A Window View
FinsburyParkCarrots
Posts: 12,223
Pink swathes of mist lay curled on the yellow tips of meadow grass. From the window you could a see hazy redcloud evening come down in long shadows on patches of stirring field. In front of the house the stream grew dropwort and rainspectral reeds in sibling clusters, overgrown in play and weighting each other into a murky drowning.
At the window Gemma pressed her knuckles white upon the sill and leant her brow onto the breathwet face of the glass, just as she had done as a child watching her sister and brother at play on the green beyond. Now she was forty-one and the room was bare. Rheum was gnarling her back. Chill came from within an emptying room. It scratched at her to turn from the green plain of memory to grey naked floorboards and stripped walls. And she turned from the past of play in wellies in an October dusk before being called inside for tea, to this day of middle-aged brothers and sisters arriving in hired vans and grouped around with eager spouses eyeing up fridges and pianos. The day was here of oblivious friends of the family helping to lift chests of drawers, cupboards, cumbersome wardbrobes, and fragile old stained wooden writing desks, through the door for the final time. A day when bodies of wood were years of spirit touch to some, and were to others, mute, lifeless lumps to be shifted across a threshold of meaningless space. The day was here of all three together again, those left, for the first time since mother's funeral. Here they were assembled and conducting the inevitable plunder of home before the selling of bricks, mortar, foundations and ghosts.
-There's a mountain of ash in the garden, a male voice spoke (Jim, her brother, in from the kitchen). Gemma didn't look at faces. She fixed her eyes on the wooden knots on the floor.
-Oh, the clothes I didn't take to the charity shop I torched. And the old cot mattress. They couldn't take it. Health and safety reasons. Younger sister Samantha's deep voice, tremulous, trying to match the chill but with too much of outside in it, too much of those meadows.
-Oh yes, that's right, it's to do with the kinds of foams they used in mattresses when you lot were kids, proposed through assured laughter Jim's wife, whose breezy gushings made Gemma look up to her late summer holiday tan and bleached hair, scraped off the head.
Those rings she wore! They were mother's! How could Jim be so weak? Gemma stood at the window, watching a wet vole clamber across the stream reeds, holding them down in the browning brook. She would take nothing, she would say nothing. Let them go through the pack a playing card at a time, those outsiders, confound them all! Her legacy would be the memory of this view: she this side of the glass, watching Samantha, her orange dress muddied by hide and seek in the flooded meadow the year the brook burst banks; she watching Samantha laughing and calling Jim who'd forgotten his hiding post and was making friends with the bad lads over from the railway bridge; she watching Jim giving those rogues his football sticker pack to be in with them before they cycled off jeering.
At the window Gemma pressed her knuckles white upon the sill and leant her brow onto the breathwet face of the glass, just as she had done as a child watching her sister and brother at play on the green beyond. Now she was forty-one and the room was bare. Rheum was gnarling her back. Chill came from within an emptying room. It scratched at her to turn from the green plain of memory to grey naked floorboards and stripped walls. And she turned from the past of play in wellies in an October dusk before being called inside for tea, to this day of middle-aged brothers and sisters arriving in hired vans and grouped around with eager spouses eyeing up fridges and pianos. The day was here of oblivious friends of the family helping to lift chests of drawers, cupboards, cumbersome wardbrobes, and fragile old stained wooden writing desks, through the door for the final time. A day when bodies of wood were years of spirit touch to some, and were to others, mute, lifeless lumps to be shifted across a threshold of meaningless space. The day was here of all three together again, those left, for the first time since mother's funeral. Here they were assembled and conducting the inevitable plunder of home before the selling of bricks, mortar, foundations and ghosts.
-There's a mountain of ash in the garden, a male voice spoke (Jim, her brother, in from the kitchen). Gemma didn't look at faces. She fixed her eyes on the wooden knots on the floor.
-Oh, the clothes I didn't take to the charity shop I torched. And the old cot mattress. They couldn't take it. Health and safety reasons. Younger sister Samantha's deep voice, tremulous, trying to match the chill but with too much of outside in it, too much of those meadows.
-Oh yes, that's right, it's to do with the kinds of foams they used in mattresses when you lot were kids, proposed through assured laughter Jim's wife, whose breezy gushings made Gemma look up to her late summer holiday tan and bleached hair, scraped off the head.
Those rings she wore! They were mother's! How could Jim be so weak? Gemma stood at the window, watching a wet vole clamber across the stream reeds, holding them down in the browning brook. She would take nothing, she would say nothing. Let them go through the pack a playing card at a time, those outsiders, confound them all! Her legacy would be the memory of this view: she this side of the glass, watching Samantha, her orange dress muddied by hide and seek in the flooded meadow the year the brook burst banks; she watching Samantha laughing and calling Jim who'd forgotten his hiding post and was making friends with the bad lads over from the railway bridge; she watching Jim giving those rogues his football sticker pack to be in with them before they cycled off jeering.
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