A New Beginning

‘Ok, you can drop us here,’ Sean said to the taxi driver as he pulled up to the front of his dishevelled new apartment building. He paid the driver and helped his mother out of the car. He took her luggage from the boot and looked with pride at the derelict building which he now called home. Sean proudly extracted a set of keys from the front pocket of his jeans and linked his mother as they walked through a squeaky gate and up to the front door. Sean opened it with the bright and shiny new key he had received from the landlord the previous week when he signed a six-month lease.

‘You’re going to love it!’ Sean said with excitement in his tone as he escorted his mother into a landing with an awful greenish-grey carpet and a smell he couldn’t describe as anything but disgusting. The building was divided into three apartments, one on each level of what was once a house. Sean walked behind his mother as she struggled up the steep stairs to the middle apartment, his apartment. He was so proud to get the opportunity to show his mother how he had made a positive step in his life after his wife left him for his best friend. Sean noticed his mother hugging the railing as she climbed those last few steep steps that were also covered by a filthy greenish-grey carpet.

Finally, after a lot of huffing and puffing, they reached the landing. Sean smiled proudly as he retrieved the keys once more. He noticed his mother mirror his smile through her gasps for breath. ‘You really need to quit those things!’ he chastised her gesticulating towards her bag where her cigarettes lay. Her face quickly changed. She was a stubborn woman, something Sean had inherited.

Without looking, Sean went to put the key in the lock but the door opened spontaneously once he touched it. Sean knew from his many, many hours of watching police shows that this was a bad sign. His stomach felt a jolt, as if it had just had a weight drop into it. His whole demeanour changed. He looked at the doors lock noticing that it had obviously been tampered with. He moved his hand towards his mother indicating for her to stay behind him as he opened the door further with the toe of his boot.

‘Hello!’ Sean bellowed as he entered his new living room that was spotless when he left it to collect his mother from the train station, but now looked as if a tornado had passed through it. He was hardly gone that long! His vision became blurry as he spun looking from one side of the room to the other. He looked behind him and was met with a pale pasty-faced old woman who he always believed to be as strong as an ok. He urged his mother into the hallway once more and returned to the apartment to take a look around it.

As soon as he was satisfied it was empty, he went to bring his mother inside before she keeled over. He was met with a small hunched over old woman who he couldn’t associate with his mother whatsoever. She was quivering holding her handbag tightly to her chest, tears streaming down her face. Sean put his arm around her and led her into the eye of the storm. He picked up one of the knocked over chairs and sat her down. He went toward the kitchenette and retrieved a bottle of water from the yellow linoleum covered floor for her to take a sip of.

Sean hadn’t seen this side to his mother since the day he buried his father. After that he left the country and fled to Australia where he met his lovely wife. She was so lovely in fact that she bled him dry in the divorce and he ended up back in Ireland in this dump.

Once his mother composed herself a bit, Sean dialled 112 for the gardai. As he waited for those lovely boys in blue, he looked around his new place, devastation on his face. He wanted everything to go well for his mother’s visit. He had even gotten flowers that morning, flowers that were now scattered all over the place, their vases smashed into smithereens. He wanted to show her that he was no longer the young man that left her eight years before at a time she had needed him the most. He wanted to be there for her again, to make her realise she had her peanut back.

What Sean’s mother didn’t realise was that he was scared. Seeing his father deteriorate from Huntington’s and realising it to be hereditary frightened him. That was the reason he had moved away from his mother long before he emigrated. That was the reason for the drugs and the drinking. That was the reason he married that poisonous bitch he had to call an ex-wife, and the reason she left him. When Sean started having the early symptoms of the disease, he was in a detox centre a couple of months after his divorce. At first, he thought them to be withdrawals, but then he got tested for the disease. That was the reason her little peanut was home. He wanted to be close to his mammy.

He entered the bedroom, the dresser open and empty, not that he had anything in it in the first place. That was one of the main reasons he wasn’t overly panicking about the burglary, there was nothing he had worth taking. His eyes were drawn to the floor beside the tossed lumpy bed, a picture of his graduation day from Dublin City University.

He picked up the broken frame, brushing away the smashed glass and smiled. His mother entered the bedroom and sat down beside him. Sean was teary eyed as his mother told him how proud both herself and his father were that day, referencing them beaming up at him. That was the same week his father had gotten his diagnosis. That was when everything started going downhill. Sean felt a frail, cold hand rubs his cheek. He leant into his mother’s shoulder and wept. He had never mourned the death of his father. He had just blocked it out with drugs. His mother kissed the top of his head and rubbed his hair soothingly.

The knock on the door brought the pair out of their trance. Sean looked up to see two gardai in his bedroom and was suddenly aware of his surroundings once more. He wiped his eyes and kissed his mother’s cheek and answered all the questions the gardai had for him. They told him that it looked like a straight forward burglary. Sean disagreed, he looked into the open bedroom door and saw it as a new beginning.

picture from pixabay