I see cardboard and wrapping paper drifting idly around the bushes, and the odd toy flung unnoticed in some remote corner of the garden. A cool breeze stirs the raspberry bushes, laden with fruit that will remain unpicked this year, and daisies droop on the overgrown lawn.

They’ve gone, this family who have been the focus of my attention for the last twenty five years, moving on with scarcely a backward glance at me.

For days I look out, wondering if one of them might come back for some forgotten toy, or perhaps to say goodbye properly. They never said they were leaving, but then, who am I to figure in their plans? How could they know how central they were to my existence?

Sometimes, if I listen carefully, I think I hear the children at play in the garden, running along the drive with excited squeals and giggles. Dogs bark, stirring the leaves of the rhododendrons as they go in frantic pursuit of imaginary cats or rabbits.

With little else to occupy my time, I admit I’ve deliberately snooped on them, involved myself in the minutiae of their lives. I watched dubiously when the young couple first moved in, but my reservations turned to joy as they brought their first child home from the hospital. The baby cried all night that first week, and they shushed her repeatedly, no doubt worrying about the neighbours, but for me the sound heralded hope for the future.

Three more children were to follow over the years, together with a succession of noisy, enthusiastic dogs who dug up everybody’s gardens. It didn’t matter. There was such vitality in this family, you’d forgive them everything.

Everything except leaving.

I turn inward on myself. Months pass. The days are long without company of any kind, with nothing to observe. I sense I’m deteriorating and realise what a pathetic specimen I’m becoming.

The winter drags on for months. I cringe as the icy wind rattles my windows and finds it way under doors and through the gaps in the floorboards.  Snow drifts along my driveway and there are no other neighbours who care enough to keep it clear.

Eventually, winter relaxes its icy grip and crocuses begin to push their heads above the frozen soil.  The days lengthen; small comfort for me though.

Then one March morning, lost in thoughts of the past, I hear voices outside. I look down and see a young couple staring back at me.

“This old house?” says the man, incredulously.

“Oh yes,” she says, hugging her swollen stomach. “A perfect place to bring up children.”

They struggle with my rusty locks and I fling my front door wide to welcome them into my dusty embrace.

My rafters sigh with contentment, and my roof tiles quiver in anticipation.

The circle begins again.

“No, Billie, she’s changing at the moment.”

“Will it take long?”

“Give it an hour or so, hon.”

That hour seemed interminable to Billie, but eventually Mom checked the clock and jerked her head towards the sitting room.

“Grandma!”

The wrinkled creature in the chair smiled, opening her arms, and Billie leapt onto her lap.

“You look real funny, Grandma,” said Billie, wide-eyed.

“So do you, dear,” said Grandma, brushing Billie’s fur out of his eyes and kissing his paws. “But when you get as old as me, you’ll look like this too.”

First to emerge, was the Max Mara black velvet evening suit, a formal fitted jacket and long fishtail skirt, bought over ten years ago for the Nobel Water Prize presentations in Stockholm (executive wife stuff). I’d justified the price (over £500 which was mind-blowing for me in those days, and would still give me a sleepless night now), saying I’d get plenty of wear out of it.  If you count one banquet and one dinner dance as justification, well I suppose I did.  Time to let go, I decided.

Next was the sea-green silk suit from Monsoon.  A real confidence booster when I was travelling around educating unwilling managers about various aspects of employment law. Tailored, smart, and achingly ‘petite’, it had remained unworn since my leaving ‘do’ eight years ago.  Into the bag it went.

I contemplated several other business suits.  When would I ever wear them again?  A funeral perhaps?  I don’t really know enough people approaching that category now; most of my elderly relatives have all shuffled off the mortal coil. And I don’t really care what I wear at mine.  Into the bag with you.

The three piece wedding outfit, the desperate and final choice for my niece’s wedding four years ago went into the bag.  It was taupe, a colour that makes me look like I just climbed out of a hole in the ground, so it was no hardship to part with that, apart from the lingering recollection of the price tag and the hours I spent trawling for it.

