TALES FROM PANDORA 2 (close window to return)

Rain: it lashes down, grey, cold. A smart-double fronted house with a sold sign outside being pulled down. Dr. Colin Davis, sixty-plus, is respectable, well-dressed as he buttons a coat and opens the front door. He turns around for a last look. The empty, dark hall. In his mind, it colours and gets brighter, like summer entering dead space. His memory repaints the scene. The décor is nineteen-seventies. A young, beautiful woman further down the hall turns towards him and smiles. A flash of light. Her face: smiling and frozen. The colours fade. Her face is in a photo frame on the hall table where he placed it for his exit. His hand touches it and lifts it up. He holds it, kisses it and then puts it carefully in his pocket—the only precious thing and the last item to take with him.

He steps out into the rain. His shoe splashes through a water puddle on the front doorstep. He looks at the ‘sold’ sign as it falls into the mud of the front garden, just missing the rough boots next to it of a workman removing the sign for the estate agent. Dr. Davies comes down the path to the gate. The workman looks up and nods to him. “Lived here long?” he says to Dr. Colin Davis.
The doctor reaches him and says, “A while.”
“Sad to leave a home,” the workman says.
“This was just a place,” the doctor replied.
The workman waits for him to add something, but nothing more is said.
“Furniture all moved then?” the workman asked him.
The doctor nods, opens the gate, and goes through. The iron gate-latch snaps down with a final clunk as the gate swings shut.