Memories are made of this

His dog found her peace....in the most violent of ways!
When the small voice sounded from the kitchen Esther’s mum had said,
“Of course it’s not your fault that you have to take your school photo back again…just say we have some already!”
Andrew looked puzzled as he took his best photo to-date back to school, knowing there were none in the house. In a way it didn’t seem sensible to have pictures that neither his mum nor anyone else could see then, but there was still the future, wasn’t there? True, there were school reports that proclaimed they could all do better. How exited his mum had been when his brother brought back the note that said he had passed his 13-plus and was off to the Technical College in Wellingborough. Study such as that did not enter Esther’s mind as the pages of her life turned one after another. But one thing that was important was photographs from the past when life had been so normal.
“I don’t know where that article or the photos are, sweetheart…it was such a long time ago now…we were, in Harold Hill, I think!”
“I remember now” interrupted Esther as she stood in the kitchen with her mum who was boiling another copper of water for their Sunday night tin bath.
“When we got back from school the reporter was there and a man with a camera. He took photos of all of us running down the Close holding hands, and there was Dad and I think we were all skipping!”
Esther’s mum smiled at that precious memory, still locked in the past, and at her daughter’s imagination.
“I remember”, continued Esther, sitting quietly in the kitchen, “there was another one of little Mark being washed in the sink as well…he wouldn’t like that now, would he? It would be so lovely to have a photo of Dad. Just one would be nice. I sometimes find it hard to remember just what he looked like, as time goes by. Perhaps if we contacted the Daily Mirror then we might just be lucky enough to get a copy”.
“I don’t know, sweetheart…” then she was stopped in her tracks as the voice that stuck to the walls in their house shouted loud above Wilfred Pickles and Mabel on the radio.
“Where’s my f….in’ tea woman? And you, boy, close the door, or were you born in an f…in’ barn?”
That was the end of Esther’s questioning for that day.

He maintained his demand as the leash that guided him moments earlier rained down on the guide dog’s bedraggled body, and he slipped deeper into his own insanity, foaming from his mouth like bubbles from Laura’s washing machine. His brogue shoes sliding and crunching and gripping yesterday’s ashes, now cold and dead and his face mask-like and eyes cold. Suddenly though, and in an instant, she had found her brave moment to escape, running past the outside toilet, left open earlier. She shot unbridled down the dank, dark tunnel as he stood there in the darkness at the end of the tunnel, screaming and deranged.
“Come back, you f...in’ stupid, useless animal! Come back now!”
Only moments later there was an almighty squeal of brakes and she, his slave, bloodied and crushed beneath the front wheels of what turned out to be a director of a shoe factory on his way to an early start at an exhibition in London. Esther and her brothers and mum cried. Surely though, the guide dog people would not train for him, or give him, another guide dog? How could they do something so stupid? People didn’t work and raise funds and dream of helping blind people, to have guide dogs end as that one had, who had worked so hard, unstinting through her years of beatings with never a show of teeth?
Esther’s sadness whirled and dipped and gripped her own insecurities and doubts for, as a child on the threshold of teenage years, who would listen to her? What could any of them do, unable to take care of themselves then, although she often wanted to run, but in which direction should she go and what should she say? With her afraid they might all end up torn apart and away from their mum, who they all loved and felt sad for. Hadn’t they already been through so much? If only someone could help in their sad soiled house.
“Ssh, Esther, you can’t say anything or do anything. Leave him where he is in his bed!”
She had seen him there, and hated him with an intensity which frightened her. Banging with an old walking stick for her mum to fly to his ministry with his usual second mug of black tea, always leaving what she was doing. In their house he always came first, no matter what. In the school bike-shed later that morning, Esther recounted her story to a boy who towered above her and listened, his thin, gangly arms resting on the post of the shed as he relit his cigarette. He seemed to understand, though there was so much she couldn’t say and would have to keep back. How could she say how he who was there to care for them and protect them had damaged them all so much?
The tall gangly boy talked about his dreams and then, how she could do what she wanted with her own life and how somehow, sometime, things could change; but she would have to dream and try if she wanted to get out of the trap, and then he had touched her on the wrist and gone to his carpentry class, putting his fag out beneath the sole of his shoe and later heading home.