House of Dreams
by Veronica Holmes

"Play"

The deep, languid sounds of Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor filled the air, reverberating off brick veneer walls and red hardwood floors. She loved the acoustics in this house.

Jesse remembered a hotel room in Berlin, where she and her lover had splurged and indulged in a luxury suite on the second-highest floor. It had cost what a week in another cheaper hotel would have cost, but the romance of it seemed worth it. The carpets were so plush you were tempted to sleep on them rather than the enormous King sized bed. The shower was the size of the largest walk-in wardrobe she'd ever seen, and beside it a spa with high powered jets sat seductively, tempting her in. In the whole of Berlin, a city filled with history and tragedy and questionable table service, there were no sights that could compare with the vision of her lover stretched out in that bath, her dark hair floating idly on the foaming water. And through it all there was the music.

Now, in the living room, she had painstakingly assembled her voice-activated surround sound system, screwing in wall brackets and arranging speakers for the optimum effect, so when she stood in the middle of the room and listened the music swirled around her like a maelstrom of sound. Sense-memory took her back to that hotel in Berlin, but then it had been Berlioz. The Bang and Olafsson sound system attached to the wall. The richochet of notes. Sound-proofed walls back then had prevented them interrupting their neighbours.

In the country there were no neighbours to hear you. No peeping-toms could look through your windows. She dropped the towel to the floor and stood naked in the middle of the room, letting the soft breeze from the early evening cool her body still steaming from the shower. It was, she decided, a feast for the senses.

She walked into the kitchen, leaving the soggy towel in a heap on the living room floor. Tomato soup sat on slow simmer on the hotplate, the big copper-bottomed pot radiating heat. Smells danced enticingly around her nostrils and she lifted the lid to inhale the scent fully.

The adagio moved through the middle section. A cello began the dirge, crooning through the speakers, testing the subwoofers, the depth of sound in the bass.

She padded down the long hallway to her room, stepping onto soft pile carpet through the doorway. In contrast to the orderliness of the kitchen and living room, this room already reflected her personality a little more. Some clothes lay scattered on the floor, books and CDs not yet arranged properly were piled haphazardly onto a little side table.

A door led into her small study where books on literature, cinema, marketing and gay politics were dumped around a mahogany computer desk. A sleek, black laptop sat on the desk, surrounded by what she liked to call her "geek gadgets", scanners, printers, removable zip drive, DVD-Rom... Lots of hours of selling crap to people who didn't need it to provide for those things that she had never thought she could ever afford. And now it was hers, all hers.

It was so quiet, even with the music. The first night was always unsettling, the night filled with noises you didn't recognise. This was made worse by the shift from city to country life. Trains and cars and barking dogs replaced by the almost overwhelming lack of movement. The air itself seemed to be more still here.

She threw open the window of the study, old style shutters instead of fading curtains or twisted venetians, and looked out into the backyard. Or the back paddock as her best friend called it. She planned to have two dogs. Definitely two. So they could play with each other whenever she was forced to commute to the city. Akitas. Dribbling, fluffy, hulking beasts with personalities to match their looks.

Maybe there was a movie on TV? She looked down and realised she was still naked. She snagged her robe from the hook on the study door and wrapped it around herself. The soup would take care of itself for another couple of hours. It was still so early.

Her best friend Kate had left over an hour ago. She'd insisted she could stay if the house seemed too lonely. Jesse had waved her off with a grin, saying that she wanted to be lonely, that was the whole reason for buying and renovating a country house. Besides, it was only right she should savour her first house by spending the night in it alone. She had to get used to the solitude sometime, it may as well be now.

It may as well be now.

She shivered. Maybe opening the window wasn't such a great idea after all. She shut it again against the chill.

Walking down towards the kitchen again she let her eyes wander along the freshly painted running boards. Burgundy. So very much like a room she had shared with a lover long ago, had even helped to paint. When she had re-painted the new house she'd added the burgundy as a final touch, almost an afterthought, a feeling. They had been white in the original design. She sniffed. There was still the faint smell of new paint hanging in the air. In her memory she picked small flecks of paint out of red hair, revelling in the sexy smile that had been her reward.

