Short story number 16

                                 Short story number 16

                                              A Day in the Life…

Elizabeth stared out of her car window towards the dismal estate. What brought her to that part of town today she couldn’t answer. There was no reason for her to come that way and her mother certainty never expected her to visit. There was a strict understanding between them; Wednesday and Saturday afternoons  either at A&N coffee shop or at her own home ‘The Glades’, though her mother never showed much enthusiasm for the latter. She lit a cigarette and stepped out of the car. Today was Thursday and no such meetings were imminent. She inhaled deeply and breathed out the smoke with an aggression she could barely articulate. The whole development had gone up in the 70’s in a wave of optimistic fervour; a happy new world of precincts and open courtyards, playgrounds and picnic areas. What had the planners been thinking of? The precincts were barren and windswept, the playgrounds had become a meeting point for crack and other adolescent miseries and the picnic areas were more like tracts of waste land; old tires and discarded pieces of furniture sprouting up in place of wooden trestle tables and benches. It hadn’t been like that when she was growing up in the terrace. The project had been swamped with theories, riddled with unanswered questions and puffed out with an awful lot of ignorance and self interest. She flattened the half smoked cigarette into the tarmac with her foot and sat back again in the driver’s seat. Had she really thought she could throw all this behind; that the past would never catch up with her? She flicked on the radio and, to her great surprise, instead of the usual musical indifference she was greeted with a sound that stirred her from within; a long ago tune but one which brought with it an intangible warmth, a craving and nostalgia and an irrefutable throw back to her early childhood. What power lay in that music to do this to her? She thought to switch it off but the pull was too strong and slowly, she relaxed and let it do its work. She was a little girl again, standing in her soft blue flannel dressing gown with the ladybird buttons. It wasn’t so much the memory of her home itself but a far stronger, richer recollection. It was as though she were engulfed with an immense strength, a warm breeze of love, security and belonging, an unwavering sense of absolute belief and trust. Tears began to roll down her cheeks and she wiped them away with the back of her hand but they came all the more. Was it Christmas? If it was, it was one far, far away. It spoke of pure happiness and joy, it called out from the past, not in anguish or regret but with a soft voice of assurance, unblemished and indestructible. She breathed in deeply and shook slightly as she tried to control the tremor seizing her chest; so beautiful, so indescribably beautiful.

The song finished and immediately she switched off the radio, terrified the return to the superficial gabble of the D.J could shatter this fragile, ephemeral remembrance. After a few moments, she dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief, had a quick look in the mirror and turned the engine on. She had to drive away from that place but at that moment had no notion of where she wanted to be. She slipped into the stream of traffic heading towards the town but at the crossroads took a left turn that climbed steadily upwards. The road was lined with neat 1930’s semis, most of their front gardens still intact and all of them emitting a profound Englishness. She both loved and despised it. At the ‘Grenadier Arms’ she turned right and knew she was heading to her beloved grandmother’s old home. So many years had passed. The route was more than familiar. It was as though she were following a map of her own dimension, her own world. She knew every wall, every house and every garden. Whether in her mind or now, physically at this very moment, she could trace every step. She knew the smells of every season. She could sense the damp from the pavement in the autumn and the rich aroma of the dripping overhanging plants along the way, or feel the sunlight penetrating the hedges and bushes in abundance on a long, sultry summer’s afternoon. It was all so unquestionably part of herself. The house appeared on her right and she pulled up just a little before the front gate. There it was, number 22, still with the original wooden number plate, black on white. The garden was neat and orderly with just enough flowers to credit it as such but with an obvious disregard to any real appreciation of plants. She stared at the white painted front door. It had always been a dull green. There was an alabaster obelisk in the front window and orange and pink draylons of somebody else’s house and somebody else’s reality. The house was an imposter in the precious world of her memories. Her own lay deep within her but this edifice, plain in front of her eyes was merely a stage copy, a barren lifeless image that surely could be blown away with a simple puff. Elizabeth retreated back to her car and lit another cigarette. She furrowed her brow and bit her bottom lip to stop it trembling. She felt fragile and vulnerable. ‘It’s normal’, her friends had told her, ‘Sometimes you’ll feel up and sometimes down. You’re whole body’s going through a tremendous change, you’ve got to respect that’. She shook her head and pursed her lips. Did it really matter what may or may not be happening to her body? She wanted answers to questions she could barely articulate. There were so many thoughts flying through her mind, if she could only put them together, line them all up and answer them one by one, but they would slip away so from her mental grasp.

