Soft Angular
It is a familiar journey, three hours there, if I’m lucky, the same back. The traffic is heavy, lorries throw up dirty spray. I pass the house.
*
Clink, clink. The fork taps the glass bowl. Egg whites gradually frothing to soft triangular peaks. Mummy has her pretty apron on; it has sprigs of flowers on it. Her arm is tired and I offer to take a turn, but I am too small and I have to be lifted onto the chair. Four years old and strong, my arm won’t get tired, or so I believe. Within minutes I am returned to the floor. Meringues. Someone special is coming for tea, I don’t ask who.
*
She is folding and refolding. The handkerchief is labeled with her name. They have spelt it wrong, added an S.
‘They lose everything here, you know’. She is lost.
‘Did you expect daddy to die?’
It was a year ago, I explain gently.
‘No?’ She says shocked. The hands work the small cotton square into an oblong. ‘Someone is living in our house, a woman.’
‘Yes, they have a little boy. It’s a family home again, which is best.’
‘But where will daddy go when he comes out of hospital’.
‘He isn’t with us anymore. We lost daddy a year ago. He was very ill’. The handkerchief is now the smallest square.
‘No? Oh yes, I remember, was it a year…no. Weeks, a month at most.’ The handkerchief is spread wide and the creases smoothed out. She pauses, sighs.
‘Did you expect daddy to die?’ It is the fourteenth such question.
She folds the handkerchief in half and in half again. The rope-blue veins stand proud of her skin. The small cotton square becomes a soft angular peak.
The traffic is lighter. I pass the house and turn up the music in the car, muffling the clink, clink.
• Patricia Mullin lives in Norfolk is an artist and author of Gene Genie and a graduate of Norwich Art School's Writing the Visual MA.