Several other items were included, many of which had never been worn but which seemed like a good idea at the time.  Piling these into a black bin-liner, I sometimes wonder whether I’ve been indulging in mind-altering substances when I’ve paraded around in front of dressing room mirrors.

Next to the shoes.  Having truly ruined my feet in sky high stilettos during my working years, (yes Mum, you were right, and Victoria Beckham, you have no idea what’s coming to you) these days I wear mostly boots, trainers or sandals.  Yet somehow, I draw the line at passing on shoes, it seems distasteful.  Into the bin, perhaps?  I’ll think about that.

All this activity underlined the fact that certain aspects of my life are now a thing of the past.  Since we gave up work to spend time living abroad or cruising in France our lifestyle has changed completely.

Gone are the executive dinner dances, the Christmas ‘do’s’, the formal dinner parties, the conferences and cocktail parties.  We just don’t move in those circles any more.  And even if we did, and a suitable occasion were to arise, I’d probably not be able to squeeze into these outfits any more.

Nowadays, when we’re in the UK, a night out constitutes an informal pub or bistro-type meal with friends, and when we’re cruising I live in jeans or shorts, only occasionally changing into a casual long skirt for waterside barbecues, or drinks on friends boats.

I don’t miss the old days; in fact as I sorted through my wardrobe I remembered just how much ‘angst’ was generated by the occasions that these garments supported.  It was strangely liberating to let go of these ‘power dressings’.

There was however, as I held some of these miniscule skirts up against me, the niggling reinforcement that that the high-octane lifestyle did tend to keep my weight down.

These clothes, I realised, weren’t the only aspect of my life that I was ‘letting go’.

Off to the gym now, I think.  And to padlock the fridge.

What about you?  Have you made the decision to let go yet?

Two shiny red apples nestled beneath a banana, as yet unflecked by brown spots. And to the side, a plump bunch of purple grapes,  nestled up to the hairy silhouettes of half a dozen kiwi fruit.

Dad eyed it disapprovingly.

“D’you know, our Shee, that I were twelve year old before I saw my first banana?”

“That’s an old joke, Dad …” I protested.

“And I’m seventy nine now, and can honestly say I’ve never seen hairy bollocks like those before,” nodding at the kiwi fruit.

The boys looked up expectantly, whilst Sophie giggled.

“More tea, Dad?” I offered, picking up the teapot.

“Not if it’s that Earl Grey muck,” he said. “Don’t you have any plain Yorkshire tea?”

“That’s what I gave you, Dad”.

Dad’s visits were a source of mixed feelings. On the one hand, I didn’t have to trail 150 miles up the A1 and back in the day, but on the other, I did have seven days of relentless “when I were a lad…”

“You coming with us to the swimming baths, Grandad?” asked my youngest.

“I’ll say I am,” said Dad, “I’ve brought me trunks.”

“Oh I don’t think you should …” I began, but he cut across me.

“Don’t start, our Shee, I’m not decrepit you know.”

At the baths, Dad disappeared into the changing rooms with the boys whilst I helped Sophie change. When we reappeared, Dad was already parading up and down the poolside, his knitted woolly trunks offering a montage that could solidly compete with the fruit bowl at home.

‘How thin he’s become,’ I thought, studying his stick-like limbs, dotted with the bruise marks of age, and his narrow chest, festooned in cobweb-like white hair.

“Get in the pool, Grandad,” shouted Gareth, the eldest boy, clearly embarrassed.

For a moment, I thought Dad might jump in, but thankfully he shambled to the steps at the shallow end. Gareth struck out for the deep end, obviously needing to put some distance between himself and his Grandad, whilst Mikey, seeing only a play opportunity, dog-paddled gamely across towards him.

I walked round to the side of the pool where Dad was already shivering in the water.

“Are you sure you should be doing this, Dad?” I called.

He shot me a look of pure malevolence and struck out in an awkward straight-armed crawl across the pool, Mikey in his wake.

“You look like you’re drowning, Grandad,” he shouted loudly.

“When I were a lad…” Dad began, before suddenly disappearing beneath the water with a horrified expression.

Fully clothed I leapt into the pool.