Sixteen again. What was it her grandmother had said? Yes, she began to remember the scene.

“Grandma, do you feel any different from when you were my age than you do now?”

What sort of question was that from a teenager with a hopelessly loose grasp of the world to a woman who had lived decades and decades – almost an eternity for a naïve sixteen year old? “No”, her grandmother had replied, “I think I’m fundamentally the same, but sometimes I see myself in the mirror and I ask myself, who is that old woman looking at me?”

But hadn’t she always been that age? Surely, she had been born a grandmother, just as surely as her mother had always had a daughter to look after and she herself had been surrounded by her parents and aunts and uncles? She had her place! That was the way it was supposed to be. Her grandmother had always been old; cosy and rounded with lovely soft white hair but then she had broken the rules and simply died. Where did that leave her, Elizabeth? What had happened in between? Her own mother’s grip of the world was fast receding and Elizabeth was reluctantly awakening to the fact that she would shortly be incapable of living alone. Everything was breaking up and she resented it with a bitterness that gnawed at her inwards. She pulled out a hand mirror from her bag and stared angrily into it. What face was glaring back at her? It was assuredly a young face, not above thirty; pretty, she’d always been pretty, “Quite the English rose!”, how many times her aunts had cooed. “Quite the English rose, a lovely fresh English rose”. She threw the mirror onto the floor and, as it hit the clutch pedal it broke in two. “English rose”, she murmured, “More like a bloody English thistle! Christ, what a shambles, what a mess! I’m fifty bloody two. How the hell am I all that?” She switched on the ignition and pulled away without checking the rear mirror. A large Porsche just avoided clipping the bumper. “Stupid old cow!” screamed out an angry voice from the open window, “Try getting a bloody license!” Elizabeth clenched her teeth, raised her chin slightly and steadily headed down the road. By this time, tears of anger were streaming down her cheeks. She drove straight out at the T junction and was greeted with a siren of car horns and flashing headlights. ‘Tesco’s Megastore’ loomed on the right and, drawn by a desperate need for something she could feel in control of, she turned a little too quickly into the car park. A shiny white Mustang braked abruptly. “You’re in a bit of a hurry” drawled a carefully cultivated husky voice from the open window, “Liz, this is Marco” and the woman leaned conspiratorially towards her, “Quite a dish, eh?”

Elizabeth glanced hesitatingly across to a dark Brazilian looking youth by the side of her friend. He couldn’t have been more than twenty three or four. He gave her a confident grin and she caught the flash of his white teeth.

“Not really the place for chatting, is it, Liz? Give me a ring some time. We must have one of our coffees” – and in a moment she and her latest indulgence were gone.

There was a free space close to the entrance and she gratefully slipped into it. The engine off, all quiet and still. Her breathing slowly returned to normal and she sat staring fixedly in front of her, registering with a calm neutrality the various shoppers either leaving their cars to visit the consumer cave of delights or returning with ridiculously over laden trolleys. The scene with the Mustang crept into her thoughts. “What did Carol Slayter think she was doing, gavotting around with a mere boy? Did she think she could stay young forever? Push here, tuck there – and her clothes! – on a sixteen year old, fair enough but – oh, how absurd it all was!”

Was she jealous? Yes, perhaps she was a little, but it wasn’t fair. What right had fifty something Carol got to go flaunting taught young male flesh in the faces of her flabby, wrinkling up friends? At what point do you leave the ship and say, enough is enough? Step aside for the others to take the helm – step aside and do what? – fade away in the pastel shades of her suburban home? Submit graciously to a stuck-in-the-mud, dreary respectability? She thought of her little home with its neat front garden, but even that sanctuary was cracking at the edges. Until her grandmother had died, she had relished collecting all manner of decorative items and pieces of furniture. Her home had been a refuge for all discarded and unwanted relics that she had lovingly acquired in her weekend forays to the bric-a brac shops. She had felt she could breathe life again into the love-less and rejected and so onwards to an unspoken eternity. Clearing the house after her grandmother’s death, she had salvaged enumerate beloved objects and gathered them tenderly to her benevolent bosom. But there they had undergone a curious transformation. She had stared in dismay at these forlorn orphans sitting incongruously on her shelves and had slowly awoken to the perception of a monstrous betrayal. They were simply objects; beautiful or not in their own right but quite dull and lifeless; neutral pieces of glass or china as dead and devoid of the unspoken love and security they had previously conveyed as any other similar item to be found. Elizabeth sensed her heart was beating faster and as she did do, an indescribable panic rose up from her toes and crept into her chest, her throat, her head. She felt unable to breathe and, fumbling helplessly for the handle, staggered out of the car and leaned against the door, her left hand clasping her throat. Was it a heart attack, a stroke? She had an acute vision of herself lying straddled on the tarmac and dying, yes, dying, snatched away from life, breathing her last with the smell of tar and petrol in her nostrils and simply snuffing out. Oh, how she wanted to live, to be present in the world, a part of it, however confused or distorted! With no thought to locking the car, she falteringly headed towards the supermarket entrance and, once within the marble floored interior with its artificial palms and wooden slatted seats for the comfort of the elderly, felt an unsteady but rising sense of relief. Almost immediately she sat on one of the benches and closed her eyes and, with immense effort, tried to clear her mind.

