This is a short fiction I wrote more than 20 years ago. I was labouring through a writing course (which I never finished – hmm I see a life pattern), and ‘Old Tom’ was an assignment. I would so love to write a novel. I keep putting it out there, but nothing emerges from the depths of my expansive inner landscape which begs to be written and told. It may yet arrive. For now, I refresh this old story and enjoy the moments it creates for me.
Whilst searching for document files of old writing I realised that somewhere in the transferring of data to newer, larger hard-drives, I have misplaced things. Perhaps they didn’t make it from that old corrupted drive before it died completely. I also like to think that I am organised with where I put my writing, but in practice it appears to be spread across drives, devices, and online storage in a way I would never have knowingly agreed to – surely. The largest piece I ever wrote is gone. I am not upset, more resigned to the nature of living which sees things born of intense labour disappear when you aren’t looking.
“Take a look at that will you, Tom. Going out dressed like Sunday dinner. Should be a law against it.” Lucy let the lace curtain fall back before anyone spotted her.
Not that they would, she thought sourly. All too wrapped up in their own busy lives to notice one old woman.
“Always coming in and going out, doors banging, children yellin’ and screamin’. Not right, is it Tom?”
With a final ‘harrumph’, Lucy moved from the spotless window, pushing her neighbours’ goings on firmly out of mind. She shuffled into the kitchen to get dinner on. Tom liked his dinner on the table by six o’clock, so he could catch the 6:30 news. Lamb chops and three veg, one white, one yellow, one green, and a little bit of mint sauce. Tom liked mint sauce.
Dinner was quiet. Tom never was one to talk much during meals. Said it was bad for the digestion. “I’ve had a hard day, Luce. Not much in the mood for chatter. A man’s entitled to a little peace and quiet in his own home.”
The television went on at 6:30pm precisely. Tom set every clock in the house according to the man on the phone every Sunday evening. Lucy sighed, there were dishes to do and the shopping list to finish for the morning.
“It’s the first of the month, we’ll be needing paper towel and toothpaste won’t we dear?”
The house remained silent. Not that Lucy expected a response, but it would have been nice.
The neighbours at 24 Maple Street provided a constant source of distraction to Lucy and her routine suffered. On Saturday, so incensed was she by raucous squeals and head splitting screams from a dozen ten or eleven year olds tearing around 24’s backyard all morning, that she clean forgot to rotate the drapes. It was Tom’s opinion that the sun blazed hotter on the eastern side of the house, he insisted that they rotate the living and dining room curtains every two months “so that they bleached even” he said. First time she had forgotten in 23 years, since Tom had first taken an interest in such things, not long after his retirement.
Lying awake late into the night, Lucy tossed and turned, unable to stop fretting. Finally, she slipped quietly out of bed and spent the next hour and a half teetering shakily atop their three-step ladder. Tom never helped. “Not my job,” he had once said.
She slept late next morning, starting awake in a panic at 8 o’clock to have breakfast ready at half past. Seven-thirty breakfast Monday to Friday, eight-thirty on weekends. Sinking heavily into her chair, she eyed her scrambled egg wearily. Lucy had never much cared for scrambled egg, she preferred poached, and she disliked orange marmalade, that was Tom’s favourite not hers. Pushing the plate aside, she sipped at her tea and listened to the silence.
Ever present, deafening, the stillness pressed in around her, a thick woolly blanket, suffocating. She caught herself listening for the trill of childish laughter that often floated through from Number 24. Three children they had. The eldest one, a boy, went to the primary school on Gatton Street, she knew from the uniform. The other two were girls, a toddler with a shock of curly red hair, and the six year old. Lucy searched for a name, Heather - Heather with the large dark blue eyes and soft brown curls. Lucy knew Heather’s name because the child had told it to her herself, and she remembered her eyes were the colour of rain-burdened storm clouds, because they had looked up at her large and moist with tears the day she had come to Lucy’s front door. She had sobbed out an apology for tossing the ball that had gutted Lucy’s nodding violet. The girl’s mother insisted that she make amends.
Lucy found the replacement violet by the back steps where she had deposited it, in a sorry state.
“A bit of water is what you need,” she told the plant firmly. “A little bit of TLC wouldn’t hurt either.”
We could all use a bit of that, she thought glumly.
She was just scrubbing the soil from her fingernails, admiring the violet in its new pot, when the jingle of her door bell made her jump. Visitors? Who would be calling, and on a Sunday? She froze, waiting for another buzz, surely she had misheard.
The bell shrilled again, joined by a frantic pounding.
“Hello?” a boy’s voice called. “Mrs Brittol? Hello! Anyone home?” Thump, thump, thump.
Scowling, Lucy hurried stiffly to answer. Such rude pounding! Snatching back the lace at her front window she recognised the boy from No. 24, hopping about on her front landing. She ought to ignore him, she wasn’t in the habit of opening her front door to impatient, loud youths. But something in his face sent her fingers to the ring of keys beside the door.
Relief relaxed his face momentarily when she drew back the door enough to glare at him. “What is it?” she demanded.
“Please, it’s Mum. I need an ambulance. She fell. She won’t wake up.”
“Ay? What? Then why haven’t you rung for one?”
“We don’t have the phone on.”
Several tense seconds ticked by. Lucy stared hard at the boy, fingered the cool metal of the keys. Tom didn’t hold with dramatics, wasn’t keen on her getting herself all in a state over things. She had weak nerves, he said, went all to pieces in a crisis. Tom was always right, he said so. He would hit the roof.
“Right,” Lucy said firmly, pushing back the door. “In you go, phone’s on the hall stand,” she indicated with a shake of her head. “Call triple zero and get them here quick like. I’ll go see what’s happened.”
She was out the door and down the three steps to the pavement with more speed and vigor than she had mustered in over a decade. With the crochet rug from her lounge over one arm, Lucy marched down the path of No. 24 and straight through the front door. The small voice in the back of her head that had started to keep her company in recent years screeched with shock and dismay. What would old Tom say! What indeed.
A little over one breathless hour later, Lucy stood in her kitchen, arranging cups and fresh baked honey-snap biscuits, the ones Tom liked, on a polished wood tray. Placing the pansy-painted tray on the kitchen table, she tried a small smile for the three dishevelled children wriggling and fidgeting on her teak chairs.
“Dad doesn’t live here now,” Heather offered matter-of-factly, pulling a honey-snap slowly toward her with a pointer finger Lucy felt was a little too thin for a six year old. When Heather broke the biscuit into uneven halves, Lucy watched the fragments fall silently onto her fresh-pressed tablecloth. The girl passed a soon-to-be-sticky portion to her sister's eager hands. “He said his co-worker understood him better than Mum, so he lives with her instead.”
Lucy snorted. Old Tom would never do such a thing. Old Tom would never do a lot of things. Early afternoon light danced with leaf shadow through the tall wide window that Tom hated for its insulation faults. This was her favourite spot in the house. With a deep breath and tired but resolute exhale, Lucy limped to the bureau sat against the wall of her small kitchen. She moved the Bohemia crystal vase of fat chrysanthemums from its place beside a grey marble urn and positioned it carefully in front.
She liked crinkly seersucker tablecloths and cozy piles of fruit, soft jam drop biscuits - and crumbs, soggy crumbs falling from the mouth of a giggling toddler sitting on her brother's lap.
Photo by Maurice DT
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