Horizons 4 Anthology: winning stories from Page and Blackmore National Short Story Competition.
The spirit slips out of the mouth with a soft sigh. The folds and wrinkles on the old face bear testament to her long journey through life. Nurses whisper. The family gathers: two daughters cry while grandchildren hover helplessly on the hem of domestic tragedy.
The breathing is laboured but still there is that miracle of life.
“I’ve come in time, I’m so glad,” the younger daughter says as she rushes into the ward and stretches out her hand. The late afternoon sun glints on a curiously-wrought silver bracelet on her arm. She takes hold of the worn fingers and squeezes but they lie inert in her grip. So little is left; a few clothes, a few papers. The daughters look through the old black and white photographs of their mother when she was young and pretty, smiling in strange locations.
“Where do you think this was taken?”
“Look, she’s kept all our reports, all our certificates - even the one you got for skipping! Funny, dear old thing.”
Time spirals back seven years. Mists gradually but inexorably cloud the consciousness. The body is only a machine after all and the parts have developed faults. Faces swim into focus, sometimes bringing a glad stab of recognition but later there is only a tug at vanishing memory.
“You have a brain tumour,” she is told.
She nods and says to herself, “Ah, so this is how the end will be.” She has nursed enough to know how it will unfold; the light gradually fading before the very slow extinguishing of the last, faint spark. No merciful bang then, but a whimper. “Well,” she thinks, “there’s no point in worrying about what can’t be helped.”
A funeral. She is brave but he has gone, her companion of thirty-six years. There were many good times, she thinks to herself. Remember the laughter and forget the fears that had held him back. In the last years he had worried about becoming blind, becoming wheelchair bound.
“What will you do then?” he asked. “You will not be able to manage.”
“We’ll worry about that when the time comes. Besides, it may never happen for who knows how our end will be.”
He died while digging the garden on a summer’s day.
New Zealand is ringed with hills of green. Bright shoots of hope flourish in the earth. The daughters give her grandchildren and these are moments of perfect happiness. Blue seas wash at this shore of new life before ebbing back thousands of miles, dropping away thousands of feet to where the great flat plains of central Africa. Here there is no hope as the country tears itself apart in great bloodied wrenches. Bombs do not rain down from the skies as they did before but instead explode underfoot. It is a different sort of war but still the boys bleed so much, suffer so much. She is clear in her mind, quite resolved as she raises her head from the window pane which she has pressed against to think. Though she has loved this land, it is time to leave.
“We must save our daughters, keep them safe. We need to start a new life somewhere else”
“That’s impossible. How will we find a new home? How will we find the money to live? What if we cannot find a place to live?”
“We’ll worry about that all that when the time comes.”
It’s a happy life, modest but she has everything she has ever wanted. Her world is bathed in sunlight. The two girls come home with certificates. “Look! Third place in the skipping race.”
“How wonderful! Aren’t you clever!” The certificate is filed away that very evening while they practice their piano. He too is happy and, fearing this happiness, clings tighter to her calm.
“What if you should die before me? I couldn’t bear it.”
Two babies are born. Can one cling to these moments of perfect happiness? She looks down and vows to give them everything, everything they can possibly want. He is proud but worried. Can he be a good father?
It is their wedding day. “Will I live happily ever after?” she wonders and then laughs at herself for there is no such thing as perfect happiness, she knows that. Two lamps and two irons are the only wedding presents. They laugh and laugh in their empty new home. “Two of everything – aren’t we lucky!”
Cape to Cairo, what a lark. The war is over and peace, like a silken sheet, envelopes their lives. She is ready for adventures and there is that fellow she met in Italy, living in Bulawayo.
“Do you remember me?” she writes.
He is as she remembers him. Tall, physically strong and with the anxious man’s gift of humour. He is a good man and makes her laugh. She has never laughed as much as she has with him.
“I would ask you to marry me but I have nothing to offer. I’m afraid I won’t be able to provide for you.”
“You have yourself. That is enough.”
Italy is ravaged, ripped apart. But still there is cheap wine and love stolen in off-duty hours. The nurse and the soldier bump down battered roads to villages clinging to cliffs above the impossible blue of the Mediterranean. They laugh and swim and play then lie side-by-side on the hot sand; hands clasped, eyes closed. He has borrowed a camera and they take photos.
“If it were not for the war I would ask you to marry me.”
“Ask me when it is over.”
Who knew men could bleed so much, suffer so much? In stifling army tents baked in the yellow of the African desert lives slip away every minute, staining the sand. No matter how hard she works, there are always more of them. Even in her dreams she sees their faces. She cannot save them, cannot keep them safe. Yet she is calm and brings them a peace of sorts when they cry out in fear.
“What if I should lose my leg?”
“What if my wife won’t want me now I’m blind?”
“Cross that bridge when you come to it.”
There are also moments of happiness. Everything is so gloriously dry. Even the air crackles and in a market she finds a curiously-wrought silver bracelet.
“Look up,” cries the young sergeant who is with her. She glances up from the stall and he captures her smile in that moment. It is the last photograph he ever takes. The bracelet is his gift.
On the roof of the hospital they stand and watch fire rain down on the city all around them. There are no air-raid shelters for those with patients. Fear poisons the air like mustard gas.
“What if a bomb should fall upon us?”
The matron’s face is crumpled with fatigue for she not only sees these bombs but in her memories, trenches and barbed wire. She is filled with hopelessness but her reply is steady. “We’ll worry about that when it happens.”
The young nurse overhears and strangely this makes perfect sense to her.
Poverty breeds resilience but her dreams - such fragile green shoots - are almost swamped by these hills of coal-dust that ring the Welsh village. Her father labours not in the sun but in the dark womb of the earth and her world is dank and shaded in blacks and greys. She presses her forehead to the cold window pane, looking out at the rain which never seems to cease.
“One day I will escape all this,” she vows. “I will go to the far ends of the world away from here.”
“Look! I’ve come first in reading!”
“Lovely, dear.” The mother glances down at the certificate but the little ones are fighting, the copper is boiling over and dinner has yet to be started. There is no time to look properly. “Lovely,” she repeats turning back to the life she cannot escape.
The little girl goes to her best friend’s party. Marie has no brothers and sisters. She has a bow in her hair and the prettiest dress in the world. Her presents are heaped up there’s a piano in the corner. It seems that Marie has everything, everything she could possibly want.
The mother lies in the small double bed of the two-up, two-down home. Her hair is plastered to her forehead and she is smiling. This is her sixth birth with two more still ahead of her but for now this is a moment of perfect happiness. She reaches out and takes the tiny hand. The minute fingers close about her thumb. Wrinkles and creases on that baby face are testament to the long journey she’s taken into life. The mother smiles.
“We will call her Muriel.”
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