A Life Like That

John feels a little better today.  He thinks he can see enough blue in that sky to make a sailor’s underpants: a sure sign that it won’t rain all day today. Like it did yesterday – and more than a week’s worth of drab-days before that. John has forgotten about weekdays, weekends, workdays and worst of all thankfuckitsfridays. They’re all the same, after all. When the washing machine in John’s parents' house had a mangle, Monday was washing day. Tuesday was market day, Wednesday was early closing in the shops. Thursday? Pay-day for Dad. Stay quiet after half-past ten, ears covered. Friday? Fish-and-chips day, what else? Saturday was match day, under the turnstile or lifted over while the ticket- man watched. Grass roots football, community clubs, rumours about the scout who offered lifts home to the young kids the club wasn’t going to sign. And then Sunday. Church, of course. Mum’s beady eye making sure you put the penny in the collection and not back in your sunday-best shorts’ pocket. Dad didn’t go. If the sermon was too long he’d miss the opening of the Working Mens' Club bar. No roast dinners. Too expensive except for lamb at Easter. Mum paid into the Easter and Christmas clubs at the butcher. Always got dressed up for a visit to Geo. Allinson & Sons, Purveyors of Fine Meats. If she wore stockings and make-up it kept the butcher’s thumb off the scales.

Who else remembered a life like that, nowadays? John supposes most of his school-friends are dead. Old age belongs to the wealthy, for the most part. Was it lucky or unlucky to be poor and old? John doesn’t feel lucky. Sometimes he snaps at the attendants, when they don’t get what he said. Not their fault. They don’t speak the same language. No-one does. And it’s not because they’re from Poland or one of the -Nias. No, it’s because they’re from “Now”. John isn’t. He knows it. He’s from “Then”, from when you could say “since Granny caught her tit in the mangle” and people would understand and even laugh.

Just fifty years ago John would have been “at home”, not in one. A ghostly presence in an anti-macassar-ed chair with a back straighter than his own. He’d have slept in it. Meals on trays. Sacrilege, but what could you do? If a person couldn’t walk or talk anything resembling sense. The tiny screen in the corner would reflect a black-and-white world. As unreal as memories. Might well have died in the chair, one night. His dad did, after all.

It wasn’t better, John knows that. It was simpler.