The house, when I opened the door the Saturday morning following the funeral, gave off the constricting smell of damp and closed windows. Not wanting to waste time I didn’t look around the place, but started to clear straight away. I began with the downstairs front room. It wasn’t an appealing sight, the wallpaper a geometric design of thick brown and orange strips, black-dotted mould in the corners, the floor covered with boxes and boxes of lever-arch files. Very quickly I began to see that my uncle had been a hoarder of official documents. The files were full of bank statements and gas and electricity bills dating, in chronological order, back to the seventies, as well as many years worth of neatly catalogued tax forms, TV licenses and other assorted receipts, notices and requests. There was an entire cupboard full of local council newsletters. I was almost surprised I didn’t find a room dedicated to junk mail, I wondered how he would have catalogued the take-away menus; date through letter box? Geographic origin of food? Fat content?

But amongst all this hoarding it seemed my uncle had no space for sentimentality. I found no photos of family in the house, no record of holidays or first days of school; no later university graduation snaps. No pictures of family weddings, and I saw him at some when I was younger, or of visits to his aging parents in their house in Dorset, and I knew he occasionally went. All that paper work and there were no objects to show he had a family or a past other than the black and white facts which record the mundane numeracy of our lives. No jewellery from his mother, no trinkets from his father (who was a hoarder of sentiment, I found in his house some of my own father’s school reports from the thirties), none of those objects that we keep precisely because they have no use.

I suppose it was this lack of emotional clutter that made me mistake the scrap of paper for an old shopping list, misfiled down the back of a radiator. The words made no sense at first; they seemed plucked out of the air at random and laid down on the paper with no intention or purpose:

These four lines of what seemed to be poetry fitted so comfortably into the category of things that cannot be understood that I put the piece of paper in my pocket and carried on clearing. But then, in the middle of a stack of phone directories stretching back thirty years I found this:

Why had he written them? I did not think he was ever keen on literature; I remembered him having some books on his shelves when I had been round before, but there were none now; he must have given or thrown them away. I could find very few clues in my memory that would help. He had worked in a ship broker’s office for forty years until retirement but that didn’t tell me anything about his attitude to poetry. All I had was the vague idea that he didn’t seem like the type of person who would write poems. I remembered him once saying that the idea of culture was rubbish and that people should stop talking about it, but I didn’t know what the comment meant when he said it, and I still didn’t know. In a desk drawer alongside six staplers, lined up in order of size, I came across another scrap:

I like to think that I know a bit about literature, though my wife is really the well read one, but I could make nothing of this.

By the end of that first Saturday I had finished clearing the ground floor and found only these three scraps. I ate dinner with my mother that night, in the kitchen of the house in which I had grown up. All through the meal I kept thinking about the three pieces of verse – what is that phrase? – burning a whole in my pocket. She could tell I was distracted by something, but she didn’t ask what. We didn’t mention my uncle’s house, although she knew I had been clearing it all day, and was covered in the dust that accumulated behind his boxes and piles and stacks. I thought about the torn paper fragments, but did not bring them out or ask her whether she knew if my uncle wrote poetry. My mother had lived as a girl in the same small Dorset town as my father and uncle. I asked her about them:

‘Dorchester was a small place. They were the local butcher’s sons, everybody knew them. But we were just kids then, I didn’t get to know your father properly till we met up again in London.’

That bit of the story I did know. He had seen her from a bus in Archway and had jumped off and run down the street to catch up with her. He always said he wasn’t sure why he had done this; he hadn’t seen her for years, and when he did reach her on the pavement he did not know what to say. They got over the initial awkwardness and it turned out they were living only a few streets away from each other in Kentish Town. This story used to come out at family get-togethers. He would say how beautiful she looked, how he couldn’t stop himself for chasing her; she would joke that he had been sweating and out of breath from the run, she would say had no idea why she had invited him round for dinner the next week. When the story ended she would give him a peck on the cheek and smile at me proudly. My father, like his father, had a sentimental side. He kept the ticket from the bus he had jumped off, and the new one he had to buy to get back on the next one.