Diving down, I was greeted with the sight of Dad’s narrow shanks snaking along the pool floor in pursuit of his woolly swimming trunks which, softened and elongated by the water, had shimmied down his legs and were floating off to the deep end as though possessing a life of their own.

The pool attendant was not amused when he dragged me out coughing and spluttering, and even less so when Dad refused to leave the water until someone located his swimming trunks.

“That was so embarrassing,” complained Gareth later.

“That were nothing, son,” said Dad proudly, “you should have seen me when I were a lad.”

I reach into the packing case, and draw another pile of books and papers out, separating them as I feed them into the flames, where they brown, curl and finally shrivel into ashes. The leather bound covers of the diaries take longer to melt away; that’s only right, for they must have spent longer in her slender hands than the notebooks, photos and scrapbooks.

They’ve certainly occupied more of my time, as I’ve pored over them, reading every entry, trying to remember the things we did on the day in question, that person she might have met, or that place she’d visited.  Such a painful journey that’s been, and tears now sting my eyes again; or maybe it’s the smoke, for I’ve vowed to harden my heart against all those memories.  She is lost to me now.

The timbers at the base of the fire collapse, sending another shower of sparks into the air, and I begin to feed her clothes, one item at a time into the flames.  She’d hate to see that favourite jacket finally meeting its end in the fire.  It’s the one she wore when we used to walk through the woods to the lake, in the early days, when the future stretched ahead of us and it never occurred to us that anything might tear us apart.

And now I can almost feel her distress when I pull the wedding dress from its protective covering.   I remember her walking down the aisle towards me, resplendent in that heavy silk gown, the train whispering against the edges of the pews, the carefully sewn pearls garnering dust bunnies from the church floor.

The air seems heavy with the scent of lilies, rather than the acrid fumes from the box of shoes that I’ve just consigned to the flames.  I hold the dress to my cheek for a moment, feeling the soft coolness of the fabric, inhaling the residual fragrance of the perfume she’s always worn.  And then I crush it into a ball and throw it with all my might into the flames, where it’s received with a flaring leap of welcome.

In the distance, across the chasm that now separates us, I think I hear her scream, and I cover my ears with my soot-stained hands as tears stream down my cheeks.

I’m almost done.  I’ve removed just about every trace of her from my life, have exorcised the ghost of our life together, of what we once had, who we once were.  Before that night.

I begin to stoke the fire again, piling timber, branches, crates, whatever I can find to bring the inferno to a sizzling, roaring crescendo.

As I turn towards the house, I catch a flash of movement at the upper window, as she pulls back, leaving a tell-tale circle of condensation on the window pane to betray her presence.

Taking the knife from my belt, I make my way silently up the stairs to the back bedroom, where I’ve imprisoned her.

The last vestige of another life I once enjoyed.

Women would scurry out of their houses to dump old clothes on the back of the cart, wrinkled clothes that smelt of death, just like all the blankets and sheets my mother had inherited when Gran died.  The odour was, in fact, just general damp and mustiness.

Death, I learned later, has quite a different smell.

I used to wonder what use those stinking rags could be to anyone; no-one in their right mind would surely want anything from that sorry pile accumulating on his cart throughout the day.

I also used to wonder who on earth had bones to give away to the Rag and Bone man. Any neighbour who may be fortunate enough to afford a joint of meat in those days, would be more likely to consign the bones to the neighbour’s dog, in the vain hope of buying peace for a couple of hours.  After it had been boiled and re-boiled for soup stock, that is.

The rags that our mothers gave were exchanged for one of two items; a large donkey stone, traditionally used for cleaning the worn stone steps of the long rows of terraced houses, or a gold-fish, which would be scooped from a large bowl into whatever receptacle was provided.  In reality however, few mothers wanted a gold-fish, and despite our pleas, they’d hurry back indoors clutching their donkey stones.  The fish would only die the next day, they insisted; better to have something useful.

The Rag and Bone man was a menacing apparition, with his dirty old coat that flapped at his calves, a battered hat, fingerless gloves and a grubby white scarf. Why, I used to wonder, would you wear a white scarf when your neck was thick with grime?  Yet the white scarf was just about the only thing that was ever clean about him, seemingly being washed at least every week.

