Fran Macilvey

Short Story – Mum – Part Three

Companionably, the two women worked together, Audrey staying by the wardrobe and Pamela opening the top drawer of the bedside chest. That way, they could each be together, but not so close that they fought for space. At first they gathered and sorted gently, carefully considering each item and then gradually picking up speed, so that before long, six large bags had been filled with an assortment of personal items no-one would want: old stockings and tights, underwear and tops. Lipsticks and eyeliner scooped out of the drawers went in with bits of lavender sachets, cheque stubs, old biros and scraps of paper. Gladly, Audrey would slip open a new sack and fill it with outdated shoes and worn-out boots, baggy trouser suits and warm, shabby tops that might have come from Damart circa 1975.

“It feels a bit too private, doesn’t it? Panty liners and brassieres are not really meant to be seen by anyone else, are they?” Pamela exclaimed, her cheeks pink with embarrassment. Her mother just nodded, adding, “But then, you never know when you are going to die, do you?” and before she could stop herself, she started quietly crying, big tears just leaving her eyes and rolling over her cheeks and down her neck. She wiped them away, but more came, and more, until it was too obvious she would have to leave the room and get a hanky. She glanced up, helpless with grief as Pam quietly fetched the box of Kleenex from the kitchen windowsill. “Let’s keep going, shall we?” Audrey croaked, feeling deeply self-conscious.

“Yes Mum, though I would like a cup of tea in a minute.”

Glancing at her wrist, Audrey was surprised that it was almost six o’clock. She had been half expecting to hear a key in the lock, footsteps over the threshold. The silence, unmarked by the usual noisy rituals of occupation, had slipped past her.

“Just a little more, and then I think we could stop for the day?” she agreed, but hesitantly, as if reluctant to break apart their togetherness. “Shall we come back tomorrow?” Audrey felt suddenly unsure. “There is so much still to do.”

“Whatever you like,” Pam answered automatically, then smiled to show that she had all the time in the world. “We’ll call someone to come and take away those bags.”

Suddenly both tired, they gazed around the room, straightened their backs. The roll of plastic sacks had become a couple of flat shadows, while in the hallway and living-room over a dozen carriers were piled up, filled with the remains of a life. The newer things, the unopened packets and extra items of clothes were gathered in another bag, waiting like a dog at Pamela’s heels. Since Naomi had not been shopping for many months and had been practically house bound for over a year, it was light.

Naomi’s bedroom, with its stained furniture, dusty lampshades and furry corners, looked almost exactly as it had when they had started, hours ago. It would take a week or so to tidy away the different lots, organize uplift of the more useful items of furniture and arrange for house clearance. After that, there were readings for the telephone, the gas and electric. The hospital would come and collect its equipment and then, apart from cleaning the place from top to bottom, there was nothing more to do. The Council would take possession at the end of the month, in three weeks’ time.

Naomi had left no money, no assets, nothing except a few bright, well-worn dresses. One of these, a deep turquoise, strapless summer number which had hung quietly on its hangar for twenty-five years, Audrey collected, folded and put carefully to one side.

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Short Story – Mum – Part Two

Naomi, who had fizzed through her years with ferocious elegance, ended up eking out her last days in a small, two-roomed council house with no garden. Pretending to enjoy the cigarettes to which she was so badly addicted, she hardly ate; and as throat cancer took hold, grew and blossomed darkly inside her thin body, Audrey watched in despair. Her sisterly arms could only hold hands and wordlessly pray. Nor was there a cure to whip up from the chemist’s or the whole-food shop; no copper bangle, crystal prayer mat, scented candle or shaman’s feather would fill the void, answer the questions or deal with the thin agony of wasting illness. As she watched, Audrey’s anger kept her moving.

Now, as anger seeped away, tiredness threatened to paralyze Audrey. Though often argumentative, annoying and disagreeable with each other, Naomi and she had been in so many ways the same, understanding and knowledgeable around each other. All that familiarity lost, and where could she find it again?

Bracing her legs beneath her, Audrey stood and very carefully approached the built-in wardrobe with its full length mirrors. Long mirrors are fine when you are young, happy and expansive. Utterly demoralizing when what you see behind you in the reflection are the remains of sorrow, illness and decrepitude. Audrey slid the cupboard door ajar and something nameless whisked past her face. Moths? That would make her job easier. The smell of her sister’s perfume still held in the background, deeper than the dust, the sweat in unwashed woollens and crêpe-like silk jackets. Automatically, before she could stop to think, Audrey started hefting stuff out and throwing it behind her onto the bed. All of it: jackets, skirts, shirts, vests from the shelf, cardigans which had been fashionable decades earlier. The pace quickened until Audrey felt sweat breaking out on her forehead, running down and stinging her eyes. She ploughed on, ignoring the dust and her hair stuck to her cheeks.

