Memories are made of this

Seven years later and how could she have done it?
It must have been around 8 a.m. Esther, with her rough scratchy pajamas rubbing against her stale skin and breathless, fearful, and angry, muttered, “He’s gone and done it again. Why can’t he leave the drink alone?” She knew so about his addiction, rather than the spirit that inhabited his body.
It would have been easy to make presumptions why he had called. With his slurred voice reverberating in her ears she dashed, resentful and upset, wondering what might be wrong now.
A nightshift Weetabix worker called from across the street, “Morning Esther, you’re on the move early, is everything ok?”
What was she to say, and where should she begin? And so she simply replied, “Everything’s fine thank you!” With the neighbor she had known from childhood disappearing out of her view behind her stepfather’s tall overgrown privet hedge, she knocked firmly on Joe’s front door.
No answer. She knocked a little louder. No reply or response, so she headed for his back door and fortunately discovered it unlocked, which was either an oversight on his part, or more likely as a result of the beer that clung to the kitchen as well as his sitting room and the stairs she defiantly climbed. Where had her compassion gone? She wondered, as she pushed his bedroom door open for the hundredth time. There seemed no connection between him and her as she stood there looking across and down at him in the single bed, where only years since her mum’s frail sad body had lain and all but disintegrated, before being lovingly cared for at their local hospice. She walked across the fraying mat and spent cigarettes and swan matches and looked down at this thin frail and pinched man’s face and scrunched grey hair.
Kneeling now closer to make sense of the disjointed words, she heard him mutter first her own telephone number and name and then the familiar smell of drink so stale and sickly sweet on his breath. He was drunk yet again, so she was furious and without compassion, yet again, as she turned and left him lying there, but beneath that anger lay something she could never understand; it wasn’t and couldn’t ever be love, but as she closed the door out into the street there was something that didn’t feel right this time.
Down the narrow street, now slowly coming to life with kids in their red and white striped mc-claren buggies being hurriedly pushed to the nearby town nursery, and their bigger sisters and brothers to infant’s school. She should be doing all that but, ‘I hate him, I hate him,’ were the words that spun in her mind quietly as she smiled and spoke to those she past as she walked. Beneath these words lay another layer of more compassionate thoughts, what if he was ill, it seemed like a stroke, how he lay there, how his head flopped, something just wasn’t right.
So about an hour later his doctor, who she summoned, walked through the bedroom door. He was young, kind and puzzled it seemed.
“You know he has had a stroke!”
She didn’t reply, nor did she feel.
“I will call an ambulance right away. Can you wait here for that Esther?”
She wanted to run like hell, but instead she just answered, “Yes, of course Dr James.”
The ambulance duly summoned, he was out of the door. Then another struggle began in her head. This was as far as she could go. It wasn’t that she didn’t try to sit beside his bed, it was that she couldn’t fish down to find any humanity or love there within her own soul, nor could she go on pretending and sitting beside his bed to check on his breath, so she left him laying there alone in his bed, neither knowing nor feeling.
She sat for an eternity in his living room, now without the ticking Braille clock and the dog harness and lead, long since used for anything, lying on the back of the shelf. At times guilt forced her halfway up the stairs to listen, hearing nothing, she returned back to the loneliness of the room and just thought, wondered and agonized. It was the hammering of the ambulance man on the red front door and the blue flashing light that flickered through the nets and the thin long sitting room curtains that drew her back away from the then to the now.
They weren’t there with him in that room at the back of the house many minutes before she heard their heavy feet running down. “He’s been gone a while now. How long has he been dead?” She was numb and in shock, so unable to answer or say to them just why she hadn’t been able to sit by his bed. If anybody expected to see tears, then they couldn’t ever be seen, didn’t anyone know how difficult taking care of him had been when she would have sooner had turned her back and left.
“I’m not going back,” she murmured, as she went shaking through the back door where his body now was.
Was she cold-blooded? He was nothing to do with her, yet he was alone and vulnerable, and that was why she had remained all those years and it had nothing to do with love, but perhaps pity with a touch of puzzlement.
She felt stunned, for how could he go so quietly, and with such little fuss, in like a lion, and out like a lamb, and she unable or unwilling to shed one tear as she stood in his yesterday’s ashes and looked across at the rose bush they had planted for their mum so many seasons before there in that back garden where she had sat quietly whenever she could. Then she thought, wasn’t that where her brother from America who she really hardly ever knew sat. No longer would she sit in his chair in the front room with his ash tray over flowing onto the hearth, and his alcohol sticking to every fibre in their tormented house.

What now could tomorrrow begin?