up to the move. Rewire the upstairs sockets. Replace the bathroom suite. Sand the floorboards in the front bedroom. Knock through the partition wall. Whitewash the back bedroom. He read the list to Meg on their first night while they sat on the floor in the bay of the empty living room eating fish and chips from the paper. The house smelled of old carpet and paint stripper. Their furniture was arriving the next day.
“I’ll do the wall on Saturday.”
“We should get someone in to check it first,” she said. “They might have run wiring through it. Or pipes.”
“It’s a stud wall,” he said. “There’s nothing in it.”
“We don’t know that.”
“It’s just a stud,” he said. “It’s fine.”
She looked at the plasterboard, the thin skirting board along the bottom, and the line where it met the ceiling. She did not say anything else. She ate her chips.
On Saturday morning Rob bought a sledgehammer. It had a ten-pound head on a hickory shaft. He brought it home with a plastic bag wrapped around the head. He leaned it against the hallway wall, changed into old jeans and a t-shirt, and put on safety goggles and a dust mask.
Meg was in the kitchen doorway.
“We should cover the worktops,” she said. “And put plastic sheeting on the floor.”
“I just want to open it up,” he said. “See the frame.”
“The dust will get into the boards,” she said.
He pulled the sledgehammer out of the plastic bag and walked into the kitchen. Meg stood behind him and took a few steps back. He planted his feet before the centre of the wall, swung the heavy iron head back over his right shoulder and drove it into the centre of the plasterboard. It punched through with a flat, dry crack. The board split along a horizontal line. A cloud of pale dust blew out of the hole. He pulled the hammer back. White powder and fragments of board fell to the floor.
He put his face into the hole. Pale timber studs were visible behind the broken plasterboard. There was dust and old plaster and a cobweb in the corner of the frame. He pulled off the goggles and dust mask and tossed them on the floor. He looked at Meg.
“Just a stud,” he said. “Nothing in it.”
He put the sledgehammer on the floor with the handle leaning against the wall, walked down the hallway, stopped at the shelf by the front door and picked up his car keys.
“Where are you going?” she said.
“To get the flooring samples,” he said. “For the bedroom.”
He opened the front door, walked out and pulled it shut behind him. She heard his boots on the pavement. The car door. The engine starting. She stood in the hallway and listened to him pull away down the street, the car noise melding into the hum of the city.
The kitchen was quiet. Just a hum from the fridge. She looked at the hole in the wall. The dust was settling on the floor around the base. The pale timber studs were visible through the gap. The cobweb moved slightly in the draught from the broken board.
She went to the cupboard under the stairs and took out a roll of plastic sheeting and a roll of gaffer tape. She taped plastic over the kitchen worktops, laid sheeting across the kitchen floor and taped it to the skirting boards. She put sheeting across the dining room floor. Taped it down. When everything was covered and ready, she put on the safety goggles, pulled the dust mask over her mouth and nose and picked up the sledgehammer.
The handle was thick. Her fingers barely closed around the hickory. The head was heavy. She could feel the weight of it pulling at her shoulders and her lower back. She planted her feet the way she had seen Rob do, swung the hammer back, then swung it forward. It hit the wall two feet to the left of his hole. The plasterboard cracked all the way up to the ceiling and a large triangular piece caved inward. Dust filled the air.
As it settled she looked up. A thick, dark liquid was running down the plasterboard from the ceiling plate. She swung again, breaking another big chunk off the other side of the wall, sending pieces flying into the dining room. The liquid began to ooze. On the third swing a wide section of board gave way on the kitchen side. Plaster fell in chunks to the floor, exposing pale softwood studs, two by four, spaced evenly across the width of the wall. With the plaster gone, the liquid had nothing to run down. It began dripping straight to the floor.
Meg cleared the loose plaster from the opening, grabbed some plastic sheeting and taped it over the gap. The dark liquid struck the sheet and trickled down into the dining room in a red line. She touched it with the tip of her finger. It was warm. Faint steam rose from it in the cold air. She pulled down the mask and smelled iron, copper, something raw.
Then she opened the wall wider, working out from the centre. Each section of plasterboard she broke free released more of the dark red liquid. By the time the frame stood bare, it was streaming down the studs and pooling on the plastic at her feet. There were litres of it, across her arms, across the sheeting, on the hickory handle.
She put the sledgehammer down and picked up the crowbar from next to Rob’s toolbox in the hallway. It was nearly two feet long with a flat blade at one end and a curved hook at the other. She set up the stepladder, then wedged the blade behind the first stud at the top plate. She pulled. The wood groaned. She pulled harder. The nails came free with a high screech. Half a pint of the thick red liquid poured out onto her hands and wrists. The stud dropped, clattered against the neighbouring stud and then fell to the floor.
Her phone buzzed in her back pocket. She wiped her hands on her jeans and pulled the phone out with wet, sticky fingers. A smear of dark red crossed the screen. Rob. She read the message. The place he went to had nothing but they mentioned a place in Derby doing end-of-line engineered oak at half price. He was going to drive up and have a look. Might take him the rest of the day. She put the phone face down on the kitchen worktop.
She stood with the crowbar in her hand and looked at the liquid running down the studs. More of it was coming, from every crack and gap. It was thick, leaving dark red trails on the pale wood, pooling on the sheeting.
