I can’t remember the last words I wrote on the desk, but I doubt they were profound. Emails, probably, or a paragraph that will sit on the internet somewhere, in an article I’ll forget. I’d taken everything else down around the laptop: the big screen I’ve become dependent on, even though it blocks the view of the garden; the velvet blind that keeps the draught out. I’d unscrewed the bolts. I waited for the doorbell, and opened the door to a couple a few years younger than me and a little nervous. Another writer, another book, another desk out the door. 

This wasn’t my desk to sell: it was M’s, but he insisted he was cool with it. We were both responsible for the baby whose cot would occupy the space it held. We painted this room within hours of moving in. I thought about the fine dust that filled the air as he meticulously sanded the walls, how it clung to the cobwebs in the window frame. We needed to work, so we painted over the soft green chosen by another couple for another child, and the mural of lemon trees that grew across the wall. I think of the doing and undoing of it all as I took the drill and, belly pushing against the wall, pulled out the screws I’d put there not so long ago. Hot then, cold now, but history repeating itself nevertheless.  

The baby, we know, doesn’t need the room. The baby will need milk and love and the moses basket my nephews slept in and the tiny white vests that haven’t been through the wash yet. I mention the plans for the baby’s room cautiously, because sometimes all it takes is a mention of paint, or a second-hand chest of drawers, for people to say that none of it is necessary: the baby will sleep next to us. The baby could be fed in the bed, or on the sofa. They can fit in a shoe box, they won’t need a whole room. 

But the room, you see, was mine. It held M’s desk and a tower of his playscripts in the shelves we built into an alcove. It was theoretically shared but he scarcely worked in there. In Treehouse, we wrote and ate and read the papers over one small table - 1930s and solid, with folding leaves; we sold it to a couple who lived in the Barbican - but we moved in here and began to work in different corners. I sat at his desk and conducted Zoom calls with my laundry airing in the background. I sat at his desk and I wrote emails and articles. I sat at his desk and I conjured a book from the small hours to the hum of an electric heater as he slept next door. I covered the walls in paper and I wrote things on them. I surrounded myself with books and words. I made different kinds of babies here. 

The space in which something was written isn’t something I’m inclined to sentimentalise. For the handful of days left before I go on maternity leave, the big helpful screen is on the kitchen table. I am writing this propped up by cushions on the sofa. I have written chunks of chapters on my notes app, on the Tube. I will write, I suspect, one-handed, the other holding a milk-drunk baby. Words aren’t fussy about where they are put down. Like babies, they don’t need a room. I am plotting one, and it will come, but for now I will manage with making space where I find it.

The desk was taken upstairs by the younger couple, who had grown less nervous given the stairs to navigate. I pushed what was left behind into the middle of the room, covering it all with dust sheets. It makes sense that I do this alone, despite being 35 weeks pregnant. That I wrap up the last remnants of the study and take in the emptiness before it transforms. I fuss over instructions, writing notes in pencil on the wall for the decorator and sticking Post-It notes on tins of paint. The next day I will return home and a new colour will be on the wall, the smell of paint in the air. A rough red line to mark a new beginning.