Memories are made of this

Breaking in two
It was several days later when Esther woke to find her Coventry nana sitting at her dressing table where she tugged a floral stiff hair-brush through her long grey, wiry hairy, before twisting it with her thin fingers. Esther wanted to ask her a question but she did not dare, for though a child of almost eight and three quarters, she was so very aware of the possible response. Eventually though she found the courage.
“How is daddy Nana?” Her Nana moved slowly and sat down on her sunny yellow eider-down that they had been given by nuns a year earlier.
"Your daddy died last night, hinny. He is now in Jesus’ garden!”
Never before had Esther sobbed so painfully and so loud. Where did those tears come from? Could it really be her making such bad noises, and why could she not stop crying into her pillow held close to her face? Things could never be the same again, could they?
Only a day later, Esther watched her nana pull from a large bag her daddies creased pajama’s he had been wearing when she had seen him that last time. Then her Nana did something strange and held them close to her face and took in a deep breath.
“Why are you doing that Nana?” She didn't answer her, but just sat there, rocking back and forth, and whispering her granddad’s name and others she had never heard of before.
“It isn't fair. Not again and so soon after your granddad. How can this be gods will?”
Esther cried too and so wanted her daddy back again, laughing with them. Shortly afterwards, her Nana went home to Coventry, carrying her daddies typewriter after her, hugging them all on their front door step, the step where not so long before the News’s of The photographer flashed his light and then he went away and so did the reporter to try and share their story.
"Is that the one you mean, darling?” Asked the young girl in the flower shop just opposite the hospital where Esther’s daddy had laid dead and cold. “Flowers, ruby red, crimson pink, yellow!”
Esther looked down and across at the vibrant colors in big tin buckets, then to the floor where there were already wreaths with labels on. She turned to her mummy.
"You did promise that we could choose flowers for our daddy didn't you mummy?” she asked. Laura didn't answer her daughter, trapped in her own pain and doubts and fears and anger for cruel injustices and a battle now seemingly lost. The man who had held her up now had gone, suddenly and cruelly, taking his promises and his assurances and defiance against a doubting world with him. Now with his little lost family having only the state to support them all and for that they knew how lucky they were.
A man was just closing the shop door, grasping a bunch of red roses in his greasy hands. “For my wife's twenty sixth birthday,” he had said brightly to the fidgeting anxious young assistant. Laura touched Esther on her left shoulder.
"Please, darling, pick me a nice bunch of flowers and all that smell nice and we will have them wrapped in a red ribbon!” She thought of what might have been her bouquet on her wedding day, and the battle to get there to. She turned to the young assistant.
“Please will you write: To my darling James, thank you for the sunshine? Till we meet again. Your loving wife Laura! We will all miss you so and love you forever!” Then Esther chose a card with a teddy, and buckets in the corner and the young assistant blinked whilst she took a card from Esther and that was after she had replaced onto the glass counter a card with a white cross and silver thread running through it. Her brothers chose another card with a wheelbarrow in the corner. Just like the one their daddy used to use in the back garden when he had whistled and sang as he hoed, and Beethoven echoed out through the open kitchen window.
“I’m doing my very best writing for daddy...it's a bit wobbly where I sneezed.” So she wrote; to our nice and kind, funny daddy now in Jesus’ garden from Esther, Andrew, and Mark, Timmy and Rex and mummy.
At breakfast the next day, she said with silent tears building like a violent storm behind her eyes.
“I’m not so very hungry mummy. My tummy aches. I can't stop thinking about daddy in the chapel of rest. Why is it called that?”
Her mum Laura stopped there beside the cluttered sink and freshly opened cornflakes packet, as she contemplated on what she should really say and how honest could she really be.
“It’s where people get taken when they are dead and can rest and their families who will always love them can go and pay their respects!” said Laura, as she moved around in a mist of agony and loss, unable to express in words that would mean anything to anyone else. Anyway, didn’t she have to keep strong for their little family, whether James was there or not? Wouldn’t he be saying, “Be strong and I will be there besides you all, no matter what!”
Esther wrinkled her nose and stood one foot on top of the other in the kitchen as her mummy poured orange juice into their plastic mugs and a robin hopped from stone to stone in the back garden, and then settled on the fork handle that her daddy had left there not so very long before.
“What do you mean respect? They are dead. How will they know who goes to see them? Didn’t nana say daddy was in a garden with Jesus? Perhaps we should go there instead!” Esther sadly watched as her beloved mummy, with a strained pale face and red nose, began to balance eggs with lions on one at a time on a desert-spoon with a plop and a splash that tickled her nose into the bubbling water.
And then she turned the electric plate down very slightly and with a flick off a switch she turned off the electric kettle on the shiny work-top, Esther had watched her daddy put in the last Christmas but one. Somehow in those empty seconds Laura regained her composure, only wanting to be one place or maybe nowhere at all.
“It’s difficult, darling, but one day when you are a bigger girl then you will understand what I mean but...” stammering, she turned her face away from Esther and tried to gulp back her tears.
“I want to think about him with us all at the sea-side or playing his accordion or tickling my toes beneath my sheets. I know daddy wouldn't want us to cry now or be scared of him!”
Laura didn’t know what James might really wish at that moment for now he was so sadly simply just dead.
“I think I need to ask you though. Would you like to go and see your daddy lying in the chapel of rest? He will be lying in his coffin and not like the daddy you knew but you mustn’t think you have to go though!”
“If he doesn’t know I am there, then why should I go?” Esther wanted to say then, how very scared she was of death, and about how she strangely shivered when a coffin went past by her and people ceased their usual activities and chattering in their very ordinary streets. Even the nearest shop tills stopped ringing. Children out with their parents stood very still with the youngest not really knowing why. Then an odd silence crept like a dark over-coat encasing them in a bubble away from the distant humming traffic heading towards South End where, no more as a united family, they would ever be able to joyfully return.
"I don't think I do want to see daddy in a coffin. I would rather remember and think of him as he was before he lay in his hospital bed. I want to think about him with us all at the seaside, or playing his accordion, or tickling my toes beneath my sheets. I know daddy wouldn't want us to cry now or be scared of him.”
On the kitchen windowsill there stood three little tubes with their lids now firmly back on.
“See the metal thingy inside,” her father had said to her, and her brothers, only a short time before. He demonstrated. “You just blow through it very hard and you will magically get hundreds and hundreds of bubbles.” He was right. Their life up until that moment had been brimming with vibrant and dreamy bubbles. Now the bubbles would disappear and the storms beat down on their once happy and settled home lives.