I was meant to be counting cutlery. Forty-two settings, silver-plate, the estate agent wanted a number for the inventory before the skip arrived in the morning, and I kept losing count somewhere in the thirties because I was thinking about my phone, face down on the stairs, and whether Dana had texted back yet. Third time I lost count I just wrote 40 and moved on.
It was gone nine by then. Gary and Pete had the van loaded with the easy stuff, wardrobes and the sofa nobody wanted, and I'd been left in the back room going through drawers because I'm slow and thorough, that's what Gary says, though what he means is I get distracted and don't drop anything valuable in a skip by mistake.
The house belonged to a woman called Ivy Thorn who'd died in the front bedroom in March. No family that anyone could find. Council had the clearance out to tender and we got it cheap because nobody else wanted a job with no relatives to sign things off, which meant nobody to ask questions either. There was a dog next door that barked the whole first hour we were there and then just stopped, and I never worked out why, or heard it again.
Every mirror in that house faced the wall. I noticed the hallway one first, just a shape under a sheet that turned out to be glass when I lifted the corner, backing outward. The one in the good room was the same, hung the wrong way round with the wire still showing at the back like a plaque nobody wanted read. Pete found a hand mirror in a drawer with a bit of cardboard taped over it.
I asked Gary if he thought she was just houseproud about smudges. He said some old people don't like seeing themselves get old, and went back to the wardrobe.
I kept thinking about that while I was meant to be counting cutlery.
Around eleven the electric went, which happens in these places, meters run out and nobody tops them up for a dead woman. Gary swore and went to find the fuse box with his phone torch. Pete went out for the second load. So it was just me in the back room with a head-torch and a stack of side plates I still hadn't finished counting.
There was a mirror in that room too. Small one, oval, gone dark with age at the edges. I'd already turned it round earlier without thinking, the way you do, straightening a picture. It faced the wall again when I looked at it. I hadn't touched it since. I told myself Pete had knocked it, coming through with a box, though I hadn't heard him come through, and the boxes were all stacked on the other side of the room by then anyway.
I turned it back round to check the frame for a maker's mark, because that's the kind of thing you note down for valuation. In the torchlight I saw the room behind me the way rooms are always in a mirror, boxes, the doorway, the shape of the hall beyond it. The doorway in the glass was shut.
It was open behind me. I could feel the draught from it on my neck.
I didn't turn round. I turned the mirror back to the wall, careful, both hands, the way you'd put down something that might spill. I finished counting the plates without looking up again. When Gary came back with the electric fixed I told him the small oval one in the back room needed wrapping separate, bubble wrap, glass facing in. He didn't ask why. I didn't say. It's sitting now in a storage unit in Enfield with its face against a cardboard box, exactly the way I left it.
"Au très fond de mes souvenirs" by Hexvessel (Max) is licensed under CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/.