Episode Details

Call My NameThe house had an uneasy feeling about it.Mark had seen it first, and he’d fallen in love with it. She knew that any house she showed him after that would never match up to the chocolate box cottage on the outskirts of the small, old fashioned village: the quirky wooden beams in the rustic lounge, the quaint thatched roof, the overgrown, bewitching garden with its secret hideaways and colourful flowers - he’d fallen for the house the moment he saw it. And from that day on, Sophie knew her fate was sealed. It was inevitable. Her husband always won.They moved in on November 11th.All their modern things looked strange amongst the old, brick walls and the looming ceilings. Sophie put her juice mixer on the stone kitchen counter and stared at it, thinking how displaced it looked - and then, how displaced she was herself. She’d always wanted to live in the city in a modern apartment. But they couldn’t afford to live in the city unless they sacrificed comfortable living for squalor, and all the apartments she had shown Mark had failed to impress. Deep down, she too knew they were horrible.So here they were, in the desolate countryside with an hour’s commute to Mark’s job every single day. Sophie was still searching for employment, and she thought glumly of how she would be on her own day after day until she too found a soulless office job. Still, a soulless office job surrounded by other people had to be better than life in the country by herself, without even a pet to keep her company due to Mark’s allergies.They began to settle in over the next few days, unpacking boxes, putting up pictures. They met some of the neighbours - mostly retired couples, who were bemused that two twenty-somethings had moved out to the back of beyond, and come voluntarily at that.Sophie took an immediate liking to the woman who lived next door: an old lady in her eighties who was virtually housebound and had a dry sense of humour that reminded Sophie of her own deceased grandmother.Sophie decided that she would be neighbourly and offer to bring the woman groceries, even take her out once in a while, but it appeared quickly that the woman had several friends in the village who had already cheerfully taken on these burdens. Regardless, Sophie went to visit her often anyway, as she enjoyed listening to her stories. The old lady had lived all over the world, and her husband had died a few years back. It emerged after he died that they were almost destitute financially, and so she lived in her little cottage with no heating and no electricity, and survived almost completely on the kindness of friends and neighbours.Sophie liked listening to her talk about her experiences; it made her feel like she was worldly herself, even though Mark never expressed an interest in going abroad. The old woman painted a colourful picture of the most exotic places Sophie could imagine - of cows roaming the streets in India, of African tribes dancing to the beat of a drum, of people more rural than they who lived off the land and were at one with nature.‘I’ve seen real life voodoo dolls, I’ve danced naked round trees, I’ve participated in animal sacrifice - the strange practices of others have always fascinated me,’ the woman said to her. ‘Perhaps, sometimes, to my detriment.’One day, however, they got on to discussing the village.‘Are you enjoying it here?’ the old lady asked.Sophie wasn’t sure how to answer. She’d been living in the village for about three weeks by this point; most days Mark was out, even on some weekends, and whenever he was home he was absolutely exhausted and locked into his own world. She felt very alone, but then she had felt like that in her marriage for a very long time now.‘I’m getting used to it,’ she said, truthfully.‘How’s the house?’‘It’s…’It was spotless. She cleaned it every single day, for lack of anything else to do. But it was als