Cardboard

Friday Fragment #14

We spread the flattened cardboard boxes out onto the floor only when the last of the day’s light had almost gone. We lay down, Pete and me first, keen to sleep, but also to prove that sleep was possible, and to signal that the day could end. Dave settled down near to us at some point later. And Mum just sat there, on the stairs. Earlier, when the light was beginning to fail, and the heat from the day was draining away with it, we had not really known what to do, not thought how best to prepare for the night, the dark and the cold. Earlier still, that morning, the door to the house that had been home for a life of days previous had been secured by somebody else’s hand. A new key turned to bite on a new lock and that life seemed gone. Our things still inside. Dave had mentioned something about coming back for them soon. I can’t visually recall a look back, no wistful final glance. I can see again, though, the men who came, the locks they brought, the piece of paper they handed to Mum, with the address of an office printed on it. Then there was a bus and then a second bus, and finally a long walk, in the heat, three boys, each young, and Mum who carried her large frame, and also that weight that can neither be seen nor measured – a heaviness of disability, illness, love and shame. A ten-minute walk to the office printed on the paper took more than half an hour, stopping for Mum to rest and catch her breath. Two or three hours passed before a set of keys were handed to Mum. I didn’t understand how one house could be taken from us, only for another to become ours so quickly. There were directions to the new house, names of roads to remember, and then another walk. Mum’s pace was now so desperately slow, the heat of the day fierce. Each stop for rest frustrating and tormenting her boys; each restarting step weakening and tormenting their mum. We took turns at her side. We’d approach a corner, read a road sign and see the next long road ahead, the physical arithmetic for Mum scarring all of us instantly. Finally, the last turned corner, past patchworks of concrete and grass, Mum smiling first hellos to new neighbours, and we walked to the top of the cul-de-sac and found a green door with the numbers 6 and 8 and our new home. In that next hour, that last hour of light, came real moments of joy; Pete and I tearing around the house, bewitched by magnolia-fresh walls in all of the rooms and the shiny white gloss that coated every door and window frame. Brand new linoleum floor tiles ran from one side of every room to the other. A gas fire had been fitted in both downstairs rooms, so new that the box and polythene sleeve packaging they had arrived in were still there, discarded on the floor nearby. The old house had been flaking paint and peeling paper; torn vinyl and mismatched, worn carpet; dirt; neglect. This was a new home. But the day was spent and the light finally failed. That excitement and happiness greyed over. The front rooms of the house were floodlit by the street lamps outside. Though the back of the house offered privacy, it gave us very little light. The warmth had gone too. We brought the cardboard box from the front room into the back and lay it on the floor beside the other one. Pete and I got down first. The cardboard brought no comfort, but it was not the floor. The polythene sheets offered no warmth, but they were at least cover. We rucked jumpers as pillows, and lay our heads down, shuffling restlessly, each time scraping the cardboard with the raking noise of sandpaper. We were cold and tired, but the one initially prevented us from yielding to the other. The cold eventually stopped our shuffling and brought a rigidity to our foetal forms that would lock in for the night. Not able to yet accept sleep, but no longer wanting to have to remain awake, those minutes, which might have made an hour, were perhaps the longest of the day. We closed our eyes again and again, each time hoping that morning would be there when next they opened. But sleep could not so quickly bury that day. The door that led upstairs from that room where we lay remained ajar. Mum had perched herself on the stairs earlier and she was still there now. What light there was had stray-printed across the wall and some of it also fell across her. I saw her face and I know that Pete and Dave saw it too: a day and indignity endured, a story she could never re-tell. Her face. I closed my eyes and saw it again and again. Sleep came. I woke once and found Dave had settled near to us. At other times, I would wake to tuck the sheet more tightly in around my neck and chin in the vain hope of finding warmth. I looked and found Mum each time, and each time she was still there on the stairs. I woke for the last time that night, again the thick dark, again the stiff cold, and I looked to where I’d remembered her last. Her eyes were closed, her head dipped down, her bottom lip pushed out, her chin sunk back into a fold of skin draping down from her clavicle, her hand clasping the wrist of her other arm and resting against her stomach, her knees and ankles together. Still there. The soft light across her face.¹

‘Friday Fragment’ is an additional weekly instalment to my A Thousand Fragments monthly newsletter.

1. Extracted from a larger work in progress, Gaps Between.