She started taking out the noggins, levering the horizontal braces free one by one. Some came easily. Others were nailed hard at both ends and she had to work the crowbar back and forth until the wood gave and the nails bent loose. By the time she had cleared them, her arms and shoulders and neck were spattered with red so dark it was almost brown or black.
She wedged the crowbar above the next stud and pulled. The nails screeched. The stud came free and thudded onto the kitchen floor. More liquid poured from the joint, splattering the sheeting. She moved to the next stud. The blade slipped in her wet hands. She tightened her grip and pulled until it came free and slammed to the floor.
She worked methodically, prising the studs loose one by one while the dark liquid poured from the joints and spread across the sheeting. Hours passed. Her shoulders burned. Her forearms shook. Blisters rose across her palms beneath the red stains, then burst under the pressure of the crowbar. By the fifth stud the skin had torn away in strips, leaving the metal slick in her hands.
She stopped and stood inside the stripped frame. In the dining room, the largest puddle on the plastic sheeting was nearly an inch deep and over a metre wide. Liquid still dripped from the ceiling plate and from the joints where the studs had been. Every nail she pulled released more.
She picked up the crowbar. The metal was wet and sticky. She wrapped her torn hands around it and tightened her grip until the pain was steady and specific enough to bear. She stretched her back, pressed her fists into her lower spine, and went back to the wall.
The last stud was tight against the side wall, the nails long and driven deep. She wedged the crowbar behind it and heaved. It did not move. She braced one foot against the wall and pulled with her full weight. The wood split lengthwise. Half came away. She tore the other half free with her hands, the splintered wood scraping across her torn palms, and dropped both pieces onto the pile of red-stained plasterboard.
The wall was gone. The frame was gone. Only the ceiling plate remained, a single horizontal timber running across the top of the opening. She dragged the stepladder to the centre, climbed it, hooked the crowbar over the timber and pulled down. The plate came away in a shower of plaster dust and dark red liquid. It crashed to the floor by the foot of the ladder, bounced once, and lay still. The stream gushed for a second then thinned to a trickle, then a drip.
Meg stepped down and stood in the open space. The light from the kitchen window reached all the way through to the far dining room wall. It crossed the debris and the broken board and the dark pools on the floor. The space she had seen when they first walked through the house was there. It was real. It was full of wreckage and dust, and dark red liquid was dripping from the ceiling, but the room was there.
She put the crowbar on the floor beside the sledgehammer, pulled off the goggles and pulled down the dust mask. Her face was streaked with dark liquid and pale dust. Her t-shirt was soaked. She could feel it drying onto her skin, tightening as it dried.
She stood in the wreckage for a long time, gathering her strength. The light moved across the floor. The dripping slowed. The pools on the plastic sheets stopped spreading. The liquid was thickening. It was darkening at the edges where it met the air. It was starting to dry up.
Meg laid a long strip of plastic sheeting down the hallway corridor, over the beautiful original tiles, and opened the front door. They had hired a large yellow skip for the week and it was sitting by the kerb outside the house. She picked up the broken plasterboard in sections, carried it out into the skip in chunks. Most of the edges were dry with dust, some of them sticky with the dark red liquid. She got into a rhythm, holding the large pieces against her hips as she walked them down the hallway. Twenty trips. Thirty. She lost count.
She carried the timber studs out one by one. Her arms and shoulders were shaking from the strain but she managed to get each length out without knocking the hallway walls. She took all the long pieces first, then gathered five or six noggins under one arm and one final one in her hand. She had to do that five or six times.
Just the plastic sheeting was left, covered in pools of thick red liquid, darkening, beginning to crust at the edges. She started in the centre, scooping the stuff into an empty paint bucket with an old dustpan. Nearly five litres of it. She sealed the plastic lid and lowered it down into the skip.
Looking at what was left, she decided to pull up the edges of the sheets, pooling the dregs into the centre and hauling them out into the skip like bin bags. Despite being as careful as her exhausted arms would allow her to be, a few thin lines of dark red managed to ooze out onto the floorboards.
She mopped. She filled and emptied the bucket four times. The floorboards came up dark but clean. The boards were good underneath, the original pine. They were pale and unmarked where the wall had stood. A band of clean wood ran across the centre of the room.
She swept the remaining dust and plaster fragments into a pile and shovelled them into a thick black bin bag. She wiped the skirting boards with a wet cloth. She cleaned the ceiling where the plate had been.
It was almost dark by the time she finished. She had been working for over seven hours. She turned on the bare bulb in the kitchen. The room was empty and open and clean. The floorboards ran from the kitchen door to the far wall of the dining room in an unbroken line. The band of pale wood was the only evidence of the wall.
Meg washed her hands at the kitchen sink. The water stung the raw skin. She held them under the cold tap until the bleeding slowed. She dried them on a clean towel. She filled the kettle, turned it on, then stood at the kitchen window and looked out at the dark garden. The kettle boiled.
She made a cup of tea, carried it to the far wall of the dining room and sat on the floor with her back against it. She could see the whole room from where she sat. The open space. The clean boards. The pale strip in the centre. She held the cup in both hands. The heat stung her torn palms. She held it anyway. She drank her tea. The room was quiet and finished and hers.