The nature of love

What would you do if there were only 20 minutes until the end of the world ? Too little time to cook a pot roast or run a laundry cycle, but sufficient to ask forgiveness, make amends, get some answers. Then again, some might use it to watch porn. Or to chug back a bottle of single malt, in search of their own bespoke oblivion. Look, it’s up to them I guess. It’s their 20 minutes.

As for me, I know my answer. I know because it is here, right in front of me. The world isn’t ending, but I am. And in the 20 minutes I have left, I have chosen to return to this place.

The old bungalow is exactly as I remember it. On the outside at least. The high grey stone wall running down one side of the sloping driveway - its fortress-like severity offset by a haze of violet from Mrs Clark’s jacaranda tree. Maybe it is no longer Mrs Clark’s jacaranda tree. She may be dead or, worse, in that new retirement complex near the flyover, where the frail and the half-mad are housed in tiny units like niches in a cemetery wall. Like a cemetery wall, but with line dancing every Thursday.

The original letterbox is still here, with its lopsided metal roof. The opening flap is fringed with rust so vividly orange and textured you can almost taste it. An envelope has fallen onto the neatly clipped grass below – limp, rain-speckled, defeated. Its air mail sticker is testament to how far it has come, across continents perhaps, only to give up in these last few metres. I go to pick it up, then pause. If I touch it, if I touch anything, it might all disappear. Too precious, too fragile. Like a dream you fight to remain in, even as daylight tears at the curtains and the alarm slaps you awake.

I tread gingerly down the driveway, my bare toes gripping the cool, damp concrete like a starfish on a rock. Ah yes, over there are the nikau palms, their slender trunks dry and cracked, great sheaves of bark falling away to reveal an inner skin, ringed green and brown. I stop to sniff the hydrangeas crowded beneath the bay window - their heads exploding vivid blue and mauve. Camp, over-the-top. Magnificent. I stop to sniff even though I know they don’t really have a scent. But I inhale deeply and their lack of odour becomes a thing in itself. Base notes of absence, of loss. I used to cut them to place in a blue vase on our long white table, and you would laugh at my need to domesticate them and make them mine, even while they pressed wild against the panes just inches away.

Near the front door the sweet, honeyed fragrance of a flower whose name I never could remember. You always had to remind me. Nature isn’t my forte. Not the specifics anyway. But it did – does – move me. Especially the birds. The darting cheekiness of the fantails. The soft, sad ‘oo’ of the wood pigeon, calling out to us on sleepy afternoons. The song of the tui - by turns a squeaky playground swing and a joyful soprano. I remember that Saturday when Misty, our villainous tabby, caught a tui and swaggered around with it in her mouth, pleased at the shock value of capturing a treasured native bird. She dropped it and pawed at it while it twitched, intent on torturing it to death. The two curled white feathers at the bird’s throat appeared intermittently like an SOS as Misty tossed the poor creature and rolled it over with her thick, murderous paw. I watched in horror, a bystander to pain, but you managed to get Misty to drop her prey then knelt to take a look. "It's alive," you said. "But it won't survive beyond a few days. Too much trauma." You looked at me, and I nodded sadly. "Go inside," you said gently. "I'll deal with it."

I climb the three porch steps now to find a jumble of shoes - sandy flip-flops for childish feet – and a front door I no longer have the key for. The chipped pale green has been painted over. Red, fierce and proprietary. You don’t-belong-here-any-more red.

I freeze. Tears press and crowd behind my eyes and I am forced to remain motionless and wait for the wave to break. You have 20 minutes, they said. Not 30, not 25. Twenty. So arbitrary. It’s been, what – five, ten already? What now? Do I knock? What do I say?

The front door swings open and a red-haired girl of about 10 emerges. Her thin arms encircle a football, which she presses tightly to her when she sees me. Stares, then turns back and yells “Mum!”. She grabs her flip flops and with a last look gambols down the steps and away up the driveway.

I look down at my hands. They have taken on a blue tinge – the colour of the ‘Kia Ora’ doormat, rough and bristly under my feet. The day is heavy and close, even after the rain, but I shiver.

A woman appears, wiping her hands on her skirt. She is forty-ish, about the age I was when we first came to live here. Her hair is cut short, the hair of someone who doesn’t want to remember she has hair. She takes in the sight of me, a pallid old woman in a blue cotton dress, barefoot, and concern shadows her face.

“‘Hello.. Are you… can I help?”

I mouth ‘yes’, but nothing comes out.

“Who is it?” A man’s voice, a boom from out back.

She ignores him. A frown, indication of a decision in progress.

“Whew, it’s muggy out there. Why don’t you come in for a second....”

