The Five Brothers

The Five Brothers
Part 1- Faversham-1974

“Granddad!” Tobacco smoke rose from the old pipe between Herbie’s aged lips as he glanced at his plain featured grand-daughter who sat beside him on the floor of his fifties tainted living room. “I’m hungry!” She whimpered. Herbie sighed as he exhaled the thick smoke which surrounded him like a protective shield as the seven year old whinged and rubbed her tummy dramatically as her eyes screwed together tightly, physically showing him her desperation for food.
“Well go get an egg from the chicken shed and boil it then!” Herbie shouted his voice coarse and dry from where the heat of the smoke had scorched his decaying throat.
Clara, Herbie’s little grand-daughter, looked up at her elderly grandfather who she so secretly admired.
He sat uncomfortably in his tartan armchair, his corroded muscles attempting to relax but stiffening as his old bones rested against them awkwardly. His face was crinkled and pale, his health had not been sufficient in the days leading to Clara’s visit and she knew this but this did not stop her treating her grandfather like she would on any normal visit.
“But they’ll peck me!” She exclaimed, matter-of-factly rather than scared. Herbie turned to look at her properly as she fiddled with one of her loose ribbons in her hair, her pigtails unravelling before his own watering eyes. He inhaled deeply, as if to say something serious as he leant nearer to his youngest granddaughter’s freckled face. She inhaled deeply and sat up straight, like she would in school as a teacher came to berate her for slouching.
“If they peck you, I’ll peck them.” Clara giggled amused. Herbie smiled as he rocked back into his former position, aching as his bones protested and moaned inside of him. Clara stood groaning as she shook her foot out towards her grandfather, as it ached from where the blood flow had be restricted. She regained her balance and shook the pretend dust from her plain blue dress which didn’t suit her and was too loose around her thin belly.
Herbie observed her as she scowled at her shoes like they were the enemy. She was a sprightly young thin, feisty and witty but she was so slim and bony that any bully in their right mind would think that she was an easy target at sight but her fiery tongue and wicked temper were no match for any coward that would set loose on her in the school playground, she could tease them as easily as they teased her.
She sighed and looked at Herbie again, not noticing that he was making a study of her lanky form.
“You promise to peck ‘em.” Herbie smirked, as though he were a young man again.
“Only if they peck you first.” Clara shuffled backwards as she corrected her wonky prescribed glasses on her nose. Her green eyes were out of proportion when she wore them but her mother insisted that Herbie scold her whenever she took them off, and Herbie had made a promise to do so but he generally preferred her without them, she looked too much like his brother with them on.
She turned from the living room and exited the house through the backdoor in the small panty next to the kitchen, leaving the door open and sending a chill through the house. Herbie shivered and automatically rubbed his arms with his feeble hands. He caught sight of them and stopped. The veins were black from the high doses of morphine he had been taking so much of.
It had taken him many weeks to get used to the idea that he was dying, he was old and infirm in his own house and it was not exactly displaced knowledge but the scariest thought of it dying that was that it was already natural to him. Not in the sense that he knew that everyone was dying from the moment they exit the womb to the time that they actually depart the earth, but the knowledge that he had already faced up to death. He had met grim reaper, they had shook each other’s skeletal hands many times and they had earned each other’s respect. Thinking of death was like thinking of an old friend for Herbie, a lost friend.
Although last time he had met the Angel of Death it had not been to offer his soul to the scythe carrying, cloaked figure but to offer another chance, one too many chances in Herbie’s mind. If the Angel had not given him one then maybe the bereavement and the suffering that had amounted over the time that Herbie had grown infirm, would have been stopped to.
Herbie trembled at the memory that he had so fondly repressed and placed his hands under the knitted blanket on his lap. The veins and the wrinkles were like rings on a tree trunk that taunted him with his age, his own skin was a surface with a tale on, like a piece of parchment or a Stone Age rock.
Herbie rested his head forcefully on the back of his armchair and, whilst quivering, placed the still burning pipe on the small table that sat next to him and held the unread, ink smudged newspaper from the day before and tried to ignore the electric lamp that stood above him which hissed and whistled whenever it was turned on, the dusty surface made it obvious that that was not often.
The stomping of wellington boots made it clear that Clara had returned from her adventure to the end of the garden to the chicken coop that Herbie had tenderly built when his eldest daughter was in swaddling clothes. She slammed the door and the reverberating sound echoed the feeling of anger. She tramped through the pantry into the tiled kitchen floor where she cautiously removed her muddied wellingtons and dropped them heavily by the door. Herbie could just make out the colour of pale blue when he pushed his head around the curve of his chair.
Exhaling loudly, she made her dramatic entrance into the living room. Herbie twisted his aching shoulders to perceive her and what he saw gave him a great shocked.
She stood before him, shoulder’s raise in angst and lips pursed in annoyance with little chicken feathers and an array of different coloured straw in her hair, her ribbon caught on her dress and her hands muddily cupping a bald beige egg for Herbie to see. He chuckled under his breath and exhaled amusedly as she huffed at him.
“Don’t laugh at me!” Her shrill little voice yelled exasperatedly. Herbie shook his head in apology and raised the one hand that rested upon his blanket in a position of cease fire.
“I’m sorry, Clara. I shouldn’t laugh.” His shoulders shook as he giggled again. She placed one hand on his hip and let the other hang limply by her side with the egg still lightly clasped in it. “No seriously, I’m sorry. Don’t get stroppy with me now, young lady.” She scoffed and placed the egg on the sideboard near to the door as she crossed her arms infuriately.
“I’m not stroppy!”