The Visit

The dark-clothed people mingled around me, cups of tea were sipped, and a few biscuits nibbled.

I took a large bite out of a digestive and watched in horrific slow motion as a large part of it fell towards the cream carpeted floor. On impact it split into a multitude of pieces, spreading crumbs everywhere.

I stood there staring at the broken biscuit and wondered if I could be bothered to clean it all up.

A hand touched my shoulder.

“It will be all right”, a female’s voice whispered softly in my ear.

“Will it”, I said softly, staring at the biscuit on the floor. Who will clean it up if I didn’t do it now, I pondered?

I just stared at the yellow crumbs on the cream carpet as the woman’s hand left my shoulder and I felt a soft kiss on my cheek, and I watched as the dark blazer and long-skirted woman walked away to mingle with the others.

I turned away from the crowd of staring faces and noticed there was a small fly on the main lounge window above the spider plant. It kept climbing up the little ledge where above sat an open window, an escape to freedom for the fly. However, it kept climbing the glass until it reached the ledge before falling to the bottom and then starting the loop of failed escape to freedom once again.

Stupid fly I thought to myself as I heard the doorbell.

Who was that? I wondered and noticed no one from the pack of dark across the room had seemed to take note of the ringing from the corridor. It seemed as if wasn’t going to get answered unless I did.

I stepped over the broken digestive making sure not to crush it further into the cream carpet and left it to enter the hallway. This was covered in a dark grey carpet. A more suitable colour for the hallway floor I thought as I tried to guestimate the number of feet that had crossed it over the years.

There were probably thousands of parts of digestive crumbs on this carpet, however, they wouldn’t be noticeable with this colour scheme, not like the cream of the living room. Any stain or mark on that was a beacon of my messiness to other people now.

I got to the front door and opened it only to be shocked to see Sarah standing outside. I was confused and stunned to be staring at her dark bobbed hair which just hung an inch or so above her shoulders.

“Why didn’t you use your own key?” I asked her.

“Oh, I don’t have it on me.” She replied. That’s odd of her to forget I thought, she usually remembered everything.

“So have you missed me?” she asked, giving her hair a little flick like she always did when she wanted to impress me. I had to think. Miss was such an odd word. I guess I had, but the copious amounts of opiates I was now consuming on an almost daily basis had left me numb. I hadn’t really felt anything. I still didn’t.

I just nodded my head instead. A response was required so I duly supplied one.

“So how are you?” I asked awkwardly, not knowing if I should be talking to her at all.

“I’m okay, it’s a bit different now, the place I’m staying at is a lot fancier than here.” She peered in through the door and saw through the open door into the lounge.

“You’ve got a biscuit on the floor” she said. Oh great, she had spotted it. Little Miss Perfect, I knew her next question.

“Do you want me to come in and clean it up?”, yes, I was right, 100% spot on. I couldn’t let her into the lounge, not with all the suits there. They would think it strange for me to let someone else pick up my biscuit from the floor. I wasn’t going to let them see me as a useless male stereotype.

“No, it’s all right” I said as I put my hand up against the door frame making a blocked route for her to bypass. She wasn’t getting in to clean the biscuit up I was making sure of it.

“That’s okay”, she said, noticing my arm blocking her way into the hallway.

“You can pick the biscuit up, I’m sure you will manage”, but would I? Picking up biscuits and other mess from the floor was never my job. Would I be able to handle it without rubbing the crumbs further into the nice cream carpet and staining it forever? I didn’t know for sure.

“Yes, I will manage, I will have to now, won’t I?” I shot back in a semi angry manner. It was the first bit of emotion I had felt since the accident. Somehow it had burst through all the pills I was taking and exploded. I looked over my shoulder and saw a few heads from the crowd of black looking my way wondering what the commotion was all about.

“They are all looking now”, I said in hushed tones to Sarah, who didn’t seem to care one bit. She never did care what other people thought of her. I always admired her for that carefree trait, something I had never actually told her.