I step over the threshold and straight into the living room. Apart from the dark chocolate beams and the broad smile of the bay window, it is not how I recall. Here too, our life has been painted over. How many layers deep, I wonder. Maybe if I scratch at the polished wood floor I will find our old grey carpet, and if I chisel away at the sleek L-shaped sofa I will find patches of worn green velvet where our three-seater resides.

“It’s different,” I say, pivoting slowly, a creaky music box ballerina.

“Oh, you used to live here?”

“Long time ago. Yes.”

Speaking is an effort. It’s not breathlessness. The words just feel heavy, like pieces of furniture that are hard to shift on your own.

I glance at a large silver clock on the wall. Modern and minimal with fine hands and no numbers. Time that refuses to tell.

“Where do you live?” asks the woman. “Are you still local?” She is speaking exaggeratedly, and a little loudly, as if to a small child.

I shake my head. At that moment a man enters the room. The energy changes, but not in a bad way. He looks like his booming voice. Big, gruff, but not unkind.

“Oh hello”, he says to me. Looks back at the woman, tips his head towards me in inquiry, a ‘who the hell is this?’

“Excuse me a second,” says the woman. “But please, take a seat.” They both pad out of the room and into the kitchen, which I know is just a few paces away. Low, urgent talking. What to do with me? I hear the words ‘lost… maybe… police?… poor old…. wait, find out...” The sound of water running.

The woman comes back, places a glass on the coffee table in front of me. Nice wood, solid. Not a flatpack job like most of our furniture. We were broke but happy, in the early years that is. Such a cliche, but true nonetheless.

“Thank you,” I say. Then “Why did you buy this house?” The question surprises me as much as it does her.

“You mean when?”

I didn’t. But I nod.

“About two years ago now. We…” a pause, weighing something. “I wonder, since you lived here too. Did you ever hear anything about a… a tragedy, a death here?”

I did. But I shake my head.

The kindergarten-teacher's voice falls away and the words tumble, chasing one another.

“Because, so weird. And I have always wondered… The day we came to see the house, we were standing outside, looking at it from the road and a man, an elderly man, stopped and said ‘lovely house. Not sure I’d want to live there though.’ Said someone died here. Was killed, were his words. Yet the instant we stepped inside, we loved it. If someone did die here, tragically like he said, you wouldn’t know. I’ve only ever felt warmth and love. Maybe he got the wrong house. Anyway, look… Are you sure there is no one I can call? Or perhaps we can we drop you somewhere?”

I shake my head again. She asks me to wait for a second, to not worry, she will be right back. I hear the door from the kitchen to the deck open and close. Low voices again. I stand and move silently on old, worn feet to the bedroom. To our bedroom. Large black and white photographs of children line the far wall – artful, done in a studio. We never had those. Children, I mean. A deep green duvet, floral cushions. A room so different, yet exactly the same. The dense green beyond the window, the papery rustle of the nikau branches, the chatter of birds unnamed.

And now I see you again, lying back on the pillows, eyes large and fearful, a snail trail of drool. They could do nothing, they said. Too much damage after the accident, they said. Placing you in care would be best, they said. But this was your home. I couldn’t release you to an institution, and I couldn’t watch you imprisoned in that broken body any longer, not knowing how much pain you might be in. Silenced for all time. You loved to sing and now you couldn’t even speak.

Your eyes said it all. And you would have done the same for me.

But of course there is a price for everything. Guilt, the horror of friends and family. The same friends and family who, after the accident, had said ‘we’re here for you’ – then vanished one by one as I struggled alone with the husk of the person I married. Afterwards, even after I did my time, I remained isolated and alone. The decision I made in this very room took just minutes to execute, but decades to pay for.

I hold up my hand to the photographs, and the children’s faces loom ghostly through my skin like a drawing through tracing paper. The back door clicks lightly, a soft tread on the kitchen floor. They will enter the living room to find me gone, and for days – possibly weeks – will ask themselves “But who… ? But why…? But how? And where?”. So many questions.

You have 20 minutes to return to find an answer, they said. No more, no less. Rules everywhere, even in the afterlife. And forms, haha. That one surprised me. So much paperwork. And chewed biros that barely work. I mean, really.

If I find my answer, if I can be absolutely sure of it, that will count in my favour, they said. When the time comes to decide.

So, then. Would I do it again? It was all so clear at the time, but now a mist lies over everything. Were your eyes really pleading for release? Or were you afraid of me, and what I was capable of? Were you asking instead to remain, despite everything?

I pull back the curtain to better see the garden, but anyone entering the room would see a curtain moving of its own accord. I am nothing now but air and light. The wind comes up and stirs the dry branches, and in a whisper they tell me ‘Shhhhhhhh’.