Gas Mark Zero

A kitchen should be at least warm, but this one is cold, bone cold, as cold as my name; Chantal. Chantal, it sounds light, like vapour rising from bubbling pots, like the song of a singing
kettle, but it means stone. Stone like the weight of my heart.

The gasman has just left. After all of his rummaging and measuring and sighing and shaking of his head, he has left me worse off than before. He was supposed to be fixing my gas cooker - I didn’t
like the way it kept cutting out and the odd smell that hung in the air.

Turns out there was nothing he could do. The gas has been turned off and my cooker can no longer cook. It bears the banner: 'condemned’. It has never looked so clean, scrubbed whiter than bone.
It looks forlornly at me and I at it. I remembered one of my mother’s sayings for hard times, ’at least things can’t get worse.’

I had thought of that saying on that strange night when my then husband told me he would be leaving and making a new life for himself. The children and I would have to find our own way.

That change to our lives was not, of course, the worst thing to happen, but like a chain reaction it triggered a series of off switches.

Some of it was of my own making.  I wanted to be rid of everything that spoke of the once marriage, gave away the forest of wardrobes that had stood gloomily over us, stripped the house of all but the essentials; and then they began to fail.

The vacuum cleaner gave up the ghost, so I swept the house with a garden broom. The telephone bill could not be paid, so I sent telepathic messages to all and sundry. The backdoor would not shut
properly and I had neither the means nor understanding to mend it. I would listen all night for the sound of an intruder, knowing that things could indeed become worse.

When the children left for school the chill house echoed in its emptiness. At least I had the kitchen and the cooker. 
My children would return home to warming soups, home-made bread; delicious food made from inexpensive ingredients, but which took time to prepare.

We were thin but strong, unbreakable; fuelled from the heart of the kitchen. I would ladle out bowl after bowl of goodness, and the story sharing would begin, continuing in a constant stream
until the children were sleeping, under bedclothes and coats.

The children’s father is not heartless, he sent the gasman after all, but he is like all those who live far away and do not see, he lives his life and does not think too deeply on what he has left behind.

I quell the blue flame of anger that unexpectedly rises. Cut off that line of emotion. I need all of my energy for my children and myself.

The room is growing steadily colder as the little heat it contains leaks out through the backdoor.

I lean against my stone cold cooker, stone against stone and sink to the floor.

This is like year zero. The past eradicated, but no tools left to build the future.

I think again of my mother, I am no longer resentful of the name she gave me, stones are hard to break after all.  I remember the other thing she would say in hard times, ‘everything passes.’

Domestic Detail in the House of Dreams