I went home that night cheered by the happy reminiscence. But I dreamt of strange, grotesque, wiry-haired creatures and dark figures on cold, isolated beaches. I awoke in the blackness of my curtained bedroom and reached out to grab at the scraps from my uncle’s house. Safe. Tucked under my book on the bedside table they were safe. The sudden movement in the bed awoke my wife who rolled over and pressed her face into my back, into the place where the neck joins and the vertebrae stick out further. She touched the back of my neck with her nose and stroked lightly upwards, sighing gently with the contentment of a well-known bed. I relaxed into her and fell asleep, and did not dream again that night.

After breakfast the next morning my wife offered to help me with the clearing. Yesterday I would have been glad of another pair of hands and the company, but now something held me back. I told her he had had a cat, and her allergy would play up. I lied to her. As I drove to my uncle’s house this part of Wandsworth no longer seemed drab, the streets no longer uniform and grey. As I opened the door I was not repulsed this time by the smell of age and absence.

I did not allow myself to rush through the upstairs searching for scraps; they must come to me as I cleared, as they came to me the day before. I began at the front of the house, in the spare room furthest from his bedroom. I worked slowly and methodically. I threw away an entire trunk full of travel brochures (brochures but no photos or tickets, no evidence he actually went on any of these holidays) and found nothing. From the top of a wardrobe I took down and emptied several plastic bags’ worth of TV guides. The oldest had a picture of Slade on the front cover, Noddy Holder grinned up at me, pleased with his Christmas number one, but still I found no poetry.

I had nearly finished on the bathroom before I found the next piece. At the back of the mirrored cabinet above the sink I saw a dry, curled scrap of paper. Holding back my curiosity I reached out calmly, as if it were any other piece of rubbish. Unfortunately I was right: it was just half a label which had fallen off an old prescription bottle. I dropped it, face-up, and it spiralled down into the black plastic bag I held open on the floor. The cabinet now empty I turned to leave the bathroom, but as I did I saw another scrap against the wall under the sink, this time I was sure there was writing on it. Kneeling down, I carefully peeled it away from the tiles. It seemed so delicate I might destroy it were I not careful. Getting to my feet and holding it up to the light above the mirror I read this:

 The top edge was ripped: it must be part of something longer, I had to find it. I looked around under the sink but saw nothing, checked the cabinet but there was nothing, in the bath, on the floor, behind the toilet, nothing, nothing, nothing. Maybe the first section of the poem was on the other side of the paper, why hadn’t I thought of that? I turned it over, but all that was there were small black printed letters, not my uncle’s scratchy handwriting.

I almost threw the scrap to the floor, but something made me look at the typed letters again; the address of a nearby pharmacy, it was the other half of the label I had found in the cabinet, why had I not even checked the other side? I snatched up the bin bag and poured the contents on the floor, the rest of the poem was in here, I must be able to find it. But again, nothing. I checked the pile on the floor hurriedly at first, then, thinking I had missed it, I put all of the rubbish back in the bag slowly, piece by piece. But it was not there. I sat down on the bubbled linoleum, with my back to the bath and tried, this time, to think of nothing. I had become too concerned by these scraps of verse. They were just the petty cares of a lonely, probably senile, old man. I did not care, I told myself.

I went downstairs to the kitchen, filled the kettle and put it on to boil. My wife had told me to bring some teabags, milk in a flask and sugar, and I was glad of it now. The sudden memory made me think of calling home and I reached for my phone. But in the pocket, as well as the smooth plastic of my mobile’s screen, I felt the rough crinkle of old paper. I knew, I knew I had thrown it away. I could see it circling like a falling sycamore pod into the black bag in my memory, but still, here it was now, in my hand. I read the reverse of the label and then took the other scrap from my pocket where I had put it along with the first three. The poem now appeared like this:

How could they do what? How could who do what?

