The Weirdest Thing A Guest Has Done At My Home

When I was 18, I had a weekend where my parents were out of town. At this point, you’re probably already picturing the following clichéd situation – parents go out of town, the teenager decides to throw a monumental party, too many people arrive with too much booze, things get wildly out of hand, and the teenager faces a rollicking when the parents see the state of the house left behind. Well, as I’d already experienced a similar situation once before, I decided to be a little more sensible – just a few friends, ones I could trust, coming round to have a few drinks.

A few arrived early on and the others trickled in slowly over the next couple of hours. One friend, however, was coming from the deepest, darkest place in the middle of nowhere – she’d taken a bus into town, and needed a lift out to my house. Having expected this, I was still sober and could drive out to pick her up. It was about a 30-minute round trip, and as it was still early in the night, I trusted those already present not to do anything stupid in my absence.

I drove to pick her up and on the way back we decided to call our friends in case they wanted us to bring back anything. The phone rang but no one answered. We tried one friend after another but still no response. Naturally, this made me slightly nervous, but it was perfectly plausible that there was some issue with the phone reception – I lived a little out of the town and it could be spotty at the best of times.

When we pulled up back at my house, it looked deserted – the other cars had gone and there were no lights on inside. My friend and I looked at each other with a mixture of confusion and annoyance – had they really just upped and left without a word? I got out my keys to unlock the door, only to find it was already open. Annoyance was overriding confusion at this point. We looked around the house but saw neither sight nor sound of anyone. They really seemed to have vanished without a trace.

As it turned out, so had a few other things. The kitchen table, for one, was nowhere to be seen, along with some lamps, chairs and even bookshelves. Peering out into the garden, we saw something unusual and the penny finally dropped. There, sitting silently in the garden, were the rest of my friends, along with the aforementioned assortment of furniture. In my absence they had recreated a whole room out in my garden. Quite how they had managed to move some of those things (like the kitchen table) through the house and into the garden was a mystery. This wasn’t some half-hearted job either – there were rugs, chairs, books, lamps, everything. They’d even gone to the trouble of moving their cars onto other nearby streets to keep up the appearance that they’d simply all left. The only missed detail had been the unlocked front door. Apparently, they hadn’t been able to find a key.

Quite why they had decided to do this was beyond me. That said, one had to admire the efficiency of their operation. It was also a beautiful summer evening, so the al fresco living room experience turned out to be a stroke of genius after all. Thankfully, they agreed to move everything back at the end of the night. Annoyance had long since given way to (slightly confused) admiration by that point.

Rob

Vocabulary

rollicking (noun) [BR] – a severe reprimand; a very strong expression of disapproval
the middle of nowhere (phrase) – a place that is very remote or far away
spotty (adj.) – of uneven quality; patchy and not consistent
the penny dropped (phrase) – used to indicate that someone has finally realized something
aforementioned (adj.) – referring to something that has been talked about before
half-hearted (adj.) – done with little effort or care; incompetent or inadequate