A Sweet Suspended Moment

She opened her eyes. The light from the blinds slanted across the room, throwing prison bar shadows across her face.

For a moment she was content to do nothing. She was between sleep and wakefulness in that happy state where memory did not exist.

But all at once she began to remember and the feeling of dread, which she had carried inside her like a poison foetus for the past three days, once again seized her, radiating outwards from her heart in an sickly wave.

He was dead.

She kicked the covers off her body and sat up on her elbows. The clock on the wall said quarter past ten. She had overslept.

Overslept for what? she thought. Bill was gone and there was really no reason for her to get up. Every weekday morning for the past twenty-eight years she had rose at seven to make him a cup of tea and to cook his breakfast. He was (he’d been she corrected herself) a busy man, selling advertising space for a radio station in the city. It was a job he’d hated, but like most people he’d long ago come to the conclusion that no-one had a job they loved. Tolerated, yes. Sometimes liked, maybe. But loved? Love was for chocolate boxes and racy romance novels. For your family and your wife. But never for your work – work was work.

On weekends the pattern would be reversed and it was Bill who would get up and cook her breakfast. She used to lie, savouring the luxury of having the bed to herself, and move her feet to his side. The bedclothes would still be warm and she would feel his body heat clinging to the sheets like a comforting memory.

Now she was frightened to move. Bill’s side would be cold, and somehow, if she were to feel that cold, it would be the most terrible thing of all. The final, irrefutable proof of his absence.

She sat up fully and swung her legs out of bed. Although it was winter outside, the room was warm, the central heating firing earlier that morning. The carpet felt good beneath her feet, almost sensuous, and she felt a momentary stab of shame that she could derive pleasure from material comfort. Surely she was a bad person to be thinking such thoughts?

The temptation to crawl back into bed was almost overwhelming. Somehow it was easier to face things when she was cocooned under the covers. She could lie on her side and bring her knees up. Pull the sheets over her head and close her eyes. It was just like a womb she realised. A king-sized, orthopaedically sprung womb.

She let out a sigh and got to her feet. Life goes on. It was almost a cliché - the brave widow, trying to keep herself busy, soldiering on – but it was really the only way to deal with things.

She remembered her own mother after her father had died. A week after the funeral she had dropped in to visit and found her in the kitchen. The room was littered with baking trays and half-filled bowls. Wooden spoons stood upright in thick dollops of cake mix. Flour, sugar and the odd, solitary raisin sprinkled the worktops, while the greasy smear of butter glistened on the cupboard doors.

She had stood there and watched her mother, sympathising, thinking she knew what she was going through.

Her mother was looking haggard and the muscles in her forearm stood out, knotted and stark as she gripped the spoon and mixed flour and an egg together.

“Got to keep busy, luv,” she’d said. “There’s a Church fete on Saturday and the vicar’s asked me to do some baking. Best to keep busy.” And she’d nodded and offered to help. Thinking she understood, when she understood nothing.

Well she understood now. It was keep busy or brood; devour herself in a grizzly act of auto-cannibalism.

She put on her dressing gown and slippers and went down the stairs. She went into the kitchen and switched on the kettle. A cup of tea was what she needed – that uniquely British solution to all life’s problems.

The kitchen was scrupulously clean. The worktops were gleaming, the floor polished and shining in the thin morning light. It was another indication of Bill’s absence, she thought. When he’d been alive the kitchen had been the busiest room in the house. Bill had liked to pretend he could cook, although his culinary skills never went beyond pasta and the odd, greasy stir-fry, and he’d inevitably leave the room in disarray. Whenever he’d finished one of his ‘masterpieces’ it would be she who would be left to clean up, a fact that had irked her at the time. She would give anything to have him with her now, making a mess for her to tidy. But the kitchen was neat, almost desolate and she suddenly felt lonely, a lone traveller in a Formica desert.

She made her tea and took a sip. It was tasteless. She got some rags from beneath the sink and took the plastic bucket from the cupboard. She’d busy herself by cleaning the windows she decided. It was a job she’d always hated, but which she now looked forward to – a pathetic penance, atonement for still being alive.

She started with the kitchen window, looking out into the back garden as she soaped the pane.

Winter was coming to an end and the grey sky was mottled, the odd ray of washed-out sunlight lancing through the clouds. The sunlight was far from warm, but it was enough to melt the snow that had fallen the week before last. Now only a few patches remained on the grass, the once virginal whiteness corrupted by the brown smear of mud.

She rinsed the window pane and buffed it to a shine. She poured the dirty water down the sink and refilled the bucket. She’d do the living room window next.

The curtains were closed and she placed the bucket carefully on the coffee table while she opened the sash. When she turned around she saw Bill’s slippers, lying by his seat in front of the television and for a second she thought she would start crying again. But somehow she managed to control herself and picked up the bucket and took it to the window.

She began soaping the window pane, putting a vigour into the task which she did not feel. What was it they used to say in the concentration camps? Work will set you free? Perhaps there was something in that, she thought.

It wasn’t until she began to rinse that she looked through the glass to the scene beyond. Immediately she stopped what she was doing, dropping the cloth into the bucket with a splash.

Here, in the front garden, the snow was also melting. The week before it had fallen over a foot deep, obscuring the neatly turned flower borders and half covering the picket fence. The morning after the worst of the drifts, Bill had gone outside. It was a Saturday and as she lay in bed her husband had been busy. She had awaked to a thump on the bedroom window and had opened her eyes, thinking she had imagined the sound.

After a few seconds there was another thump, and she had got up and went to see what was happening.

The world outside had turned into an artic landscape. Icicles hung from the nearby lampposts and the cars parked in the street wore heavy blankets of pristine snow. Below, in her garden, Bill looked up and waved, throwing a snowball. He was such a big kid, she thought. He had built a snowman. A huge, lop-sided monstrosity wearing one of Bill’s baseball caps and sporting a wide, cock-eyed grin made from pebbles.

She had laughed at the time, but wasn’t laughing now. The snowman was still there. While everything around it was in a state of decay, disappearing with the passing of the season, it alone was unchanged. It still wore that cock-eyed gin, not so much as a single pebble fallen from its mouth. What had been charming a few days ago now seemed sinister and heart breaking.
What sort of a world was it when something so transitory could outlive its maker? It was a joke. A sick, perverted joke.

And now she <i>was</i> crying. She had thought she was doing so well, but it just went to show you, she thought. There’s always something around the corner waiting to ambush you, some memory, or unexpected memento.

She shut the curtains and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. Turning around she went back up the stairs and into the bedroom, climbing under the covers that she had left not so long ago.

As she closed her eyes she prayed. Prayed for that sweet suspended moment, after sleep but before wakefulness, when the memories didn’t come.


The End.