Instinctively we treated him with caution, avoiding his gaze, though none of us could have articulated the reason for this.  His arrival was a signal for us to scurry to the side of the road, well out of his way, leaving our hopscotch half-finished, and our tops, with their brightly chalked surfaces un-whipped.  The Rag and Bone man was not like the milkman, who was a friendly soul, allowing two or three of us clamber onto his cart, and maybe letting us ride to the top of the street, our heels drumming against the huge steel urns of milk under the seat.  The Rag and Bone man wore a perpetual scowl, and his pony had a nasty temper, unlike Ned, the milkman’s affable old nag.

The only one of us who seemed unafraid of him was Maisie Wild, a girl, who at thirteen, was older than the rest of us but who, it was generally acknowledged, had a mental age of someone far younger.  Maisie lived with her mother at the bottom of our street.  There wasn’t, and never had been, any sign of a father, and those of us who listened at doors or paid attention to the whisperings of our parents might have gleaned that Maisie’s condition was due to her mother having bound herself up in tight corsets to hide her pregnancy for as long as possible.

If this engendered a sense of disapproval amongst our elders, we were completely unaffected by this censure.  Maisie was no problem for us; she might take a little bit longer to understand the rules of our games, and she was unable to run as fast as we could.  But we tolerated her, and in the main defended her against the taunts of groups of kids from neighbouring streets.

Maisie was fascinated by the goldfish swimming around in the large bowl on the back of the Rag and Bone man’s cart, and whilst we would wander off to play elsewhere until he’d gone, she would hang around at the back of the cart, her nose pressed against the bowl, watching the fish flit this way and that.

And then one day Maisie disappeared.  Censure was forgotten as neighbours from all the surrounding streets formed search parties and joined the local bobbies in the hunt for her.  The search went on right through the night and every day for the following week, as neighbours scoured the fields, streams and gullies for Maisie, calling out her name.  Eventually the worst was assumed, and the search was called off.

It was weeks later before her body was found.  My brother Jimmy and I were taking a short-cut home from school, crossing the heath despite our parents having expressly forbidden us to deviate from the main roads.  There were a lot of ‘out of bounds’ places since Maisie’s disappearance.

“What’s that pong?” I asked, my nostrils quivering in distaste.

To our right the bushes had been flattened, as if something had been dragged through into the deeper part of the wood.  Jimmy approached the clearing cautiously, with me behind, hanging onto the back of his coat.  There was a white scarf draped around the base of an old oak tree, and beneath it …

We never described what we saw; at that tender age there were no appropriate words in our vocabulary.  To this day we remember the scene though, just as we also remember running screaming across the heath and down our street, neighbours throwing open doors as we passed.

No-one ever mentioned Maisie in front of us again, not even our friends.

Nor did we ever see the Rag and Bone man again, not after the police took him away.

We did, however, finally come to understand why he was called the Rag and Bone man.

Flash Fiction Chronicles

The boy jolts suddenly from his fevered dream and begins to whimper.  Unable to move, he lies helpless on the forest floor, his leg broken and bleeding in the jaws of the trap that had been destined for the bear.

He watches her shambling slowly towards him, her head swinging from side to side. Their eyes remained locked. A foot away from him, she pauses, extends her neck and cautiously sniffs his cheek. Stepping back, and rising on her back legs, she roars, a soaring crescendo of sound ending in a throaty snarl.

Alerted, the hunters change direction, shouting excitedly, anticipating a kill. The sweet prospect of discovery and survival flickers in the boy’s mind.

The bear skirts round the boy, and lumbers away to safety, looking back only once.

‘Mon Dieu, who could have done this?’ he said, addressing no-one in particular.  The small crowd shook their heads sorrowfully, muttering amongst themselves and darting furtive glances the Roux brothers who were perched further along the quayside, legs dangling over the water as they dragged exaggeratedly on their hand-rolled cigarettes.  If there was mischief to be had, those two youths would be in the midst of it, no doubt.

The mayor signalled to a couple of the men, who came forward and started dragging the remains of the swan into a large black sack.

