This is the last walk round the house. The last chance to enjoy peace inside these walls.
Everyone else is waiting in the car. I said I needed a few more minutes to look around. Five minutes tops was my promise, but it has already been ten.
I wish I was enjoying these last few minutes. Taking one last sip of serenity in my childhood home. But I have a misson. I am looking for something.
This is not a hunt for a physical object. The cupboards are bare, the furniture carted off weeks before. Instead, I am looking for a memory. For proof.
If what happened actually happened, it took place over a decade ago. I was fifteen, maybe sixteen at most. The book I was reading had a skull on the cover, and no barcode. An impulse purchase from a charity shop. It said not to say the words out loud, but I did so anyway.
What appeared had long hair, and would not stop crying. Eyes like a pair of torches. Nails longer than most people's hands.
It would not stop crying. In the dark you cannot cope with that.
I think we had a fight. More of a panicked scramble. I believe it smashed its greasy head on the side of my bedside cabinet, and something purple and sticky had sprayed out of the wound.
I had sprinted out my bedroom door, and down leapt down the stairs two steps at a time. Collided with the shoe rack at the bottom, and whacked my ankle. From there I had hidden under the table in the kitchen, wishing my parents had heard the crash, too scared to go upstairs.
So I remained until the sun came up. Until I had a chance to crawl out, and sit watching the lawn through the windows. When my Dad eventually came down, I pretended the birds had woken me up. We drank hot chocolate.
At least I think this happened. I never found any corpses in my room. I do not even remember going back upstairs. The book is lost. Most of my other memories revolve around cycling, and playing computer games. All silence. No crying at all.
The guilt is what has stuck with me. A trace memory of something awful. Something which would one day catch up with me. Now the house is empty, I have to have one last look in my old room.
The threadbare carpet has not changed. And where my bedside cabinet had sat is a small, purple coloured, Australia shaped stain on the carpet. It must has been there all my life. Well, since my teenage years.
This is not concrete proof anything happened. I am still unsure. But the time has run out. So what do I do?
And though all the greatest memories of this house are all in silence, I beg for the sound of crying.
Line: All those Sunday afternoons will soon be gone forever.