“So let them look” she said carelessly, “Who gives a toss if they do?” she tugged my arm to make me turn back around from looking into the house back to her face. Her clean, perfect, smiling face. God, I missed that smile. Why did she have to leave me, why?

“Why?” I said out loud. A brain fart, slippage, I might be getting facial incontinence.

“You know why”, came the reply. “I had no choice” she grabbed my hand tightly. “We had no choice” she looked deep into my eyes. I stared back into her dark green eyes and then grabbed her by the waist and kissed her. Oh, that felt nice, it had been too long.

But after what seemed like far too little, the kiss ended, and Sarah was again just standing on my porch. So close but so far. It wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t right.

“I have to go now” she said brushing a stray hair off my forehead. The slight touch, that hand, why would I miss that hand so much. Sarah smiled as she waved the hair she had plucked off my face, in front of me.

“I’ll catch you later alligator”. She said as she walked back down the path.

“In a while crocodile” I replied, finishing our usual goodbye tango, and then without even turning she was gone.

I stood there at the door just staring into space and then I heard footsteps behind me before a voice spoke into my ear.

“Who are you talking to dear?”, It was my mother, she had left the crowd of people by the buffet table to come and see if I was ok.

“Oh, just Sarah” I replied nonchalantly, “She had come to say hello”. I turned to face my mum then back again and shut the door.

As I turned back my Mum’s face was all white and pale. She put her hand round my face. Oh god I thought she was going to mention that digestive I had dropped on the floor, but no.

“Son, Sarah’s dead”, she said with a look of alarm on her face. What did she mean, I had just seen and spoken to her at the door?

“This is her wake son; we’ve just come back from her funeral”. After a few seconds of confusion, and staring into the crowd of people, I noticed they were all Sarah’s friends and family, all dressed in dark garments and suits, nibbling away on cucumber sandwiches and sipping tea. It did make some kind of sense.

I then remembered the car crash when some drunk tosser had skipped a red light near the entrance to Frimley Road business park, t-boning us and smashing hard into the side passenger’s door, violently crushing Sarah to an instant death but somehow it all just felt like a vivid dream. If it wasn’t a dream, how could I explain the visit? Sarah had just been here talking to me and kissing me, right here, just a minute ago!

“But Mum, I’ve just been chatting to her, she, Sarah, was right here talking to me”. I looked at her deep in the eyes, hoping for any kind of sign of recognition that Sarah could have been here, that she wasn’t dead at all. Instead, my Mum looked at me and shook her head, her long shoulder length dark, and clear chunky earrings, swaying from side to side as she did.

“You need to stay off those pills you’ve been taking. They aren’t good for you, I told you that, doctors don’t know what they are talking about half the time son” she warbled before taking me by the hand and leading me back into the lounge.

I was despondent and quiet; I couldn’t get over the fact that I had just been chatting to Sarah only a minute ago. If she was dead what happened, was it a hallucination, or maybe some kind of ghost that I had been talking to?

“Anyway, someone has dropped a biscuit on the floor here, you want to be careful no one treads on it and crushes it into the nice carpet son, you wouldn’t want that would you?” she scolded me as we approached the remnants of the digestive still sitting in a dozen chunks on the cream carpet.

No, we wouldn’t want that to happen I thought as I stared at the biscuit cut into a few large pieces and lots of crumbs just resting on the floor where I had been standing only five minutes earlier. Sarah always used to do the cleaning up and all the worrying about broken digestives on the floor, but I guess that was my job now that she had gone.

“I’ll get a dustpan and brush in a minute Mum”, I said as she walked away from me, back into the crowd of dark figures. Leaving me staring at the broken biscuit, counting how many pieces there were, and trying to remember where the dustpan and brush were kept.

I looked up at the window. That stupid fly was still there crawling up to the ledge before falling down again, always repeating the same moves yet never getting free. I’m sure there’s a metaphor there about life for anybody who can be bothered to think about it, but I had more important things to do. I had to clean this biscuit up all by myself.

 

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