Goodbye To The Past
She shuddered. This was the room where it happened…
She had felt the heat. The walls closing in on her. She was suffocating. Why had she returned and how?
It had been a normal Sunday afternoon all those years ago in this inner city terrace. Six houses where all the residents except she alone had been related. On Saturdays, in the stultifying heat of summer days, children grizzled while their parents yelled and screeched insults, which escalated into blows on Saturday nights after the pub.
Sundays were different. Squabbles forgotten as the women seared the meat before putting it in the fireside oven and the men went backslapping to the pub to wet their appetites. Peace reigned in the afternoons. Mams and Dads went to bed to recharge their batteries. The children off loaded to Sunday School or grandma.
In the house next door Marjorie Right dug her husband in the back.
"God! Did you hear that? I reckon it was a thunderbolt or something."
Bill groaned and turned over. "You’ve bin dreaming. It in’t even raining."
Margery screamed. "The wall has gone –look."
Bill opened his eyes and looked toward the adjoining wall. He was looking into space.
"Christ,’ he said. ‘We’d better get out quick.’
He pulled his trousers on over his pants, picked up Marjorie’s skirt and blouse from the floor and threw them to her. His socks were already on and he didn’t stop to tie his bootlaces.
Marjorie stuck her feet into her slippers a followed him down the stairs. They knocked up their neighbours.
"What about her?", Marjory pointed to the pile of bricks that had been the end house.
Bill shrugged. "Mrs Green? Poor owd bogar. Don’t reckon much hope for her. Anyway she’s nowt to do with us. Let the bobbies sort it out."
They huddled together in the street shivering despite the warmth of the day. The fire brigade came but there was no fire. No smell of gas either.
"Any body hurt?" asked the bobby.
No one was hurt but all were shocked.
"Have you any friends you can go to? It will be some time before you can go back in here."
‘You get off to your Mam’s" Bill said. I’ll wait for the kids to come home. He waited, then like the pied piper, he led them all to their Gran’s.
No one knew the cause of the collapse although the newspapers put forward various theories. No body was found in the rubble. Mrs Green, the sole occupant had disappeared.
The tenants had all been rehoused before the bulldozer was sent in and where the terrace had once stood, a new block had been built. There were only five houses now. They were no longer back-to-back but it was still a terrace with little improvement. Nor had the tenants changed much. A new generation. The children weren’t sent to Sunday school but sat in front of television screens. They saw horror films depicting spontaneous combustion but that was fiction, wasn’t it?
Mrs Green felt the space around her. She moved as a shadow through all five houses. Isolated as she had been all those years ago. Now, however she was truly invisible.
A child awoke screaming. In five beds couples shivered and clung to each other. All vowed they would find new homes as soon as they could. Homes where no shadows lingered.
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