T

     he boxes were packed.

            I woke up last, roused by a sun that slunk uninvited through the naked windows. I could hear movement from another room, but it seemed unfamiliar and too loud, as though it came from a different place. The house sounded different, packed up and stripped bare, echoing like a museum atrium. All that was left in the room was the mattress I was lying on, elevating me only inches above the expanse of scuffed floorboards. Around the edges, in the corners of the room, were the patches of varnish that were less worn, recently stripped of their dust carpet, the ghosts of our furniture. The only other thing breaking the horizon of the skirting board was a chipped mug, just showing the once bright depiction of a rose bush, and the dance of steam its contents cast into the cold air. It was one of the mugs we were throwing away, a relic of our student days, a spare one of our mothers had been willing to donate. The mugs we were taking with us were cozied up in newspaper in one of the ‘kitchen’ boxes at the top of the cellar steps.

            I stared at the wall next to the door as I had on so many other mornings, and I could still picture my bookshelves puffing themselves up with pride, the haphazard spines perfectly italic and jostling against one another for space. Often, in those soft moments between waking up and getting out of bed, I would read their titles as though they were a poem; Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises. The Awakening. Travelling Light. Things That Are. Home. The Secret History. The Sense of an Ending. As I Lay Dying. The door next to the wall where the shelf wasn’t swung open and you stood there, smiling and nursing your own abandoned mug between both hands, leaning on the doorframe.

            You said something like good morning and I sat up, letting the duvet fall to my waist and feeling the chill of the morning embrace me. It was a cold September, and the walls offered no relief now that they were bereft of the frames that had cluttered them. You’d be downstairs, you said, and the van would be here in a couple of hours.

            The cold trickled up my legs as my feet touched the floor and I dressed hurriedly, shivering, in the clothes I had kept out of the suitcases and laid at the foot of the mattress; jeans, t-shirt, scruffy jumper. I made my way along the hall and stood for a while at the top of the stairwell. The warmth from the cup of tea felt strange against my palm, and when I took a sip all it seemed to taste of was heat. Oddly, now that the dusty lampshades had been removed, the bulbs seemed to shed less light over the rooms. They seemed pathetic, nude amidst the lofty ceilings and walls, unable to pluck up the courage to glow with conviction. The landing at the bottom of the stairs seemed distant, the pattern on the carpet like a town viewed from the top of the hill.

            The kitchen was empty, and the door to the garden was slightly open. Draped over a package was a heavy grey coat, pulled hastily from some box somewhere.

            The summer had sweltered, and the months had passed sluggishly, lacking the energy to move forwards. We’d passed our time lounging in the garden, moving into the cool air of the kitchen when we had baked too long, sipping glasses of wine on the patio after the sun had let off its daily siege. My sister visited in late July, bringing her young children, and the garden had seemed so different with little feet and little laughs running through it like a brook. Someone had said it was a shame there weren’t children here all year long. We’d been quiet, watching the boys chase each other with improvised water pistols made from empty bottles. When only the adults remained awake the evening took on that quiet only a summer evening can, and we ate outside and grew childlike ourselves, laughing and shouting over one another. We’d talked often of our impending departure; we knew this summer was our last and murmured our gratitude that it was such a good one, but our plans seemed mythical in the heat of our excitement.

            The weather had stayed pleasant until two days before, and we’d packed all our winter clothes in hard to reach corners and taped shut cases. But now, as I stood in the doorway and watched my breath billowing outwards, those yellowed days seemed distant. I couldn’t recall clearly either packing or wandering the house barefoot and leisurely. I felt the summer had been shooed away, spent impatient to leave until all at once the time had come. All that remained was today.

            I had a sudden urge to turn back into the kitchen, to tear one of the boxes open. To patiently stack glasses and mugs back into the cupboards, to crawl back into bed after a long day of unpacking, as though we’d just moved in. To wake up the next morning, dress and go to work, come home and complain about the day. To talk of someday, one day moving away.

            I pulled the coat over my shoulders and last year’s curling poppy crackled as I did so, wilted but vibrant against the concrete grey lapel. The garden was hushed but for an idle breeze. I yawned and plumes of hot air danced in front of me, rising and evaporating, a smoke signal. If I closed my eyes, the wind sang the ocean’s song, I could see the waves tumbling over one another, feel the sand retreating from around my toes, taste the salt that stuck to my hair and lips. For some moments I was aware only of the leaves and my heart’s murmur, melting into a soft soundscape. And then you said my name and the garden drew itself into focus. You stood on the lawn above me, towering over me like a statue, a colossus. For a moment I could almost imagine you really were carved from stone; that you’d stand there watching over millennia of lives being lived here.