“Do you mind if I sit here?” a mellow well spoken voice enquired.

Elizabeth slowly raised her head and saw an elderly but elegant woman standing in front of her.

“No, not at all” she stammered and the neatly dressed woman lowered

herself onto the bench at a reasonable but not unsociable distance from herself.

“How these shops tire me” she began. “Such enormous places to get round, though full of everything a body could possibly need but, it does take an age to get from A to B and then, of course, if you forget something…” She broke off suddenly, “But forgive me, my dear. You don’t look quite well. Is there anything the matter?”

The simple fact of having this pleasant woman freely talking to her had restored Elizabeth to a measured sense of equilibrium.

“No, not really” she replied. “Just a little tired myself, you know”.

The woman eyed her keenly for a moment and then, with a knowing gleam in her eye, leaned across and patted her leg.

“I’m just about to have a cup of tea over there, why don’t you come too? You look as though you could do with one”.

The stranger stood up. She had such a warm sparkle in her eyes that Elizabeth rose steadily to join her and the two of them walked across to the refreshment area. How wonderful! How simple! A woman she had never met before had freely and spontaneously invited her to share a pot of tea and they were talking like old friends. What easy charm the woman had and how direct and uncomplicated her conversation. Eventually, Elizabeth ventured a more intimate question,

“What sort of work did you use to do?”

As she said it, she felt she may have overstepped the nebulous boundries of untried friendship but the woman responded at once,

“That depends upon when. Let me see now. I began life as a history teacher in a grammar school, but that was before I was married. Are you married my dear?”

“Err, no” replied Elizabeth.

“Well, marriage brought me the life of a diplomat’s wife. I think we lived in at least six countries in the first ten years”.

“Do you have any children?” Elizabeth could hardly believe the forwardness of her own questions.

“Just the one” came the reply, but I lost him to typhoid fever. Life has so many pages. You turn one and you start another. I never go back to the beginning, you know. Memories are delightful – well, the good ones at any rate – but they merely serve to fortify and make sense of the present – don’t you agree, my dear?”

“No, I mean, yes, I don’t know” Elizabeth stared down at her empty cup and the woman immediately refilled it.

“I did actually go back to teaching when we finally settled here and when my husband died I was very grateful for the stimulus and vibrancy of my teaching world but, of course, I had to retire”.

Elizabeth glanced up and, behind the delicately lined face looking into her own she became conscious of an intangible beauty, an aura of calm assurance and tranquility.

“And what do you do now?” she asked.

“Heavens, all manner of things! I never seem to have enough time, that’s my problem. There are so many things that I want to get involved in. If I could only dispense with the eight hours nightly repose, I would, but, there we have it. Ever onwards! That’s my motto. This world is so buzzing with things to learn and comprehend and then re-learn all over again. It changes so and we change along with it. You know what I’ve always believed? A person remains young just as long as they are not prisoners of the past. What a wonderful never ending adventure it all is!”

Elizabeth was beginning to like her new friend more and more.

“Listen”, she continued. “I’m going straight from here to the university. There’s a speaker coming to talk about how Afghan nomads deal with old age and infirmity – I’m sure it’ll be very interesting. Why don’t you come along too?”

“You know” said Elizabeth gratefully, a shy smile creeping across her face, “I think I might just do that, but first let me pop into the chemist’s. I need to buy a new pocket mirror for my handbag”.

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