I stepped through the white panelled door and onto the terracotta tiled floor of the kitchen. The door was disturbed by a draft behind me, its squeal of resistance causing me to glance back, remembering the years of cooking that had coated it with an oily yellow stain.I made my way to the circular pine table where I had once consumed meals with my family, before they were taken away from me. I had built that table with my own hands, carefully following the international instructions from the DIY store and to my amazement getting it right first time.
As my eyes traced the grain of the wood, the voices of my children seemed to be ingrained into its surface, like the grooves of an old gramophone record, haunting me now with the memory of how they would shout and yell and laugh in their youthful exuberance. Accusing me with my insistent rebukes, telling them to keep quiet, because I was busy. But I was not busy any more and I longed for no sweeter thing than to hear the music of their delightful little voices once again.
I pulled out one of the battered, wooden chairs adjacent to the table, lowering myself onto the faded, red cushion that was already sitting on it. It had been my son’s favourite chair. He was such a grubby eater and the food stains had never quite come out, no matter how many times my wife had washed it. My thigh brushed against the leg of the table and I ran my fingers and the palm of my hand, up and down its edges, feeling the smooth texture of the wood against my skin.
I glanced up to my left to where an old clock, sporting the brand name Boisselier’s Chocolates, had stopped at exactly fourteen minutes past nine. Its wide, wooden frame was round and dark, its face ghostly white and embossed with thick, black Roman numerals. Its hands were slender and not quite black, but the hour hand budded just before the tip, narrowing again to a fine point. The white face was distorted and mottled, where the inexpert hand of my own father had attempted to wipe away its blemishes. I remembered watching him with wonder when I was a child, amazed at his cleverness, as he painted the clock-face, carefully dabbing it with a tiny brush.
On the wall in front of me, perpendicular to the clock, the upper half of an old Welsh dresser had been fixed. It was the last piece of furniture that my wife had bought for the house before she disappeared. Like the table, it was pine, but more honey-coloured, where the glaze applied to the table had a cheap orange glow about it.
The dresser was roughly square in shape, with 
two shelves
two shelvesand a row of six cream-coloured, china drawers running along its bottom. The drawers were decorated with little pink and lilac daisies, with yellow hearts, pale as sunlight through autumn mist. The handles seemed to grow out of the drawers and were like upturned shells that beckoned me to prize them open. When my wife was around, I was never allowed to touch those drawers, because she was afraid that they would fall and smash, but when she was away, they were hardly ever closed.
The bottom shelf carried an ivory wooden chest, engraved with slender hearts dangling from strings that were tied at the top with tiny bows. Next to the chest, a single dinner-plate flared with the brightly-painted image of a blood-red poppy, whose plump petals were spotted indiscriminately with thick, black seeds that drew the eye into the poppy’s heart hypnotically.
A Chinese jade tea-plate huddled against the poppy. Its surface was crazed with orange and gold curls, whose imprint I could feel on my finger-tips without even touching it. It was scattered here and there with whirling, dark blue fronds and pink chrysanthemums that I recognised from my long dead grandfather’s garden. I had fallen into a patch of them as a child, but fearing anger had discovered only a knowing smile and great laughter afterwards.
A tap on the window pane drew my gaze across the room to the window, where the greying, magnolia blinds had been drawn down against the encroaching darkness of a November evening.
A fat, orange pumpkin grinned cheesily from the mosaic-tiled window-ledge. Its diamond eyes stared back at me, like the eyes of some half-creature, half-created, on the way to being something, but not quite someone, wondering ‘who am I?’
Next to the pumpkin sat an ebony bowl, replete with ripe bananas and gleaming red apples. In front of them, on the mock, green marble worktop, a damp tea-towel had been laid out to dry. But on the white wire rack, over the stainless steel draining board, the dishes were still waiting, where the long vanished mistress of the kitchen had left them years before.
M