The soup was bubbling, perhaps a little too much. She wandered into the kitchen and adjusted the heat. Jesse looked around the kitchen - her dream kitchen, with steel fittings and wall racks for utensils, pots and pans. Long-stemmed Royal Copenhagen crystal wine glasses sat in ordered rows on the shelves. Large white serving platters were stacked neatly in the cupboards. Two shelves of cookbooks collected over ten or so years provided some much needed colour to the black and chrome.

Idly she took one down. It was a book about hundreds of different ways to cook succulent seafood, with dog-eared pages and bookmarks in handwriting not her own. She recognised them and reached up to put the book back quickly. It caught on the edge of the cupboard and fell noisily to the floor, splashing open at one of the most well used pages.

Chilli prawn laksa. Delectable. The ex that had given her the book had always insisted you needed a special wok for laksa. Jesse eyed the offending implement, now hanging proudly from its hook. Nothing but laksa had ever been cooked in that pan. Purity had been preserved. Spanish mackerel or chicken breast, succulent beef or tangy prawn. Laksa heaven. She had been a cooking genius. Pale skinned, thin, but with a voracious appetite. Perversely Jesse imagined cooking fried rice in the wok.

She turned away, thoughtful. Her eyes rested on a calendar on the wall. Women on motorbikes. She'd bought it at a sale only two weeks ago. Then she had tricked herself into thinking it hadn't meant anything. Now, in this kitchen, looking at the damned laksa wok, it reminded her painfully of impossibly long blonde hair, dancing eyes and the smell of black leather.

She switched off the soup, hunger vanishing.

Everything was so quiet. Too quiet. And yet it screamed. The music finished abruptly.

She padded into the loungeroom and sank into the cream leather chair. Her notebook lay beside it on a coffee table and she picked it up. It was filled with scribblings, notes taken on situations she'd never had the chance to turn into stories. Now she was retired, early retirement at 45, and had plenty of time to turn those old fantasies into stories, books, plays, anything she liked.

She heard her CD player clunking as it switched CDs, pulling up a random disk from the cache hidden behind its sleek exterior. An old pop melody rang out. She reached for the remote and dimmed the sound. It was a tune she used to dance to, in the clubs, back with that girl who never used to let her sit down, even when she'd danced so much she thought she'd worn away a layer or two of skin through her thick boots. What was that woman's name again?

She hadn't meant to make her dream house a history lesson. A celebration was supposed to be in order. One of those Royal Copenhagen crystal goblets, filled perhaps with that champagne she and her ex had bought in the Barossa. How had she ended up with it? It must be at least five years old. Was champagne good when aged? She had no idea. The thought was tempting, and she got up to pander to the whim.

The cork made a satisfying pop. The champagne tickled her nose. It was good, as good as it had promised to be when they'd bought it. Her notebook stared at her. If a book could have eyes, she would have sworn the cover looked wistful.

In a burst of anger she picked up the notebook and threw it against the wall, the movement even shocked her. The binding broke, pieces of paper exploding out and fluttering softly to the floor. She stared at them, stared at the wall. An exploding diary. Seemed fitting really, seeing as the diary of her life seemed to have exploded all over her house, written in bricks and plaster and paint.

She picked up the phone, and dropped it as if it had scalded her. A birthday gift, last christmas, from her ex-wife. Walking to the table she fished her mobile phone from her bag and speed-dialled a number.

"Hello." A cheery voice answered.

"Kate?" She replied, anxiously.

"Jesse? What's wrong?"

"I don't know. I just... I can't seem to get comfortable."

"Do you want me to come back over?"

Jesse thought about that for a second, then made a quick decision. "No. Can I come over to your place instead?"

"Okaaaay..." Confusion was evident in her voice. "But don't you want to be in your new place? I thought you'd be excited?"

"So did I. Listen, it's hard to explain, I just don't want to be here right now."

"Then come over."

Jesse smiled, relieved. "See you in an hour, then."

"All right. Drive carefully, OK?"

She hung up. Went through the motions of getting dressed. Made sure the stove was switched off. Hunted for her car keys.

Finally, she stood in the small vestibule near the front door, her hand on the light switch, shaking.

The perfect pile of bricks mocked her, knowingly. She switched off the light.

The end

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