I read and re-read the double scrap. I compared it to the pieces found earlier. Finally I laid all the pieces out on the kitchen counter, horrible pale blue Formica; he couldn’t have renovated this place since Callaghan was Prime Minister. I thought maybe if, like my uncle, I organised the scraps their meaning would become clear. But I could find no order. I began to get angry with my uncle, why didn’t he explain? Why couldn’t I see the pattern? But this was the one random element, the only uncatalogueable system of his life. The words had sprung from him with all the disorder that he had suppressed in every other area. I couldn’t arrange these torn fragments of paper because they were the only documents in the house which had a meaning greater than the black and white numbers and figures which covered them.

It wasn’t until my wife called to find out where I was (with a pleasantly reassuring, if guarded, amount of worry in her voice), that I found out I had been looking at these bloody fragments of my uncle for several hours. It was nearly eight, dinner was ready; I had to go home. The house looked yearningly after me as I walked away from the front door. I had seen the shadowy entrance to its labyrinth and it wanted me to explore further. At home I said nothing to my wife about why I had been so long, and she did not ask. By now I felt proprietorial, my uncle’s house had given me this secret, and it was mine alone.

The next week was filled with anticipation. Work prevented me from visiting the house during the day, but I could have driven over to the house in the evening; it would not have been hard to create a fictitious after-work drink with a colleague. At my desk each day I tried to reconstruct the pair, my father and my uncle. Or maybe reconstruct is wrong. This cluttered space flanked by hole-punch, pen holder and computer monitor became my operating table on which I dissected the dead brothers. I had always felt sorry for my uncle, upstaged in their youth by his younger sibling. People were always surprised when my father told them he had a brother. My dad had a reputation as a bit of a charmer and my parent’s single female friends would joke about meeting his eligible relative. None ever did. The way my father told it, his brother was always the odd one; shy, uncomfortable with girls. He refused to take on their father’s butcher shop when he left school, and went to university instead. I think my father resented his older brother for the rift it caused in the family.

I did not allow myself go to the house that week; it would somehow be against the rules, like Theseus taking a ball of string into the labyrinth. I had to wait until the weekend. Saturday finally came and I could continue my work. I expected my wife to offer help again, but she said nothing.

I felt the house opening up for me as I approached and, ignoring the unresolved mysteries of the scraps I had found so far, I started to clear the final two upstairs bedrooms. But the thing I found next was not poetry. I was in the spare bedroom, taking the old clothes out of the wardrobe. Out-dated, unfashionable, unimpressive, the clothes summed up my image of my uncle. These would go to the charity shop, but I didn’t think they would even make it onto the racks.

I checked a corduroy jacket and found, in the left inside pocket, a photograph. I had been wrong to think my uncle had no sentiment: here was a photo of my mother and father standing on a beach, arm-in-arm. The photo’s faded black and white, and the clothes my parents wore told its age, forties I would guess. God they looked young, my mother would like to see this, see herself as a young woman in love. I wondered where the photo had been taken, and when they had gone on this trip to the sea, I would have to ask her. I had always loved the romance of my parent’s early life together. Told in such golden, honeyed tones by my mother it nurtured me as a child, and still it bolstered all kinds of faith. Their romance was the story around which I built my own marriage, which was happy like theirs.

I checked the other pockets but there was nothing else to find. As I finished with the clothes weariness started to fill me. I barely finished cleaning one room by the end of the day. I stopped looking forward to the discoveries as I had done before. I was lost now, for the first time I realised the light from the entrance to the labyrinth was all gone and I was stumbling in the dark. When I saw the crinkled white edge poking up from under the carpet in the corner behind the door I almost ignored it. But I was now so far in it would be harder to go backwards than it would be press on to the end. Unlike the other pieces, which looked dropped or misplaced, my uncle actually seemed to have hidden this one. I had to rip up some of the age-stained carpet to pull the paper out. It was a whole sheet of A4 lined paper, and on it was this:

A love poem. Rather than, as before, laying out the scraps to order them, I buried this one in my pocket and carried the rubbish down to my car. I looked at my watch, nearly seven, I would have to pick up my mother soon; she was having dinner at ours this evening.

