CREAM MAC
Sue Welfare
Published by Sue Welfare at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Sue Welfare
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
CREAM MAC
The old lady whispers, 'Don't touch me – please, please don't touch me.' She says it again and again, the words pushed out on staccatos breaths. I make soothing sounds, soft clucks and purrings, which are as much to quell my own nausea as to comfort her. She is in the road, a crumpled bloodied heap of fire dry kindling, snapped and ringed round by carnations of blood and froth.
'It's all right. You'll be fine,' I murmur in that voice reserved for small children and frightened animals.
She holds my gaze and whispers, 'I won't be all right. I'm already dead; you are soaking up my life.' And then her gaze drops to the blood that is seeping into my clothes, rising up the cream mac like a barometer.
In the distance I hear the thin, hysterical wail of an ambulance , and around us the abstract of a crowd gathering. I'm not altogether sure what the other people are doing or saying, I only see her, only hear her voice, whispering, as I kneel beside her on the tarmac.
And then a man arrives. 'Come on , let us through – we'll take it from here.'
A policeman asks me for my name and address.
When the ambulance finally leaves there is a sudden stillness, an odd jagged empty feeling, raw, like the socket left by a pulled tooth. Self consciously, I hurry away, my cream mac like a butcher's apron.
In my dreams I see the car approaching, in my dreams the woman steps out into the road, over and over, again and again, action replay - her coat slipping through my open fingers. In my dreams I grab air, trying to catch her, trying to hold her back.
'You're soaking up my life,' she says. 'I am already dead '.
No-one comes to ask me what happened.
*
'I knew you would come and find me,' she whispers as I sit beside her hospital bed. She is dressed in a pastel pink nightdress with trim of broderie Anglais which seems alien amongst the plaits of wire and tubes and electronics. I don't tell her that when I arrived at the front desk, I had expected that they would tell me she was already dead, instead I sit and I hold her hand.
I can feel her pulse under my fingertips, fluttery like a trapped bird beneath her sigh thin creamy flesh. I'm surprised how warm she feels. There is dried crust of blood in her hair.
'Sing to me,' she murmurs, and I so do. I sing hymns I thought I had forgotten and children's song that never are.
And while I'm singing to her she dies - simply and softly with a long sigh, as if she is relieved that she can finally let go of the last thing, whatever it is, that last thread that has held her here.
There is no noise, no thrashing, or panic, just a cessation of breath, the tension goes and then a nothing and then she is still.
I don't lean over and close her eyes or fold her hands across her chest in the neat way that they do in the films. I just sit and finish my song and then go to find a nurse who will do the things that I didn't.
They leave me with her for a while; day slides into dusk that eases effortlessly into night. I walked home.
'Your life is soaking into me,' I say as I stand beside her grave with a tall thin man who doesn't ask my name nor offer me his.
It seems odd that I know her only through death. I know her name, and her age from the nurses, and all about the sister who couldn't come to the hospital to visit from the man at the funeral. He tells me that she liked birds and had a son who had emigrated in 1978.
I know where she lived, because I go there are after the funeral for a cup of tea and a ham sandwich with the tall thin man.
'Take something to remember her by,' he says, when almost everyone else has left. 'She would have wanted you to have something, besides no one will know, the house clearance people are coming in tomorrow.'
I take a photograph album full of people I don't know.
'Do you like animals?' he asks conversationally, handing me a glass of sherry the colour of fetid urine.
I can't remember saying yes but I took her parrot home anyway.
*
'He's a young 'un,' says the man in the pet shop, 'Handsome Bird - African Grey – he'll make a lovely talker.'
I'm just not sure what I should teach him to say. We sit by the window, the bird and I, while I write letters to her son in Australia, and his wife and the children.
Sometimes the tall thin man, whose name is Geoffrey, drops by to see us, and at Christmas her sister always sends me a card .
###
Thank you for reading Cream Mac. My day job is writing romantic comedy as Sue Welfare, Gemma Fox and Kate Lawson..
You can find out more about me and my work by visiting http:// www.KateLawson.co.uk or maybe catch up with me on facebook https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=782524523#!/sue.welfare