The car shakes us as it travels over gravel. I watch the bushes at the side of the road. My head is against the glass of the window. The seatbelt is at my neck. The bushes have spiky leaves in yellow, light green, dark green. We pass a set of bushes with fuzzy red berries, long spindles of branches. ‘What are they?’ I turn to ask Martha. She doesn’t look away from the road.
‘Just bushes,’ she says.
The house at the end of the drive rises. Its white columns are like the bones of another house, a house that has long ago withered into this one. It’s a sun bleached carcass of a house. Martha’d said that she’d found it last minute. That the reviews were good. That the pictures were good. We’d spend a few days here then head up to meet the others at the mountain lodge. My ex was going to be there, at the lodge. Christmas isn’t the right time to break this to her, we both think that, so we’re stealing a few extra days stolen before we have to be just friends.
‘Spooky house,’ I say.
Martha shrugs as she pulls our bags from the boot. ‘You think everything in the countryside is spooky.’
‘Bring me to a city,’ I say, ‘I’ll be happy.’
‘New York next year then,’ she says, slapping my arse. ‘Here, help me with the keys.’