“Pamela!” she called, feeling unaccountably invigorated by the mess, “Could you fetch through the roll of black bags, please?” Asking please cost such an effort. “Under the sink, I think…”

It felt good to be clearing a space, even if that meant swapping one mess for another. Her daughter crept in moments later and, with unaccustomed tact, quietly left the black plastic roll on the dressing table. In her other hand she carried a saucer and cup of tea, which clinked as it too, was placed on the table top.

“Thank you, darling.” Audrey smiled with relief. “Come and help, if you like. I could do with a hand, though most of this looks ready for landfill.” Tentatively eyeing the jumbled accumulation, wondering how long it might take to sort, she abruptly decided she hardly cared. “Grab a bag and start chucking.”

***

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Short Story – Mum – part One

***

Mum

“Mum? Are you packing up already?”

“It might be a good idea to make a start.” Audrey, 62, swept a tired gaze over the bedroom where she stood, knee-deep in boxes, bags and piles of slightly mildewed linen.

“It’s what she would have preferred, don’t you think?”

“Yes, no, not really” agreed Pam wearily. In the kitchen across the hall, Audrey’s daughter was rooting about, lighting an ancient kettle which had always boiled on the gas hob. Naomi had insisted on using it, rather than a more modern electric one, even though the once-shiny dome was scratched and dirty with age.

“We should be grateful.” Pam just caught her mother’s words, which ended on a sigh.

“Low maintenance, was she?” Pam called, louder than she intended. Through these flimsy partition walls, sounds travelled easily.

“Yes, I suppose so, though you never knew her in our young days. She was always getting into scrapes.”

“I bet,” Pam agreed, awkwardly changed the subject. “Cup of tea?”

“Yes, why not? The china might as well have an outing.”

“There are biscuits, if you would like one?”

“No thanks!” Audrey made herself sound cheerfully careless, as a wave of nausea swept over her shoulders and up her throat.

“The milk’s off” Pam called.

“Never mind, I like it black just as well.” Fighting back annoyance, Audrey sank wearily down into the nearest chair, an upright Chesterfield that, like most of the items crowding the room, had seen better days. Goodness knows why she felt so tired all of a sudden. She hadn’t done much; nothing today, in fact, except take in the empty silence and the detritus leaning against the grubby walls. Unopened bills cluttered the dressing table. The two large chairs in the room had been pushed back to allow equipment in – a new large bed with memory mattress foam, an assortment of pots and pans for collecting and disposing of body fluids. Bedridden at the end, Naomi’s elegant attempts to maintain her dignity were finally overwhelmed in a tidal wave of weakness, sickness and frailty which mercifully blinded her to the stains on the carpet. The numbing medication she swallowed hid the smell of her own sweet decay.

As if Naomi was coming home, the telephone waited obediently, ringing occasionally. The curtains flapped lazily at the window which Pam had levered wide open in an effort to clear some of the smell. Around the edges of the room and where furniture had rested, the blue carpet kept its original softness, which contrasted oddly with the scuff marks and tea stains around the bed.

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Short Story – Changing Times – Part Six

She considered what to do.

“There are few things that cannot be tackled after a bath.” Her mother’s words startled Edith.

“Mum? Are you there?”

“Of course! Go and get yourself tidied up, girl.”

Pleased to be told, Edith retraced her steps, pausing as she reached the half way mark up the stair, gladly removing her clothes which caught round her neck and made her sweat uncomfortably. Her hair could do with a wash, too. She left the bathroom door ajar as she stripped and helped herself over the sill of the bath by leaning heavily on the sink. The old, faithful taps she gripped and turned had never let her down, never dripped, never wasted a drop.

Grey water was clean enough, un-rationed and plentiful, since Edith took few showers lately, more interested in drinking tea and dreaming. She must stop doing that, she reflected, as she washed away the hardness that clung over her face. Must make the most of what I have: a daughter who loves me – a grandson. What was his name? She flushed with shame to have forgotten that. No need now, to ration her soaps, so she fished the almost empty plastic bottle from the cabinet, filled it with water and used that for a body wash and shampoo. The last time she would smell lavender brought tears to her eyes. She wept and washed, combing through her hair and watching everything swirl down the drain.

