Slate Hill

Grainger watches from the soggy moor, the old cottage around me crumbling and no real shelter from the oppressive sleet, the incessant damp; let alone from the force of vengeance who stands, silhoutted, observing.  His right shoulder hangs low on his frame, a heavy cosh concealed in his paw no doubt. No escape.

Mother stirs behind me, she has sicked up the soup I fed her those several hours ago. A bird I should sacrifice for my own survival, but to leave would mean to abandon the humanity she gave me when I myself lay helpless in swaddling cloth and she fed me my pap.

Once more I keek across the windowsill. Grainger has not moved and the clouds have lowered, the night comes and with it Mother will witness her baby boy being bludgeoned by a force she can no longer recognise.  The cruelty of her condition is one step ahead of my opponent, already it has robbed her of dignity and independence.  Already it has won.  I feel the loosened flakes of paint beneath my fingers, dust from this house where we have come to sit.

Father worked this moor. His father before him.  Mother always said she wanted to come here at the end, to feel the rains, to hear the gentle burble of the sheep.  To come home.  But we who live such fast paced lives in the towns below have not kept with tradition, nor with care for our heritage and this filth bound hovel is a shell of what it was.  The roof sags.  The fireplace leaks.  The range is rusted and the windows cracked.

The only route for escape is my riddled car, sunk to the hub in mud and moss so damp is the soil.  If I could get mother there we could drive to hospital where she would die in clinical silence, bleached white sheets and strangers' sympathetic uncomprehending smiles.    But Grainger waits without and I cannot overpower him again, not with Mother watching.  Not with this wound I carry.  I wipe her face clean as I may and stroke her wild grey hair, cupping her ear and feeling its chill.  She is staring beyond my hip at the kitchen table.  Once my sister and I would gobble our fill at our places, jumping up again to help Mother with the washing up.  To brush and polish Father’s boots, drying at the fire.  To play snakes and ladders on the scarred oak.  Mother sings a line from a song half-remembered, in her breathy quiet way.

I break the glasses in the sink, quietly in an old teatowel with memories of a seaside town printed on it.  The less attractive the house to him, the quicker he will leave when it is done.  I sweep the hearthstone and the flags upon the floor.  I take the large water bucket and soak my head, my fat back and my wincing arm.  The raw flesh hangs in ropes from where it was caught, bleeding no more.  I kiss mother and her breathing slows; heart in my throat like a ball of hurt I look down and see her eyes frozen ever open, her life withered to nothing. 

Appalled that the time has come, I’m not ready;  I pull back the bolt and expose our little family cottage to the elements.

But Grainger has gone. Nowhere to be seen.  I rush outside, chasing the rapidly clearing clouds and the memory of the man who has brought me to this.  Grainger has gone.

Falling on my mother’s lap, her dainty fingers still clutching at the fringes of the coarse matted blanket about her, I sob. I wail like a newborn as I feel the last of her warmth dissipate.

By bringing me to this nadir, Grainger believes he has won. I will not allow that, this saga will not die so very softly.

As the car hums back into life and drags itself from the sodden hill, I sing a line from a forgotten song. Mother’s song, as I am her son.