We Live At No. 4

But the postman didn’t seem to understand that – we had parcels next door, opposite, in bins, up trees. In our perfectly receptive porch? Nothing, nada, nowt, nought. To be fair, there was no door number when we moved in – just a pewter plaque reading “Chassen Square”, which seemed an odd name for a house.  

I bumped into the previous owner at The Barking Dog and she said she’d never had any problems with parcels. It’s funny – when I saw her at the viewings, she was always jut-bone skinny, joints like vertices, but she’d put on half a stone which suited her and even her demeanour seemed somehow rounder. House moves can be stressful, I reasoned.  

There was nothing for it – I bought a number 4 in tasteful white cursive font. It looked like a seagull tangled in the wind against our fresh sea green door paint. But, when I nipped in to grab my phone to take a photo, the 4 was lying there on the doormat. Then, when I put it back up and looked through the camera screen at the end of the garden, there was no number to be seen. 

Over the next few weeks, I bought a range of 4s, increasingly large and tacky but they went the same way as the parcels, only stranger – in bins, up trees, in the granola box, in the toilet bowl. Reluctantly, I decided to get one of those etched frosted glass panels that are all the rage – true to the fashion, I now had a giant number 4 shouting above the door like a title.  

Of course, by morning it had turned into Irish lettering: “Seamair Mhuire” which, according to Google, said “ironing a four-leaf clover”, meaning a funny or unusual activity. Sadly, the postman didn’t speak Gaelic. The Irish saying did change things, though. 

The house – I can only describe it this way – became boxier, the lovely high ceilings lowered to make the rooms squat. The arch separating the kitchen and living room shrank to a square space you had to crawl through. Even the furniture developed sharp edges – we kept cutting our legs on our corner sofa which extended two additional sides.  

And then our bodies. When I caught myself in the bathroom cabinet one morning brushing my teeth, I saw my head was now a hexahedron. My hips became square brackets, my breasts like a cube of jelly on top of a fez. 

The changes weren’t just external. I felt my own self become four-sided. It felt like…. flying a kite through a quadrangle over a quadrumvirate of dons playing a game of rubix scrabble chess cards while being serenaded by a barbershop quartet. A very English square. I now knew to my bones that an Englishman’s home is his square, our weather internalised. I was inhabiting the soul of the number 4! 

I had to speak to the postman urgently. I waited all day at the garden gate in the drizzling rain, preparing a speech to show I understood his predicament: “it’s a hollow job these days what with all the targets and the tracking and the privatisation sucking the lifeblood even out of the royal red vans.…” 

I didn’t get to say any of it because, as soon as he clocked me, looking up from his satchel and deep into my quadrilateral eyes, recognition dawned his face. 

“Oh, you live at number four”, he said, then paused thoughtfully, flicking through a bundle of letters and squinting. “I have a few no. 4s on my round. Look, if it’s not too much trouble, could you learn to become the colour sea green?”

Published in Urban Scrawl January 2026: urbanscrawlmag.co.uk/edition-2