Back to the Old House

 There are no ghosts here. The house is dead, flatly lifeless. Nothing between these walls but cobwebs, unopened post, dried footprints in the hallway. 

Rashes break out on the walls, blistering the paintwork in a simulacrum of life. Boils and pimples that strafe skin spread throughout rooms like lesions, livid ruptures, spattering like lichen splashes on stone. There are stains and smears - shadows describe missing pictures. It is a negative space. 

Odd details remain. A novelty light-switch hanging from a cord in an empty room, circling slowly in the draught. The rooms are vast now, swollen by the amount of emptiness they are forced to contain, each an endless vista of tired carpet in the colours of yesteryear: mauves and yellowy greens, the hues of healing bruises. 

The house smells of vacancy, as damp and hollow as a dead well. In place of music, the blaring TV, the clinking glasses, the kettle's whine and the ticking clocks, there is the banging of a wooden bucket against weeping stone, the squeak of frayed rope. There's nothing here. The house is beyond empty. 

It was our family home for nearly forty years and soon it will be someone else's. And they will remove every trace of us. They'll have to. The house has stood for over a hundred years, sheltering people we never knew. For over fifty years before before we'd even heard of Basingstoke, people sat in these rooms, trod the stairs, talked and fought and laughed. Things have happened here and those lives, like footsteps, have echoed through the house, marking it, changing it. 

Memories, ghosts, have seeped into the stone walls, into the spaces between the floorboards, the yellowing cream of the coving. But I can't feel it. I'm a shoddy aerial. I don't see the ghosts. I don't pick up the vibrations. For me, now, there's nothing. 

It's an empty house. It echoes sadly. Stuffy and stale, it has begun to settle. Temporarily bereft of life, there's nothing here. I take photos: where the bed was in my bedroom. A bee and a fly on the kitchen windowsill, dead and perfectly preserved under the shawl of a spider's web. No sign of the spider. The letterbox is choked with unread mail. The beautiful beveled glass in the bathroom I never noticed, as it was always obscured by tatty net curtains. Thick grey carpet on the bathroom floor. Dirt spilling from the mouth of the fireplace, like dried vomit. Mum's nest disappeared: no books, no medication, no solid lumps of boiled sweets. It's neglect, abandonment, ruin. A sad house. It needs people. New people. 

I lock the door behind me. The house stays empty.