Someone had forgotten to clean away the bowl of fruit. It was easy to miss, that one orange lying there in the glass bowl. It was only when he walked passed it and caught the faint whiff of mould that he noticed it had been left there to rot, all forgotten and blue, so that now if you picked it up, it was almost powdery. Just a sphere of disintegrating greenish blue dust.
Ordinarily, he would pay no attention to such a thing, checking only the bowl itself, to see if it had any value. The orange itself, would have failed to register. But today, for some reason it did. Today he looked at it and wondered just how long it had been lying there.
Which was a mistake.
There are rules in this game, the first one being to avoid the personal. Stick to that rule, and the rest will take care of itself.
And yet here he was, staring into the bowl and thinking that it had probably lain there as long as she had. Imagining her skin as it took on that same ghoulish hue, that same mouldy disintegration. The orange sitting there in the bowl, and quietly turning blue alongside her, while she lay on the floor waiting to be discovered. The smell being the thing that finally brought a curious neighbour to her door and again, the thought of it made him shudder.
Why did he have to notice that orange? In all the years he has been doing this, he has never been bothered by the things he finds, has never thought about the people whose homes he has wandered around. He has perused the remains of their lives as if he were wandering around some morbid exhibition, and has found an easy comfort in the fact that someone has to deal with what remains when people die alone and forgotten.
He has kept his focus by keeping things simple. It is not lives he deals with. It is things. He comes in, takes a look around, salvages what can be sold on. Makes a little profit then moves on to the next one. It’s just the way of things.
He breathed and closed his eyes and tried to empty his head of all these troublesome thoughts, but it was impossible. Best just get on with it, he thought. And he exhaled, loosened his shoulders then headed to the kitchen. When he entered he needed to stand still and take it in for a moment, because it was the most extraordinary kitchen he has come across in years. Extraordinary because of the things that are not there. No washing machine, no fitted units, no inlaid gas hobs, no glass fronted storage cabinets for plates and cups, no gadgets that make life so easy – like kettles and toasters and orange juice squeezers.
It was simply barren and untouched by modern life. A sink, a table, a cupboard and a pulley system on the ceiling for the washing to dry. Nothing more. And all of it a strange pale green colour. Hospital green, the colour of hand soap. A colour he thought had died out a long time ago.
The cupboard was built into the wall providing a cool space for storing things when you had no fridge. Inside, neat little china cups hung from hooks screwed into one of the shelves, waiting for the tea to be poured. The tea tin sitting patiently below, black and square, little painted impressions of life in China adorning it in red and gold. It held centre stage in the cupboard as if it was the star of the show, the most precious of objects there, yet it was worthless now, a thing to be tossed aside and scrapped.
The shelves still stored tins of food lined up neatly side by side, and there seemed to be some sort of order to them, as if the person who placed them there had decided already the meals that lay ahead. The days for beans on toast, vegetable soup, sardines and pilchards and endless cups of tea. Perhaps when you’re old, this is what happens. You think of the future only in these terms. In terms of days and meals, all grand plans forgotten because, well …
He poured himself a glass of water and stood by the window wondering how a rotting orange could start all this, cursing whoever it was that had failed to clean it away. Perhaps he should take a break? Make some grand plans of his own while there was still time? He could go somewhere? A holiday, perhaps. Somewhere warm, like Spain. Far away from all these dead people’s things. He need a break from it
Beyond the window he could see people out on the street going about their business, unaware of what had happened here and he wanted so badly to join them. Toe be out in the daylight and not stuck inside this insipid green kitchen.
He set down his glass in the sink and thought for a second. It would be a shame to waste the journey without taking a proper look around. If he left now he’d spend the rest of the day wondering if there had been something interesting or of value he had missed. An opportunity lost. Years ago that thought was all he needed to rummage around in every nook and cranny. But today…
Okay, enough of this, he thought. Just get on with it. And he headed upstairs to the bedroom.
In contrast to the cold green of the kitchen the bedroom was a welcome relief. It had a comforting aspect to it. The wood of the furniture. The rug on the floor. The silver picture frames. The bookcase with its neatly ordered line of books. He could imagine spending a lazy Sunday lingering in a room like this. It had that sort of pleasantness to it.
It was in one of the drawers that he found it. The mahogany box full of memorabilia. Photos of a young man in uniform. A box with two medals. Letters tied with ribbon, filled with pencil scrawls, the dates testifying to the events written down. September 1944, Arnhem. She had kept these things, safe. The box and its contents something precious.
Had he been lost there, he wondered. This young man in the photo whose letters she had tied with ribbon? Or had he made it home after that catastrophic battle on the Rhine, to a life with his sweetheart who had tied his letters with red ribbon?
He stared at the photo of the young soldier, just a boy really. Too young, he thought, to be facing the horror of war and his jaw tensed as he thought of it, He snapped the box shut, irritated that he couldn’t seem to separate himself from all these things today. Then he marked the box with a sticker to let the cleaners know he would return for it, before heading back downstairs to the living room and that single rotting orange.
The fruit bowl sat on a sideboard and he examined it making a conscious effort to ignore the offending fruit. Good quality teak, he would get a good price for it. He took another sticker and marked it, then opened the drawers to take a look inside.
The usual worthless knick-knacks lay piled up on the shelves. The “special” cutlery set of plated silver that never left the box, save perhaps for Christmas, and even then. The china dinner set, a wedding gift long forgotten, tucked away and still in its tissue paper and smelling vaguely of mothballs for some reason. He wondered about that for a second, why someone would think to protect their china plates from moths, then spotted the tablecloths and napkins. Belgian lace, quaint and pretty, again one of those things that belongs to a different time, and which has now outgrown its charm.
He pulled it all out of the cupboard and laid it on the floor to better order the good stuff from the rest then leaned into the sideboard to get into the back shelves. That was when he caught sight of her.
Back then a photograph was still something of an occasion and she’d put on the dress especially, you could tell. A fine silky thing that had caught the breeze just as the shutter clicked. It wafted around her knees as she laughed, frozen in the frame. She was wearing a hat too. Nothing fancy, just the kind of hat people wore back then, back in the days when it was normal and usual to wear a hat and to get dressed for Sundays.
She looked happy, smiling into the camera, squinting a little in the sunlight, her face obscured because the photographer was inexperienced and had taken the photograph into the sun, so her eyes were just deep shadows.. They stared out at him from the confines of the photograph, as he sat there in her living room, rummaging through the remnants of her life, her precious Belgian lace spread all around him.
And for a moment he thought he heard a voice.
“It was a present. Belgian lace. He brought it back from Arnhem.”
And he caught a flash of the past. The truth of it. The shelled homes, exposed to the world. Their contents there for the taking as a young English boy walked by and thought of his sweetheart back home. The temptation too great. And besides, this was war…
That lace he now ran through his fingers as he looked at the clutter scattered on the floor all around him, the smell of carbolic soap mixing with the ever-present stench of that rotting orange and filling him with nausea.
He was done with it all. Had been for a long time now. All it took was an orange to strengthen his resolve. And he stood up and walked to the door pulling the sticker from the sideboard and grabbing the orange from the bowl, it’s powdery blue dust sticking to his fingers.
Someone was shouting out to him as he walked out the door.
“You all done here?”
But he didn’t answer. He just kept on walking, the orange disintegrating in his pals as he thought about Spain. It would be warm there now and the oranges would be ripening on the trees in Seville. Juicy and plump and full of life. And waiting for him to arrive.
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