This was a sad end to an idea that had engaged the minds (and, he’d hoped, the votes) of the villagers, uniting them in support of a project that had gained maximum publicity in the regional newspapers.

For three years, a solitary swan had cruised the canal through the village, her mate having perished when some careless fisherman had abandoned a line in the water.  Watching the villagers regularly feeding the abject remaining swan, the mayor had experienced one of his periodic inspirational visions.

At his request, his secretary had spent weeks contacting other municipalities to attempt to locate a male swan without a mate.  She had worked tirelessly on his behalf, but then women generally did so, once he had communicated his vision to them.  A gift, his mother had said, and one that had served him well throughout his life.

Eventually a swan had been found, and one spring evening, in front of a small crowd, the two creatures had been introduced to another, just as the sun was setting.

In pride of place on his desk at le mairie, stood a framed copy of the photograph that the newspapers had printed, showing the two swans, forehead to forehead, their graceful curved necks describing a heart shaped space between them, the pair framed beneath the bridge opening.  It had been a crowning moment of his term of office and had been timed perfectly for the run-up to the mayoral elections.

A master stroke; yet now it had come to this.

He stood dejectedly at the waterside, surrounded by purple petunias, deep orange nasturtiums and variegated ivy tumbling luxuriously out of hanging baskets suspended from the lamp-posts and dripping in colourful tendrils from the bridge spanning the canal.  Yet another of his visionary initiatives, designed to bring visitors and revenue to the village.  And to win votes.

A hundred metres or so upstream beneath the stone bridge that spanned the canal, a lone swan regarded the scene gravely, her wings curved into a soft cradle along her back.  She flitted slowly this way and that, occasionally puffing out her wings above her ample body.  The mayor’s heart went out to her.

He wondered whether it had been cruel to enable her to sample a few pleasurable, albeit brief moments of intimacy and companionship.  Perhaps it might have been kinder to leave her to continue her life alone, cutting a solitary, brooding figure as she meandered up and down the canal.

Would she, he wondered, be capable of surviving the loss of this, her second mate?

“I’m sorry, Madame Le Cygne,” he whispered, “I did my best for you.”

The swan stretched her neck, hissed abruptly and then drifted slowly upstream, periodically ducking her head to immerse her beak in the murky waters of the canal.

As he turned away, he caught sight of Madame Lafitte, leaning against the arch of the bridge, arms folded across her magnificent bosom.  How blessed her late husband had been, he thought, to savour the delights of a woman so obviously in the prime of her life.

The mayor sighed, and felt his cheeks redden the way they always did when he regarded the object of his affections.  This was one woman, he reflected, who seemed unable to comprehend or support his visions, in particular the one he had long held regarding a union between the two of them.

Pulse quickening, he strolled across to her, conscious that she was appraising him from head to toe.  His colour deepened further.

She shook her head ruefully as he approached.

“I told you, Monsieur le Maire,” she said scornfully, “it would never work.”

He recalled, not without some discomfort, that she had been unimpressed when he had first raised his plans to introduce a second swan.  She had advised leaving well alone; it seemed she had been right.

“You cannot blame me for trying, Madame Lafitte,” he said, “the swan was lonely, she needed a mate.  And now I suppose the Roux brothers will be satisfied with their deeds.”

“This was never the work of those two,” she laughed shortly, and turned to walk up the canal back to her cottage by the lock.  He trailed behind her, like a scolded schoolboy, hoping she might invite him in for a glass or two of absinthe, as she had on memorable but sadly infrequent occasions.

As Madame Lafitte drew level with the swan, she planted her hands on her hips and regarded the swan carefully for a moment or two.   Then she threw back her head and started to laugh, a great throaty chuckle that stirred the mayor’s loins pleasurably.

He dragged his eyes from her long, smooth neck and heaving bosom, following her gaze.

Now that he was closer, he could see that the swan’s razored yellow beak and delicately curved neck was heavily stained with blood.  A few white feathers, similarly sullied, were still drifting in the water around her, whilst others clung to the reeds close to the bank.

“Ah, ma petite,” Madame Lafitte sighed, still gazing at the swan, “a woman becomes accustomed to her own company, n’est ce pas?  These men, will they never understand that?”