Posting early today as I will be out most of the day and don't want to make you wait, Dear Reader, until this evening.
A story I wrote for Pudsey Writers and it's tailored to the group; more mature persons attend PW.
At the previous meeting, an exercise was suggested: write about coathooks.
So we did.
Several people antropomorhised their hooks, having them in changing rooms or school cloakrooms talking to each other. Others wrote about the importance of coathooks.
Barry wrote a poem about dying lobsters, but that's just SO Barry.
And I wrote this:
Coathooks
The last of
the boxes had been loaded on the removals van and it had set off across town to
Mae’s new home. Her daughter-in-law
Alison was waiting there for the van, to help organise the unloading and Billy,
Mae’s oldest son and Alison’s husband, was here, helping her get ready to go.
He was currently in the kitchen, making sure all the cupboards were empty.
Mae had
already checked, of course.
She hauled
herself up the stairs – she was leaving the stair carpet, no need for it in a
bungalow – and walked into each of the three bedrooms in turn. This had been Billy’s room. And Eileen had had the little one at the
front.
And this had
been hers and Johnny’s room.
All the
bedrooms were empty now.
She made her
way back down the stairs again and into the front room, looking around. The bay
window was odd without her collection of houseplants on the window ledges,
overlarge without its curtains - she
wanted those for the new house, they’d just fit the dining room.
Was this really
the right thing to do?
Oh, the
house was far too big for her, it was old and draughty, and cost a fortune to
heat. And really, she’d had quite enough
of the stairs!
The new
place was nearer to Billy and Alison, and on a proper bus route. There was a small, manageable garden and a
nice, new kitchen. No stairs anywhere.
But it
wasn’t home, and she didn’t know what Johnny would have said.
It almost
felt like she’d be leaving him behind, with the house. All those memories.
She left the
front room and found herself face-to-face with the line of coat hooks behind
the front door.
Oh, so many
memories in that row of pegs…
When the
children were too little to reach, they had put their coats over the banister
at the foot of the stairs… only hers and Johnny’s coats had been on the hooks,
his flat cap and her headscarf above. As
the family grew taller, so more coats had filled in the row. Eileen’s fitted
wool with the half-belt, Billy’s motorbike jacket… Mae had been so pleased when
it had been replaced with something a little less rebellious, a velvet jacket,
sign of Alison’s calming influence.
But in time,
the coats began to vanish again; Eileen married and moved away, taking her coat
with her. Billy’s and Alison’s followed,
coming back to their place on the hooks for visits once or twice a week. And soon, there were prams parked beneath the
coat rack. And once more, the procession
of coats continued. Baby coats on the
banister, making her smile. Tall
grandchildren, reaching up to the hooks.
But always, at the end of the day, just two occupied hooks, hers and
Johnny’s, headscarf and flat cap, even though they didn’t wear them any
more. Out of fashion, these days,
relegated finally to a cupboard.
And then
there came the awful day when there were too many coats, all of them black, and
when they had gone, only Mae’s remained.
Had five
years gone so quickly? Sometimes she
felt Johnny was still here, in the corner somewhere, or just out of sight
behind her. Would she leave that behind, too, that crumb of comfort?
If only she
knew what she was doing was right.
She heard
the click of the kitchen door closing and knew Billy was on his way
through. She reached up to lift down her
coat…
…and there,
under it, was Johnny’s flat cap.
‘Oh!’ She’d thought it lost, somewhere in a
cupboard; she was sure it hadn’t been there on the hooks yesterday…
That didn’t
matter, what mattered was that it was there now, a sign Johnny was ready to
leave the house, too.
‘Mam?’ Billy’s voice broke in on her thoughts as she
turned the flat cap carefully in her hands.
‘You ready to go?’
Mae breathed
out a long, satisfied sigh. It had been a good house, but the new one would be
better.
‘Yes,’ she
said. ‘I am.’
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