 The authorities would take her house, but she wouldn’t have to clear it. They would salvage what they could, recycle building materials they might need, and leave the rest, or powder it for bricks. All she had to do was pack a suitcase while she waited for permission to move. Their reply would not be long in arriving.

They would be happy to have won a victory. She, on the other hand, knew that she was surrendering little. She would see more of her daughter, now that their conflict was ending, and more of her grandson, since she was about to turn respectable. She would have more to eat, and company.

She could listen to Bach and Chopin on her personal radio. Personal programing allowed that, in between the announcements. She would have help. As she wept for her losses, Edith knew that she would manage. She would make her daughter happy again.

***

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Short Story – Changing Times – Part Five

Edith straightened and pulled her hair off her forehead, aware that time was passing so fast. She had come to the garden just minutes ago, and now, look, it was going to be dark soon. Glancing up at the lowering skies, she grimaced, collected her tools and basket and carefully went indoors. Her knees and fingers were stiffening and her feet ached. Good.

She slammed the back door and locked it, twice, checking to see that the window was bolted shut and the light extinguished in the kitchen before retiring. Her supper had been meagre: an end of bread, some mangled meat substitute from a tin and the dregs of tea that she had reheated over the small stove and put into a flask. But she had a few beans, some parsley, a handful or two of blackcurrants and a few dandelion stems for a bit of freshness, and these she ate slowly and with great relish. The fresh scent of blackcurrants evoked the freshness of her youth. Tinted earth lingered on her clothes and in the sweat on her skin.

Late at night, with the curtains drawn and the small desk light for company, she wrote a reply to the authorities: Dear Sirs, thank you for your communication of 5^th instant. I am pleased to accept your kind invitation to move into the Ninth Quarter. Please expect my arrival by the end of this month. Sincerely…Though she had no intention of moving, she felt better having written, addressed and stamped the letter.

She slept over her arm, which, as it slipped off the desk, jolted her awake. The light was flickering, signalling the end of evening power, so she let it go out and waited, summoning the strength to reach her bed. She stiffly inched sideways until the comforting feel of soft, cool covers brushed her legs and she fell, collapsing sideways. Scarcely able to unbutton her cardigan, she shuffled off her slippers and in a flurry of energy which left her exhausted, folded herself beneath the covers.

The following morning, unusually drowsy and unwilling to move, she roused herself late. Had the poison caught her system at last? The dandelion leaves, the beans that might not have boiled for long enough before the gas died? So many things seemed to be finishing, running out. What about me? Edith thought, with unaccustomed self-pity. Could I just run out there? She sat bolt upright in bed, though her head sang with dizziness. A light shone over the corner desk, the curtains had not been drawn, and she was fully dressed, warm in her twisted, buttoned clothes.

Out in the cooler air of the landing, she felt her way gingerly downstairs and through to the back. The key was not in the door. She had locked it, but where was the key? Had she put it down? She felt for it, walked to the window and found it lying there, on the ledge. Strange, she had never done that before…her cup, half-filled with cold water and the small pan, were waiting from the night before. But Edith was not hungry. With an effort she opened the door and pulled it ajar, almost falling over herself to get outside. The air blew damply around her, filled with dripping coolness which she breathed, hungry for refreshment.

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Short Story – Changing Times – Part Four

“I suppose I should write and decline their kind offer…” she muttered crossly.

She sighed, dropped the communiqué onto the carpet and went to the back door to look out into her beloved small garden. A few blackcurrant bushes, an elderberry and a hazel clung on around the boundary fence, while dandelions populated the border. Edith also grew nasturtiums and poppies, which liked the space and seemed to take neglect in their stride. When the shrinking band of her neighbours shook their heads at her pointless pottering, she could smile and say that, well, blackcurrant bushes yielded tasty tea and fruit, the nasturtiums brightened her salads, as did the spring dandelion leaves. Dandelion roots were delicious roasted and used for coffee and the hazel and elderberry bushes were useful… A large tub which Edith kept filled with moist earth, always contained something salad-like. Aidan dragged it indoors when necessary, to stand under the glass porch.

 “It can wait.” She spoke aloud with unusual defiance. “Now I am going to do the garden.”

