Ring of roses

Mum cut raspberry jam sandwiches into triangles and put them into Tom's satchel, along with the wooden pencil case grandad had made him, and added a bag of Smith’s ready salted crisps (the ones with the little bag of salt in that you had to shake). She threaded his arms through the straps, licked her hand and smoothed his fringe, and gave him a kiss on the forehead. From the front room window, she watched as he skipped off to the lollipop lady on the corner, where he crossed the road and filtered into the crowd entering the school. She wanted to take him on his first day back but she just didn’t know who she might meet.

Maggie turned and flopped down into the armchair. With the morning sun on the other side of the house, there was a noticeable chill in the early September air. She rubbed her bare arms over and over to remove the goose bumps, yet they remained. Her head tilted back and she sighed with all the strength her lungs could muster. Her mind flitted this way and that, like a fly caught on the wrong side of a window. Her eyes were repeatedly drawn to the telephone, wondering if the school might call because Tom had a stomach ache again. She felt her pulse quicken with the very thought. She then called the dog in from the garden. Startled by the phone ringing, she sprang to her feet.

‘Oh dad, it’s you.’

‘Hi Mags. Just calling to see if Tom got off ok?’

Maggie massaged both temples. She could feel a migraine coming on, just like before, and knew that she couldn’t afford to have one this time. She ended the call at once, took three more paracetamols and lay down on her bed. The curtains were still drawn but the light was strong through the back-bedroom window, half exposing the layers of jeans, socks and shoes which covered the pine floor. She’d meant to do that job before Tom had left, but when he suddenly called out last night yelling and screaming, she’d spent the remainder of the night trying to control his anxiety with ‘The Famous Five’ stories. She turned her head on the pillow and watched the second hand on the clock tick by. It turned as if pulling a heavy weight. At one point, she was convinced it had stopped, only to be awoken by the alarm clock one hour later. She lifted the receiver but the dead tone reply made her sink once more down into the bed, her eyes darting around the room examining the walls and its photos as if she was looking at them for the first time. Rudy then forced her downstairs with his barking from the back yard once more.

He had brought in a black sock from the garden, excitedly slapping it on each side of his face like a bear with a salmon. She eventually retrieved it by swapping it for a ham bone, which he dually snatched from her leaving the sock behind him, his tail wagging with the sheer delight of the trade. Maggie gasped when she realised that this was one of Robert’s. He was forever airing his feet no matter where he was around the house, complaining that they were overheating (even in winter!).  She held it up towards her face examining its finer details hunting for clues - pulling at the fabric, turning it inside out, stretching the elastic, sniffing it.

Robert left them in a fog - choked them on guilt-laden air – making them cough up his promises into cracked glasses now half full. He was meant to stay until their ‘teeth had rotted, hair had turned white, bed socks were the norm’. That was what they agreed once – holidaying before Tom came along, when the wine filled glasses, sunsets filled their view. But how could he go back on his word, how could he do such a thing? She shuffled to the bin and threw the sock inside, smacking the lid with a crash. ‘Bloody dog!’ she thought, ‘I didn’t even want it in the first place.’

Tom would be home soon. Tom would be home remove some of the echoing which was emanating out these walls. He’d be full of the day. He’d bring back his lunchbox, like he always did, with the sandwich crusts left over concealed by his empty crisp bag and the salt sachet unopened. He’d be smiling, be loving, be here.

Rudy was dozing off the ham bone in the front room when Maggie arrived at the window. She bent down and stroked the top of his head a little longer than she would have normally. Searching up the road, she was comforted to see the lollipop lady there waiting patiently for the end of school; the late summer rain was bouncing off her flat hat, the lollipop sign twirling in her hands. It wouldn’t be long now.

Tom pushed away half of his fish finger dinner (his favourite meal) to the sides of his plate. Rudy sensed this and got handed most of the ketchup covered chips, patiently sitting there under the table. Maggie was eating her dinner completely oblivious to the treats being offered on the other side, her head hardly lifting from her plate since she set it down. She was recalling that Robert had hated fish fingers, always saying that they ought to be eating ‘real fish’. Maggie argued that they were real fish and that ‘it says it clear as day on the packet’. But when Tom said he didn’t like real fish, Robert said that was because fish fingers were not real; it was then that she felt that he might just have a point. Not surprisingly, since his departure, fish fingers had become the common staple. Looking over at Tom’s plate, she wondered now if she’d overdone it a little.

Later that night, in bed, Tom reached out and tugged at his mum’s dressing gown, not once but twice, whilst pointing to the book shelf. Maggie put the book down and picked up, ‘Five Together Again’. Tom smiled in acknowledgement, before asking:

‘I won’t have nightmares tonight will I mum?’

‘Course you won’t, love’, she said, smoothing his frown repeatedly with her thumb.

‘Not like last night, mum…Dad was falling again.’

‘There’ll be no falling tonight, Tom. You’ll sleep like a little log, just you see.’

She gently closed the book and lifted the duvet up higher until it was tucked underneath his chin.

‘I tried to catch him, mum.’

Maggie kissed her fingers and planted them firmly on his lips. He smiled back, turned his body to the side and wriggled his head into the pillow.

Later that night, Maggie felt a hollowing in her bedroom, an emptying of something she hadn’t known previously. On her carpet the dresses, trousers, belts and socks layered the room, somehow giving her feet a platform on which to keep going. They would remain for now.

Before dropping off to sleep, as dawn’s blackbirds signalled first light, her last thoughts were of his parting, his sudden abandonment of them. Doors shutting, keys locking, trust being lanced like some cancer. ‘And the way he did it, the way he did it, out of all those ways, out of all those ways. To leave us while still here, in this house while we were out, for us to find you hanging, dangling questions in front of us for eternity.