Memories are made of these

Still searching
Feet onto the platform on Acton station and hands at the bottom of her handbag midst a toilet roll strip. Sticky cough mixture bottle, her Visa card and a cheap return ticket from Bedford, a brush with hair, three months old, that she meant to clean, a pair of knickers, a toothbrush stuck inside, a Take a Break magazine, and an underground map for when she was hopelessly lost. Family history courses yet to run, chocolate wrappers and then the item she had been looking for; her ‘3’ contract mobile phone she had almost got the hang of, although she wished the buttons weren’t quite so small.

“I’ve found it, I’ve found it!” she squealed, as her Aunt Joan met her outside the station, still bursting with excitement at her earlier success with the newspaper archives at Colin dale.
“Hi, that’s good, but get in and close the door, Esther, it’s freezing in here. You’ve had a good day then. Let’s get you home and you can tell me all about it. Don’t forget your seat belt!”
So she had gone through lights on green and amber and stood her ground when a white van driver with his ear clamped to a mobile phone failed to intimidate her as they sat there in a bottle-neck, there seeming to be no way out for either of them; whilst the summer rain splattered her car (with a multitude of gadgets), as a plane flew low in the distance, banking then tilting before dropping like a lead balloon out of sight into Heathrow.

Then they sat together at the zebra crossing on the main road before turning left into her cosmopolitan world. There on the crossing was a blind man with a stick. Joan said he lived quite close-by and seemed confident with what he was doing. They both probably thought of James – Jim to her – and that was the connection, as well as the division, of over forty years, from such different worlds. She wanted to know so much about her dad, like; why was he blind; what school did he go to; what was he like as a person; did he have a sense of humour and was he quirky, like her, and; was his blindness genetic?
“Do you know”, Joan said, as they drove and parked outside her large terraced house, “he would know the number of the buses by the sound of the engines? And he was never phased about the underground and always just with a white stick!”
Then they both got out of the car and headed towards her house and, somehow, everything then felt just right, and this was the continuation of that special friendship that went beyond her being an auntie and she definitely wasn’t what Esther had earlier expected. She seemed to enjoy cooking and said how, maybe, she took after her own lovely mum, as she reached into cupboards below her for a microwave dish and into a fridge concealed behind a cupboard door for her Soya milk. Mum was a master baker – that was something Esther did now know. Yet, how could she know anything else about her Nan? The last time she had seen her was the day after her dad had died, over half a lifetime since; yet, of course, she had thought about her as the years had flown. It was as important that she understood her Aunt Joan, as Joan understood her.
So she talked at length about Joe and how she loved her mum in spite of everything and how she treasured the memories of her dad, and was thankful for those first eight solid years of her life when she knew who she was, as well as her place in the world, just as she knew about love. Not knowing, as she talked, if she was twittering on a bit too much about how bad life was back then, how much she had lost faith; but still she talked and, still too, her auntie listened and nodded and said she understood about loss.
“My Dad – your grandfather, of course – was such a kind, gentle and loving man. I was only a girl in my early teens when he died and I can’t believe where those years have gone”.
All Esther wanted to do was understood and know from where she came and about the roots severed all those years since. Then it didn’t seem appropriate to say why that happened or look for blame. Esther couldn’t forgive Joe nor forget all the cruelty that lay in the back of her mind like a thick undercoat of paint.
Joan gradually relaxed on her comfy chair opposite the open French windows and her natural cottage garden, shooing a grey squirrel off her bird table, and lifting her fork load of pasta and reaching for her glass of white wine, an American crime series playing quietly on the TV in the background. Esther apologized if she didn’t give her much eye contact – sometimes she still failed when uncertain.
At the end of that weekend Joan hugged her as she clambered out of the car back at the mainline station, now knowing so much more about her past, including where her Nan and granddad were buried in Coventry, and so that would be her next planned journey. Esther turned briefly to wave to Joan as her car took the second exit on the little roundabout, then she walked into the station, hoping her underground ticket was still there in the bag beside her brush, knickers and Take a Break magazine, wondering if she would get her connection later at St. Pancras Station.