 A cool start, with pains in the bending and an unusual, breathless huff when she turned her shoulder away from the breeze, just so. Maybe, she hoped, the time was coming when she would be finished with all this. But just in case there would be another winter to live through, she pulled, swept and tidied, clearing away what had grown taller, denser or pricklier in the last few weeks. Weeding didn’t much concern her, but bramble stems pulling at her skirt did, so she pulled on her warped gardening gloves, found her sharp knife and set to work, gradually snipping and pruning back their greedily stretching tendrils, but leaving blossoms and greening buds of fruit. There would be more than just a handful this year, which she would eat fresh, heedless of the scaremongers. Why should she not? It made no difference to her now.

She was utterly free, she realized, to think and do and say what younger, more respectable citizens held back from. If she spoke the truth, people assumed she was rambling, offensive because of an illness of age. Few people now lived as long as she had, despite all the promises of longevity. It would be lovely to see Harold again. Dear Harold, with his balding crown, his crooked spectacles perched on his beaky nose, his wise smile.

Suddenly, an ache leapt up from her heart and blocked her throat. The pain kept her rooted to the spot, her knife held in mid-air. She had been alone for decades. As her scenery changed, gradually the colour leached away. Increasingly, people told her what to do, as she kept her own mind, quietly resisting. She slipped away from them and they had no heart to run after her. But evasiveness was tiresome. What Edith most longed for was friendship from those who understood her, could read the meanings in her face and did not continually try to subvert her. When had disagreeing become an anti-social element?

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Short Story – Changing Times – Part Three

Edith didn’t really care for safety. She was well aware that she had few friends remaining – the sensible ones had all died years ago and she had no dependents, not at her age. On the contrary, everyone else seemed so quietly determined to point out her growing dependency.  She ate only a little food and knew her carbon footprint was very faint. A dozen commendations sat in the drawer of the kitchen table. No, what Edith cherished most, what lay in her deepest thoughts, was freedom to do as she pleased: the choice to lie late in bed, wear what she liked and eat when she wanted, the luxury to suit herself, pottering harmlessly about the house, humming tunelessly.

Domed life was increasingly sophisticated. As was intended, you could almost believe it was the real thing. Weather machines were old hat. There was piped music for walking to and sleeping to, there were birds in the roofs, countless indoor gardens, terraces and spaces for contemplation and rest. There was even an inbuilt roughness to the weather, so that occupiers could feel a shimmer of the old gratitude for creature comforts. However, making a dome was very difficult and exceedingly costly, both in terms of finding suitable materials, and re-populating domed spaces with flowers, trees and shrubs, some undoubtedly filched from nature, against all the Protocols. Computers controlled the Domes’ air conditioning, sky and bad weather.

Edith wondered when it was that technocrats had gained the upper hand, creating snow by machine, sending meteor busters into space, populating food and land banks with synthetic plants. They were building domes everywhere now, and beginning to use compulsion to make people settle inside them. The authorities could be very persuasive. Citizens were expected to be thankful, falling over each other to oblige. Edith remained obdurately old-fashioned, hanging back and praying daily to be quietly ignored. She clung to the old ways of thinking. 

Edith was grateful for all the love implicit in her daughter’s repeated attempts to “rescue” her from a solitary life. There would have been something terribly frightening in a daughter who never came to visit or who only wanted to get her hands on Mum’s carbon account. Edith had heard of other ageing parents with offspring who suddenly flapped around in February like vultures – just before the annual allocation was re-calibrated – hoping to mop up surpluses on their parents’ accounts. Some districts were so poor that being alive on 30^th February was a dangerous business.

One day in August, a letter from the Relocation Ministry landed in her box stating that she “was requested to move into the modern, safer environment of the Ninth Quarter Dome.” The letter was typical, written by some young zealot straight out of the government training school, peppered with spelling mistakes. She was required to report by 1^st October, so that provisions could be allocated for her needs over the Closed Season (November to February). Any failure to comply would result in a scheme of forfeits implemented over a six-month period to secure compliance. After this, Town Hall reserved the right to use other methods.

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Short Story – Changing Times – Part Two

When her husband and only son had still been alive, the small family had kept together here. Before Harold had passed on (they had said it was “cumulative toxicity” a diagnosis she thought surprisingly honest) he had worked all across Europe. He was lucky, since his work carried options to travel on business from Paris to Moscow, and Edith had sometimes gone with him. She cherished vivid, child-like memories of the grand, old government charter planes, equipped to take those able to pay (or who called in favours) away from The Protectorates. Harold, with his responsibility for seeing through the effective administration of fuel coupons, was able to secure occasional holiday flights to Madagascar or Tunis, where the sky had then still shown through, as glimmers of patchy blue and shards of yellow.

