I'm sat on a sofa.

The cushions are a peculiar grey-brown, the threading textured, like soft bark. It gives beneath my weight — only slightly, just enough — like hot glass. And like glass, I imagine it will stay this way long after I leave, as it cools and the shape of my presence is permanently indented in the memory foam.

I'm sat on the sofa. My shoes are off and my knees are up at my chest, my feet making their own little hollows in the cushions, small and twin, like speech marks.

There is a bag full of my things beside me: essentials for the day. One book. One crumpled packet of Walkers crisps. One notebook and pen. The house is warm and pleasantly decorated. There is a dog sleeping beside me.

It is not my house. It is not my dog.

The sofa is small, closer to a love seat: the perfect size for the older couple who live here, I realise. They wouldn't be able to sit more than a few inches apart on it, but maybe that's enough when you're older. Maybe for them, it's more than enough, even too much, and they miss sharing a single chair, her snuggled in her husband's lap, feet swinging above the ground like the hammock they used to lie on in her mother's garden. Maybe they miss sharing that space, that skin. I think there is too much space to share in a shared house.

I have been here before. I paced around the living room, hands behind my back like an inspector as I surveyed the art on their walls. Each piece alone is beautiful and well selected, but as a collection, they are inconsistent: some colourful paintings, some dark disturbing photographs, some floor-to-ceiling tapestries. The best of all worlds, or at least the something of all worlds.

I've eaten their shortbreads and made tea from their kettle. I've snooped through their bathrooms and closets and suspiciously inspected what I still believe to be a camera on the ceiling. I've left my half-watched shows on their TV and my fingerprints on their piano. And it's quiet in their house. If I stop writing, ceasing the sporadic squeak of ballpoint on paper and the clicking of cheap plastic, there is only one other noise. It's the gentlest most consistent thrum, just reaching me from the kitchen. I must ask them when they get back, where they got that dishwasher.

They made the right choice with it I think. If you live in a small town on a quiet road, with a whimsical garden and a dog that only barks when you leave, it makes sense to have a quiet dishwasher. There's nothing like housekeeping to ruin the peace.

The most extraordinary thing in this house however, is not the glass sofa or the CCTV. It's the small pile of money on the dining table, the plastic notes perfectly flat and grateful.

Don't they realise I would have done this for free? That the absence of my dad bickering, and my sister blowdrying, and the cats screaming, and that infernal Ikea dishwasher, is payment that far surpasses twenty-five pound.

The cost of silence. Or even anything close to silence. People pay through the roof for it: mothers on their first solo hotel break since their eldest was born, fathers on their impulsively bought boats on the Welsh coast. Teenagers whose trips to the emptiness of the library cost them their young reputation.

Every member of the family just wants a bit of peace, and yet they so rarely give it to each other.

And here I am, being paid to experience it. My days here are my favourite days.

The dishwasher has just paused it's cycle. I was waiting for silence in its absoluteness, wondering if it would be almost overwhelming. Rare. Instead, I realise there is one other sound in this house.

The clock ticking.

It's almost time to leave.

_________

tbh i just got bored while dog-sitting