THE SIXTH GUEST: Chapter One - Part One

Welcome to part one of a brand new serial... 

 

THE FIRST VISIT 

The sixth guest actually arrived before the fourth and the fifth guests but Clare Painter didn’t make the connection at the time.

The morning had started off cold, despite the promises spring had been making lately, tarnishing her usual routine of five o'clock start and making breakfast for all. The fact that it was five o’clock hadn’t helped; Henry’s fault for that one, her first guest and an old man who took his early starts and early bedtimes with agreeable but slightly irritating insistence. The cold had made it worse: the still forbidden other side of the king size bed empty and chilled with no more husband to fill it.

But now, at four o’clock in the afternoon the kitchen was getting to be as hot as a runner’s armpit. The digital thermometer attached to the wall next to the door to the downstairs toilet-come-wet room shower showed twenty five. And climbing. It popped up to twenty six before she turned away. She almost tapped the little digital readout with a cocked index finger but didn’t, holding it poised instead, waiting to see if the temp would rise again.

The black LED numbers remained steady. Then the lines that made up the six of the twenty six blinked and it turned into a seven.

It was odd – she’d never seen anything like it – but not odd enough to stop her noticing that somebody had left the light on right there by the toilet door, even though it was mid afternoon daylight outside and in. Clare sighed and switched it off, feeling a little knot of tension in her forehead as she did so; anxiety tapping into the soft side of her brain the way it always seemed to do now when she saw waste of any kind. “Henry, is that you in there?”

There was no answer from inside the toilet for a long enough time to make Clare think he’d come down while she was in Boscombe buying groceries and slipped back up to his room leaving behind a trail of wasted electricity (the hall light was on too she now noticed, barely making an impact on the white sunlit walls). Then she heard a murmur from behind the door from her first guest, a cleared throat and his light but hoarse voice saying, “Yes.”

The kitchen was the result of an extension the previous owners had done (or the owners before them) and reached out of the back of the house, gobbling up what would have once been a good sized garden and leaving only a little square of grass for the rabbits to act out their power plays and sex games. It didn’t have a door. The long hallway extended straight past the fridge freezer’s nook and the toilet opposite it down past a kink to the front door.

“I was just wondering if you could remember to turn the light off in there when you come out. It only affects you a little bit but it makes a really big difference when the bills come.”

“Alright.”

“And if... If you could leave it a little tidier in there when you’re finished I’d appreciate it.”

There was another long silence then he said, “I will.”

Clare hung her head then raised it and hooked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Thank you. Thanks a lot.” She hated being a mother hen – it had never suited her self-image – but he was the downhill side of seventy five at least, and the state he left that place in was a sight to be seen. What she wanted to say was “Did your wife always clean up after you like you seem to expect me to?” but she had an awful feeling the answer would be yes and though she’d never plucked the courage to ask him how long it had been since his wife’s death she got the feeling it wasn’t more than two years. Clare still had a fear of all loss-related conversations; partly for the difficulty of choosing the right words, and partly because that subject might suddenly turn its gaze on her and she knew she couldn’t stand anymore tears.

She didn’t say anything more: just went down the hall far enough to flick the light switch there at the kink where the stairs landed before coming back. She’d said her piece. If he left it untidy then she’d just have to clean it up. If she had to act like his mother in that respect then so be it. She wasn’t about to start nagging a pensioner like he was a little boy.

She didn’t even glance at the wall thermometer as she passed it but did take off her cardigan and hung it on the back of the chair at the closest end of the table  that filled the centre of the room (her husband’s chair) before she stuck her head out the door to see what the dog was up to.

If she had checked the thermometer then she’d have seen that the seven was now a nine. And if that had made her linger then she might also have seen it flick up another notch. And then another.