That had been in the first flush of her married life, when Edith was a fresh and beautiful wife of twenty-six. Now she had walked so far into her dotage, there was great comfort in knowing that her happy days were safely in her past, for her to recall as she wished. With quiet gleaming pride, she was aware that she was almost entirely beyond the reach of the authorities, simply because she was looking in the face of ninety. An image of herself dressed in a combat outfit, brandishing her broom (the nearest thing she possessed to an “offensive weapon” and therefore liable to be confiscated by the Civilian Authority) came to mind and she chortled, a deep, happy chuckle. Although this broom of hers was so ancient that the bristles were ragged, falling out, and the shaft was pulling away at its moorings, Edith would not be persuaded to part with it for one of the “nice new ones” being offered down at the Exchange. No doubt some covetous busybody was anxious to get their hands on the wonderful wooden handle and top, but they weren’t having it, not yet. In her faded slippers Edith stepped silently about, dancing a small dance of freedom.

Her daughter, with husband and single child, came to visit each weekend, regular as clockwork. Dorothy begged, with her peculiarly earnest expression, all wrinkles and furrowed brow that guaranteed Edith would retort “No!” Poor child, reflected Edith. If she knew how much I hate that face she makes. If she would only smile, I would do anything for her. But Dorothy rarely smiled, and so mother and daughter seldom agreed on anything.

Dorothy and Aidan had been assigned an apartment (if you could call it that… Edith screwed up her face in distaste) in the new Fourth Quarter Dome. Edith suspected that there had been undertakings given to move the old woman out, which had secured a favourable deal for what was, after all, a very ordinary family. They were always arriving on little missions to try and persuade Edith how wonderful, easy, cheap and safe it was to live in a dome. Any dome, they said, as long as she was away from the rain that stung the skin, the clouds that wept ice, the debris collapsing out of the sky – people had died, didn’t she know.

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Leaving Edinburgh under a grey sky and arriving in London for the Book Fair under the same blanket of low cloud, I was reminded of this short story I wrote some years ago.

Changing Times – Part One

Here was soft, muffled silence. Elsewhere, she knew a shining sun hung suspended in a vast, clear sky of shifting blues. She hoped faithfully to see the stars again, The Plough, Andromeda, Great Cygnus. Meanwhile, Earth waited, wrapped in grey, protective cloud beyond which playful starlight hung back out of sight with the myths. Naturally, it would clear, but we had no idea when.

Months ago all the strangeness started: large moths in July that clung on everywhere, silently filling and occupying all the spaces from the ground up, so that playful schemes for summer were overlooked: the mock fishing parties, the state-sponsored harvests, the tree planting jamborees. Since all-in-one pellets had been lab-perfected, people had not worried so much at the soil, had not forced food from it. Communal gardens wilted in the grey heat, un-watered and thoughtlessly trodden over. The earth couldn’t help being old-fashioned.

Many of the old, slow, ways were bypassed in an age when constant technological advances promised the world. There was small patience and no faith whatsoever, in the halls of our technocrats. The white coats clung ferociously to their ascendancy, but for how much longer?

As she patiently got out of bed that morning, Edith puffed a little, straightened and grimaced. The itchy blanket of small aches and pains began their accustomed jig over her joints. Must ease up on the late nights, be a good girl, she thought carelessly. Creeping downstairs in shabby gown and slippers, deliberately fond of those plodding, careful things of her youth which she understood marked her as eccentric, Edith used a fifth of her daily allowance of drinking water to make a pot of tea, partnering the nondescript china with a stained tea cosy. Though plain and small, the small brown piece was her favourite, one of the few pleasing and useful items she had inherited from her mother. The gentle roundness cradled exactly in her hand, like a warm, live thing.

There was a calm slowness in the small rituals of breakfasting. The air breathed balm through her kitchen windows. Many times she had been urged to leave the shabby, peeling house, which was very gently falling apart, sliding peacefully into decay. But Edith would have missed the sweeps of wind under the grey sky, the blowing breeze that welcomed her each morning at the kitchen window. She had remained in this house for over sixty years, had moved back in permanently after her mother had gone over to the other side in 2071, and in the midst of everyday tasks, cooking, cleaning, washing and baking, she would glance up and grin at changes outside, colours that clung on within the seeping seasons which, despite the grey, slipped innocently forward with a faith that Edith always found moving.

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