            The wild roses that traced the edges of the flagstone steps nodded in the breeze. The last of the marigolds bobbed in accordance, remembering the flourish of summer and taking a final bow. The lawn echoed with a confusion of conversation and shouts of laughter, replaying the faded barbecues and birthday parties. I could hear whispers, as though we still sat on the steps with a bottle of wine and a blanket, talking and smoking until it was almost light and time for us to go to bed.  

            But the garden was as empty as if we’d left months ago. The disused swing that had stood proudly on the precipice of the flowerbed that backed onto the street was gone, and in its place a vegetable patch. So many hours spent kneeling here, grubby hands and soaking knees, laughing at our first successful carrot or a less successful potato. I crouched there that morning; hand in the dirt and lost in reminiscence until you were standing behind me, laughing, then suddenly sad.

            ‘It’s such a perfect garden,’ one of us said, though neither of us was sure who had spoken. You crouched behind me and placed your hand in mine, still warm somehow, though mine were slowly turning a bluish hue, and we stood. Nobody wanted to be the first to move, standing there in the soft breeze that blew our memories about us. We turned and walked slowly back towards the house, my arm around your waist, your fingers twirling the hair on the back of my head.

            The house shuddered with the coarse trill of the doorbell, almost indistinguishable from the oven-timer’s excitable call to dinner – so many times one of us had run to the door as the lasagne browned past the point of edibleness, or ignored a visitor whilst tentatively opening the oven and wondering why the timer had sounded. No mistaking it, this time. They were there to take our boxes away, to pack our existence into the back of a van.

            It was quick work, and the weight of our lives seemed insignificant to them as they carried them easily out of the door. They trod in their heavy boots through the halls we had walked ten thousand miles over, pitched our belongings into the back of an anonymous truck, all the while smiling and laughing along to a crackled radio.

            We looked on, swept up, and spoke very little, holding our tongues and tears behind cautious faces. There were the boxes of books, collected since childhood, picture books and text books and novels all jumbled in together. The box of photographs, faces just visible through the circles of air on the bubble-wrap. And then the sound of the van, quieter as it drove away. Our memories had gone ahead of us. All that was left was a final suitcase, a last sentinel in the doorway, and us.

            On the street, a box of items that seemed useless to us now, filled with things we could not recall and things we refused to remember, was left for passers-by to absorb into their own lives, to take home to their own busy houses. Never opened books that would slot into alien collections, kitchen utensils that would cook meals we would never eat.

            Hand in hand we took a last tour. Strange, to wander rooms now so devoid of us, so lacking in history. Through the kitchen, where the aroma of our shared meals had faded to a lingering scent of cleaning products and not a single crumb littered the counter top; no lunches, dinners, no heated conversations over bottles of wine, no solitary evenings and no visiting friends. The tap dripped slightly, as though it had just been turned off. The empty living room, a picture hook embedded in the plaster the only reminder of the photographs that smiled down at us on the sofa; lazy on a Sunday, ill on a Tuesday, cosy in winter with blankets and each other to fight the cold that seeped in under the sash windows. A blank bedroom, as though it were never lain in, never laughed in, never longed in. It seemed the house we had known had vanished, and been rebuilt brick by brick, repainted and replanted. Our house, but only faintly familiar, in the way a passing face reminds you of someone but you can’t be sure where you’ve seen them before.

            It was as though we had never lived there.

            As it clicked shut we turned towards the door that opened onto our history, keys clutched in my hand as they had been so many times before. But now we would not open it. I could see so vividly the first time we opened that door, both of our hands wrapped around the key. I’d been wearing stripes, you a blue sweater. We’d only brought one suitcase that first night; we camped in the living room and ordered pizza.

            I was suddenly exhausted. You took the keys from me, cold and cumbersome, and filled my empty hand with your own. Then they were gone through the letter box, and as they hit the floor just inside the threshold of memory, their deep clatter echoed through the lifeless morning air. A man walked down the other side of the road, tucked into himself in defence of the cold, and I half expected him to start at the sound. But he walked on, and did not glance in our direction as we descended the stone steps.

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