All the way to my mother’s house I saw playing cards. Waiting at traffic lights the line of cars behind me laid themselves out like a game of solitaire; ace, two, three, four. The brake lights from the passing cars in my mirror danced like angry hearts and diamonds. In the car she did nearly all of the talking. Although well on in her seventies, the signs of physical frailty showing more and more, she was no less of a presence in my life. I felt better by the time I opened my front door and the smell of my wife’s cooking made the restoration complete. I enjoyed listening to the two women in my life over dinner, my two points of solidity. A little drunk at the end of the meal I went into the kitchen to make coffee and then remembered the photograph I had found. I laid it on the tray with the coffee things and carried it back into the dining room. As I placed the tray on the table my wife asked me a question and I momentarily forgot the photo. My mother poured herself a cup of coffee and, leaning over for the sugar stopped in mid action like a clockwork toy.

‘You’ve seen the photo? How old are you and Dad in it? It must have been soon after you met,’ I said, expecting the proud smile I knew so well, but she did not move her eyes from the picture.

‘Mum, are you alright?’ Slowly she raised her eyes to mine; I had never seen such anger or hurt in her face.

‘How dare you show this to me? What else have you found? Why are you doing this to me?’

‘But, mum, I thought you’d like the photo, you’re so young in it and look so happy, dad looks really handsome.’ The expression on her face changed, flickered through a catalogue of pain and then became blank.

‘Get me a taxi,’ she said and then would say nothing else. Faced by her silence I called a cab and, when it came, walked her out to it. Nothing was said. When I re-entered the dining room I found my wife holding the photo, I snatched it out of her hand and went upstairs to bed. A while later she came in and tried to fit herself around my body as I lay on my side, close to the edge of the mattress. I shrugged her off; I could not talk to her. I thought I would not sleep but the near full bottle of red wine I had drunk helped. If I dreamt I do not remember.

Early Sunday morning I got up, not tired but not refreshed. I left while my wife was in the shower. This time it was an effort to open the front door of my uncle’s house, but I knew where the centre of the labyrinth was now, and beyond it the only way out. I ran up the stairs to his bedroom, pulled everything out of the cupboards onto the floor, and tipped everything from the desk drawers onto the bed. I scrabbled around like a frantic rat trapped in an attic. Turning over the mixed piles of paper and clothes on the floor I glanced under the bed and saw there was a wooden drawer which could slide out. I kicked aside the clutter to make room. Unlike the rest of his crowded home there was only one thing in the drawer: a stack of envelopes held together by a single, dark-red elastic band.

I took the first letter out of its envelope. It was from her:

‘I loved your last poem, I think I loved it even more than the one before. But they’re not enough, I need you to come back to me.’ I couldn’t read the rest of the letter; I couldn’t even open the others. I sat beside the bed and wept for my stupid pride, for all my illusions, and for my uncle, who I had thought was a man who did not feel.

Finally, when I had become embarrassed by my tears, I called my mother from the phone beside his bed. Perhaps I called to ask her why, I did not know. A strange man’s voice answered the phone,

‘Is that Mr Richards?’

‘Who’s this?’

‘Doctor Goldman, I spoke to your wife earlier, she said you had left your mobile at home.’ I patted my pocket instinctively, it wasn’t there.

‘Yes?’

‘I’m sorry to tell you your mother passed away in the night.’

I rushed to the house and found the doctor and my wife there. There was a note for me on my mother’s bedside table; it seemed she had been writing it before she went to sleep. It said only, ‘I returned all his letters. We were always happy, your father and I.’