list. At the checkout he winced at the size of the bill compared with the smallness of his shopping.
Still, his purchases were heavy enough. The cheap carrier bags cut painfully into his hands as he hauled them up the stairs.
‘Get a ground floor flat or a place with a lift next time,’ he muttered to himself as he juggled with the door and bags, then door bag and keys as he reached his front door. Once inside he staggered the last few yards to the kitchen before one of the bags finally gave up the ghost and split, spilling its contents over the floor. Luckily nothing seemed to have split or broken so Dan sighed with relief whilst he wriggled his fingers trying to get some feeling back into them.
Before putting the shopping away he decided to he had better get the washing out of the machine, hoping that it was still reasonably fresh despite having sat for the best part of a day and half. He hauled it out into the laundry basket and carried the chill wet mass into the lounge, setting it down on the table whilst he set up the clothes dryer by the window.
He stopped.
That was odd.
He always kept the dryer in the same place, propped up next to the radiator in front of the windows in the lounge. It wasn’t the prettiest of things but space was at a premium in the flat and Dan couldn’t find a home for it anywhere else. He knew he shouldn’t really leave it out but there was no one else there to complain about it so he couldn’t see the problem.
Whatever, the dryer wasn’t there. He stared at the spot where it normally was for a full 30 seconds trying to remember when and why he had moved it and, more pressingly, where he had moved it to.
Eventually he found it, tucked almost out of sight between one of the settees and the wall. Puzzled, he pulled it out and set it up. Whilst hanging the wet clothes on it he wracked his brain. When had he moved it? And what had possessed him to put it there? That was just the place where Alice would have put it.
He stopped, shirt in hand. Where Alice would have put it? Well yes, because it was a bit of a girly thing to do to put practical things away out of sight wasn’t it? He couldn’t see the point; not many of his men friends could.
And as he stood there he knew that something else was niggling him, something that he couldn’t put his finger on. What was it? He looked around the room.
Then suddenly he got it.
It was the TV remote. It was always in the same place, on the coffee table where he could always find it. Now it was on the arm of the settee. Just where Alice would have put it, next to where she would sit, in control range. At first they had joked about it; later it was the spark for arguments.
He shivered. This was stupid. He was seeing things, getting paranoid, seeing things in inanimate objects that weren’t there. He must have put it there, just as he had put the dryer in it’s odd place. He’d probably done it when he was drunk last night. He put the fact that he was sure that they were not in these places when he had left the previous day to the fallibility of memory. He continued hanging the washing out, deliberately trying not to look around the flat for anything else that seemed out of place. When he had finished he tossed the basket into the bathroom where it live and went to put the shopping away.
But when he opened the first cupboard he knew that he wasn’t being paranoid.
He jumped back in alarm feeling almost physically sick.
He kept his cupboards in a slightly chaotic, disordered way. It suited him that way, he didn’t like organisation. Now his three cupboards were perfectly organised, cans with cans, rice and pasta together with all the other dry goods, bottles together in the third.
Now he knew for certain.
Somewhere had been in his flat whilst he’d been away.
Alex's Blog
I do not often have the luxury to write a long piece like this. I am usually far too busy – and where I work I need to be, being surrounded as I am by idiots. I have no idea how they survived before I arrived, before I was