A VISITOR

An old story, how memories would love to come back to life...

A VISITOR

Janice stirred in her armchair as the television switched itself off but she couldn’t see any point in switching it back on because the pictures it was showing her were nothing like as entertaining as the pictures in her own mind.

She’d had one hell of a good life and the memories she enjoyed mulling over only showed her one brief but important part of it. She sighed. You can remember images, the blue, say, of his eyes or the tilt of his head when he’s laughing with you, but other things, like the scent of his skin after a shower when he’s snuggling up to you, still damp and very lovely, that’s not so easy to recall.

He had been Walter and her first real and only true love. She had been a schoolgirl, for goodness’ sake, a sixth former at a time when girls didn’t need to study because they were going to be domestic goddesses like her own mum, and she wanted anything but that for herself.

Now the sound of his whispered teasing, and many of the whimsical turns of phrase he had delighted in using, things you can’t actually see and get weathered by the passing of too many years. But just him sitting next to her, the sense of warm flesh against hers, his touch that she had wanted to tell him to stop but didn’t because he was a decent lad and might have obeyed her unwilling command.

And don’t forget his kisses. Any of them.

They had only been young, the two of them, discovering the wonderful world of exploration, of daring and being accepted, and all the time the unique combination of scents and flavours. Had she really done that to him and with him? Really?

And that time on the park, he in those teeny pale blue shorts and she wishing he’d take them off or, preferably, let her do it for him… But he hadn’t, which was still a shame all these years afterwards.

Of course she let that live on in her had down the years, and a lot more, but slowly time was unpeeling the layers of her memories, erasing details until soon there would be nothing left. And if she stopped giving the images a chance to replay themselves like she was now, maybe they’d vanish altogether, become part of the mush that was the past, like the mundanities of everyday life, waking up, getting up, breakfast, cleaning the teeth, that was important and the proof of that importance is that she still had most of them. But it was still part of the mundane mush of life.

And most of the rubbish had become almost the total of her experiences. In fact, taken all in all Walter had been a little splash in a huge pond even though she had wanted him to be so much more. But he had gone away. To university, and very few lads from her neck of the woods ever had a chance of doing that. But Walter had been clever, and that very cleverness had taken him away from her for good. After all, why would a brainbox like him choose a girl from Woolworth’s even though she worked on the electrical counter and sold batteries and switches and measured wire by the yard, and took the pennies from the next generation of brainboxes.

So he’d gone off to University, and that was only right and proper, wasn’t it? And she’d met Jay and married him and had three children for him to call his own, created from his seed. He’d loved that, had Jay, the intimacy of holding hands to school so other fathers could look on and say how bright Jay’s kids were, and how good looking… Jay, bless him had lived for those kids and she had provided the nest in which he could preen himself.

But he had never been Walter.

And Jay had died, too young, she thought, though his death gave her renewed freedom. There had been Rob, another man more conscious of himself than he was of her, though they had slept together and once in a blue moon he had rolled over to kiss her, or more.

That had been fun, but he wasn’t a Walter.

Walter had touched her where no other man had, not always with his fingers on her flesh but with a tendril of himself on her brain. And Walter was there when she had times like this, the television off and all its dull dramas silenced, and she was living with Walter even though half a century had passed since she had seen him last. But she knew the way he had touched her like nobody else had, the things he had whispered to her in a voice that was honesty moulded into sound. He was more alive in her head than was Jay, who resided in the cemetery on a plot she had never visited since his funeral, and Rob, he had died too, but where he was she had no idea. They, that is his own family, hadn’t told her he was dead, she found out that from a months old copy of the Brumpton Courier, and by then he’d been cremated. She thought that’s what he would have wanted. He’d always said he didn’t fancy sharing mother earth with a family of worms.

Maybe it had been Walter being her first love and the way they had shared the discovery of magic together before he left for his studies. It was the flavour of him she could almost remember, not that of the father of her children, nor even of the more adventurous Rob, eve though they had snuggled together, but Rob had never even been a shadow of Walter. Not even a shadow of his shadow.

She sighed. First love is such an adventure if it’s with a Walter!

Then the doorbell rang on her phone and she picked it up to see who might be there.

Maybe it was the post with a cheque from the charity lottery she contributed to every month and never seemed to win anything. But no, it was a scruffy old man, bald and vague-looking, probably a lost soul begging for next to nothing for fear of dying. Well, he could stay there, couldn’t he? At her age it was no easy thing, getting out of her chair and walking anywhere, even to her own front door.

She heard him go and looked at the video on he rphone that showed her what was going on outside. And the old man had the cheek to push something through her letter box! Maybe it was that impossible cheque!

It seemed a long way to the front door. At least, it did these days. In the past it had been a hop, a step and a jump, but she had been young.

There was an envelope there, still sticking out of the flap, which meant she wouldn’t have to bend down to pick it up. That much was a blessing.

She opened the envelope and by some magic the first word that caught her eyes was Walter!

The message was brief.

To Janice it read, my friend Walter asked me to call and say he remembered you well had often thought of calling on you. If you remember him, he rang me this morning and I have a parcel for you, which I will bring round tomorrow. Yours faithfully, Harry Smith.

Parcel? What parcel? She opened the door to see if the old man was still there.

He was, by the gate, hovering as if he might have been expecting her to look for him. And under his arm he was carrying a small parcel that she hadn’t noticed from the door bell image on her phone.

“Mr. er... Smith?” she asked.

“That’s my nom de plume,” he said, “I thought you might run away for good if I signed my note Walter… Here, take this. It’s the pair of shorts you particularly liked me wearing way back when they fitted me…”

Her heart almost ticked to a standstill. Walter? Was it? She glanced at his eyes. It was Walter. Only Walter had eyes like that.

“I would have preferred iit if you’d taken them off!” she found herself saying, words so brazen, so of the old days and not the now.

“Can I come in?” he asked, I’ve got something to show you and it might be awkward in the street…”

© Peter Rogerson 14.09.23

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