Melancholy

[Saturday 23rd January 1988]

All is frosty. Roof slates, lawns, evergreen fronds and needles. My brother is in the driveway with his yellow Mini, he has scraped the ice off the windscreen and is continually switching on the engine, revving it up and switching it off again. The vociferous gulls and the occasional bus along the (to me still) new route interrupt the peaceful morning. The noise of water travelling through pipes and the tank, the view of the telephone cable stretching between our houses where blackbirds, starlings and thrushes love to perch a while, even sing. The monkey puzzle tree, rising like a great, jagged pillar, the garages: our own, with black-painted doors, the more distant flat-roofed ones belonging to the neighbours two doors down. The hospital beyond, red brick chimney rising above the huddle of box-shaped buildings, the wooded hills of the valley in the distance. The window opposite, from which Annette would call across; the front gate and path; the road, neatly trimmed yellow-leaved hedges. The entrance to the cul-de-sac where my Granddad lived; the swings and the school grounds beyond, churned mud of the playing fields half solid in the chill. Once these marked the boundaries of my existence, stretching to the public baths on the Crieff Road and to the red sandstone of the Sandeman Library (I was never allowed there unaccompanied, though).

[2007]

Squabbling sparrows congregated unseen amongst the lilac twigs waiting to cadge some mouldy crusts (now that the preservatives have been removed, bread does not keep anything like as long as it used to). Folded tea towel beneath her elbows (bruised dark purple in spite of the padding), my Mother leaned on the draining board as she filled in the crossword, Ally Bally’s phone-in quiz blaring in the background, the window open in a vain attempt to conceal her fly smoke and avert the slight flicker of disappointment that registered on our faces (we never challenged her directly). Sometimes she would hastily stub out the evidence in the blue glass ashtray on the sill, which she would then slide behind the pot draped with the spider plant’s prolific fronds. Or else she would shut herself away in the bathroom, knowing that the sound of the lock would make us aware of the urge.

In earlier years I had always dreaded the request: “Would you nick down to Johnny’s for twenty Benson and Hedges?” even though she would sweeten it with a bribe. I loathed the errand, as if the malignant yellow stain of the nicotine would seep through the packet and contaminate my fingers as I laboured up the steep slope from the shop, lungs like lead. Annette and I had long since ceased pacing up and down the bench in the back garden pretending to be prisoners, picking up the butts from the gravel and inhaling deeply on unpolluted air, a fantasy of toughness.

Even the shed has been emptied, the old dog’s bones in the soft earth of the border an invisible token of our former occupancy.

posted by Chameleon @ 12:56 PM
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