Alfie disappears into the classroom without looking back. It swallows him whole. That’s good, I tell myself. He’s happy and I’m free to be ‘me’ again. It’s terrifying.
Turning towards the gate, I focus on the shiny new stilettoes that I hoped would bring me confidence. But I feel ridiculous. A pool of sweat is collecting beneath the too-tight waistband of my trousers, the material straining to contain my bulging flesh. Why did I let Ben convince me to pursue a career again, at my age? Asking his university colleagues to consider me for a job? They’ll see right through me. Inadequate. Embarrassing. Fat.
At the crossroads on the outskirts of town is the shop. A grey-haired woman, hesitant at its door, whispers on entering, ‘I’m Mabel Bennett.’
Mrs Griffiths mentally notes: this one is nervous.
The shop is small from the street but its inside is capacious. Mabel’s first impression is of a greenhouse, pregnant with blooming white flowers. Closer inspection reveals racks where the gowns huddle silently, each awaiting a body to fill them, to walk and twirl in them, display them to a crowd – though just one human might suffice.
This morning, my algae soup tasted even blander than usual. Lifeless. Flavourless. Purposeless.
“Seems familiar,” I mused, granting myself a rare indulgence – not washing the bowl. Why bother? It joined the stack of unwashed dishes, each marking days of the same hollow thought.
Outside my house, I stood before the only soul who would have cared. She would have made me wash up; she made me a better man. Kneeling, I placed a small metal flower upon her makeshift grave. Its subtle blue hue was a stark contrast to this monochrome underground world of dirt and metal.
‘Could I actually just go in there and…? Let me think. Smother him? Yes, yes I could.’
‘We might not need to, Natasha. I’ve not been feeding him.’
‘You’ve been cutting back on his meals?’
‘I’ve not given him any food in seven days. Just water.’
‘He’s looking very gaunt, Annette. Do you mean you’ve been deliberately…?’
‘I want him dead. I hate him. This way we just say he wouldn’t eat, we say he…’
‘Refused food… we say he didn’t want to live any more with the pain of the cancer… we…’
‘We wait two more days. He can’t last out if we starve him.’
/
In his studio they looked at the paintings, many of them of themselves in the first flush of puberty, thin, uncomfortable, unhappy, all naked. Natasha remembered him painting Annette many times, then her turn came. She didn’t quite know what was going on. It’s art, darling, her mother insisted, keep still for Daddy and stop complaining. Her mother had practically pimped her. Creation from exploitation? That wasn’t art. Post-Jimmy Saville his reputation had crashed. Now he was reviled by many, his works removed from galleries. Quite right. Burn them all. A vile paedophile.
His sister though believed they had aesthetic value, said each haunted portrait revealed her mixed feelings: fear of her father and her unbreakable connection to him.
“Tell me how it started, Doctor Frost,” she said, leaning close.
“It was the winter of ’57 when I first opened my new eyes and saw the world as it really is.” I replied. The garlic on her breath irritated but I would not give her the satisfaction of knowing my objections. “Of course, I would not have been able to process the wealth of visual inputs I then had, but for the expanded processing capacity I’d installed two years previously.”
My mother tells me my middle name should be misfortunate. She blames it on my being born on Friday the 13th, sliding into the world feet first, causing her intense pain, which she still remarks on today.
”AS IF ITS MY FAULT I DIDN’T ASK TO BE BORN”
I had the misfortune to have very curly brown hair and green eyes, unlike the rest of my family. Mother is still convinced that I was swapped at birth.
There was a dame sitting at the bar. She was attractive and alone. I decided to take a chance. I slid onto the stool next to her and asked if she wanted a drink.
‘My name is Alice’ she said, ‘Alice Fortune. Miss Alice Fortune.’ I noticed her beautiful smile as she shook my hand.
As our fingers met, I felt something pass between us. My sixth sense was screaming at me but I took no notice, I was hooked.
This was it. I’d had my share of bad luck. After decades of caring for my ailing parents and alcoholic husband, then losing all of them, one by one, it was time to put myself first. Midlife, I decided, would be a new beginning. The mid-point of a novel, after all, isn’t the end of the story, but the moment the protagonist takes charge of their own destiny.
Where better to kick-start a change in fortune than Las Vegas?
“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas!” Nina slurred, and we all clinked glasses.
“Don’t look now,” she shout-whispered into my ear. “Hot guys, by the Blackjack table.”
I cringed. “We’re old enough to be their mothers!”
If you see this, just know that I held down the fort for as long as I could.
I scrunched up the letter in my hand, letting it squeeze through the gaps between my fingers. He’d been gone so long I wasn’t sure he was coming back, and my hope was draining. I decided to look after the shop while he went out for more supplies, although I doubted there was much left outside for us.
The shop, once bustling and filled with guests every fifth of November, was now empty, with only me and a few mice that scuttled from corner to corner for any sign of food. Its rich history cemented those bricks together, lived in the floors and lived in me.
