Melvin Burgess Stuff

Walking down Moss Lane, quiet in his trainers, and his wife Marlene, clop, clop, clip clop a few steps behind.

In mid clop her steps stop. He looks behind in surprise and there she isn’t.

Unebelieveable. He laughs.

“How did you do that?”

No answer.

He steps back and peers over his shoulder, to this side then to that.

No Marlene.

He stands on tip toe. He peers around behind a parked car.

No Marlene.

Impossible. There’s no where to hide.

Spooked now, he calls her name. "Mary!" Then laughs. Is he forgetting her already?

He retraces his steps, back to the last time they spoke. Maybe he imagined just her clopping along behind him.

“It’s gone cool,” she’d said.

“Yes,” he replied.

That’s it. And now she’s gone.

He goes back further to a ginnel running up behind Shoal Street. He peers along the narrow ally.

Empty.

She must have gone up there. Stopped to talk. Found cat. Got left behind. Gone home in a strop.

That must be it. Anxious, but still believing in her, he hurries home and no one’s there.

He goes to bed unhappy and wakes up scared. He rings the police, but the reply is predictable.

“Give it another day or two sir. These things usually resolve themselves.”

They think she’s left him. Perhaps she has.

Miserably, he goes to the wardrobe to see what clothes are missing.

Quite a few. The police were right.

Like this? He’d believed they were so close – in love? And now she’s gone without a word, in mid step.

He rages around the house. But her jewellery, so much of it presents from him? What has she taken of that?

He returns to the bedroom. The jewellery box is gone. Yet he is certain it was there only a short time ago.

He saw it on the dressing table next to her perfume and scattered bits of make up.

He turns to the wardrobe again. But the wardrobe is gone.

Dumbfounded, he goes back to bed and stays there for aday, but when he gets up Marlene’s dressing table has gone.

He goes to bookcase for their wedding album. Only his frist wife appears to have ever existed.

He goes to the PC to call up photos taken over the past five years. It appears he has never re-married.

Distraught and anxious about his sanity, he goes through the house searching, searching for some reminder of his vanished wife only to realise he no longer knows her name.

He is on the verge of suicide when he turns up a card from his mother-on-law at the bottom of an empty cupboard.

It is dated 2006 – two years after he married for the second time.

He pulls on his coat and rushes round to confront her.

A fit, well-dressed woman in her seventies opens the door and smiles to see him.

“It’s about your daughter,” he says, as he steps in.

She looks curiously at him and leads the way through to the sitting room.

“Sit, sit,” she says. She takes a chair opposite a large picture window and gestures to another by her side.

They sit in silence for a while. He wriggles uncomfortably while she gazes out of the window across the valley, as if entranced by the view.

He has no idea how to begin.

“I think, I think” he says at last, “that I may be having some kind of breakdown.”

“A breakdown?” she exclaims in disgust.

“The universe is disappearing piece by piece, and he thinks he’s having a breakdown.”

She gestures to the window. He looks out over the hill.

For the first time he sees how whole chunks of the landscape have vanished, leaving smooth, neat holes behind, like an enormous swiss cheese.