Watkins, a whole platoon in a single body, clumsily barged open the door. The committee room became a lot more crowded with his entrance. ‘They can’t deliver today,’ he said.
Davies, his face communion wafer white, said, ‘Why not?’
‘Strike at the depot.’
‘For the best,’ said Jones.
‘This is going to be a success!’ Davies insisted.
‘It’s meant to be a do to celebrate Phil’s passing, for god’s sake.’ Jones sat up aggressively in his chair. ‘Why do we need bloody fireworks?’
How stupid do you have to be to fall down a well? Pretty stupid, I’m sure.
When I was eleven I did the very same thing when collecting water with my brother. Even after my mother, peeling and chopping a pile of potatoes over the sink, apron soaked with water and littered with small potato skins, warned us.
“Careful round that well,” she declared, eyes stuck to the potatoes. “You remember what happened with Dorothy’s poor wee lass.”
“I don’t fear death,” said Polypherous, “I fear not being able to say something original about it.”
As he sauntered across the freshly blackened road, its newly laid tar still odorous, to Quinit’s bakery on the corner of Beach Street, where the paving stones were still reddened by the blood of martyrs, and overflowing flowers in iron baskets bedecking the sills of tiny apartments filled with shouting boat-wives, hung like curtains, affording cool in the midday heat, he turned to Archegoron walking alongside, and asked him, “Do you fear death, Arch?”
The Bishop was shrouded in a sterile melancholia. No Paul, no Barnabus. The preoccupied silence intermittently splintered as believers, heads studiously bowed to their books, whispered ritualistic rejoinders to the calls to silence. Not like the pub book-reading club at all!
*****
My thoughts drifted back four, no five, months. The conversation flowed then with that lack of embarrassment of familiars who knew exactly where the boundaries of safe conversation lay.
“Can’t bend… belly’s in the way.” The speaker, Betty, strained to retrieve a biscuit for Barnabus, a particularly yappy male Jack Russell, enthusiastic to the point of obvious sexual excitement whenever a woman entered the bar. That was one reason I routinely assumed a seat in the snug opposite; in clear view but removed. The other was discomfort. The invite “Come and join us” was no longer repeated, – no doubt deterred by my repeated rebuttals. I swigged a mouthful of stout and continued my solitary reading. Chapter 5 “The Surprise Accident.”
In retrospect, I suppose it was kind of like stepping through a door with no staircase on the other side. That’s what it seemed like initially anyway, the rush of fear, the clenching knot in your stomach that you’re dropping, the knowledge you’re going to really… and I mean really hurt yourself when you land.
Funny thing is, I don’t know how long it’s been now, but I’ve still not impacted on anything solid, and I’m not sure anymore that I’m falling, either. I look around… at least, I presume I’m doing so, but I can’t see any light receding behind me. Or one growing in front of me either, I’m pleased to report. It’s scant comfort to not be in a long tunnel with a light at the end, but I’ll take it.
I must say, it was the weirdest outing ever. I can try to laugh about it now but really, it just reinforced all my early fears about not getting into things where you can’t see a clear way out. (I completely blame the Brothers Grimm for this, what with Hansel and Gretel having such a close encounter with an oven – nightmare).
Dilly, my sister, (Delia, but she hates the name)and I live far apart so we take the occasional weekends together and meet up for hotel stays, meals out, the odd show and whatever we fancy.
The land that surrounds me was, up until fairly recently, a lifeline to man’s very existence. There was a time when it was a valley of black waste, tall chimneys, steam powered locomotives and the pit head winding gear. Some men worked and some men died for a meagre pittance with which to feed their families. It was a place whose narrow seams crippled the people that produced the wealth for the owners. It was somewhere I used to work, not anymore. I kept telling myself that I’d never return to this hellhole. Since its closure, I find myself once again plodding over this once industrial landscape.
You know there’s something seriously wrong when the police arrive at your door past midnight. I guessed what it was at once. He had finally done it.
I’d moved out of the family home when I was seventeen, and haven’t put a foot inside it since. After years of wanting my father’s attention, I finally had it once I reached puberty. It was the wrong sort of course, “our little secret” he used to call it.
Poor Mum, the things she had to put up with over the years. She didn’t deserve any of it. She’d never told anybody of the mental and physical abuse she had been subjected to from ‘HIM.’ Even now I can’t call him ‘Dad’, he’s such a despicable human being. Why she stood by him all these years I will never understand.
Of course, the forest was dark that night, in these sorts of stories it always is. But, even as I stumbled through the undergrowth, the wind whipping razor-sharp branches into my face like an enraged banshee, I couldn’t allow myself to slow.
There it was, by some miracle, a light up ahead. I almost physically stretched toward it, like a dying man in the desert offered a flask of water or, perhaps, to flip the analogy, a drowning man thrown a rope from a passing ship.
What it was, was hope. Lower case, yes, but hope nonetheless.
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