Listen to the author reading this story:
The idea of home throbbed in Ella’s head with increasing urgency. Normally she’d bounce back, do all the things the management training books said she ought, but ever since the meeting she’d felt exhausted. She couldn’t escape the image of her own face in London’s reflective surfaces. The frizz in her hair, the loose skin at her neck, while the people around her looked like they should still be in school.
Redundant, they’d said. Restructuring. She was fifty-four years old.
Ella found herself on the Underground unable to catch her breath, all the bodies and people and too much life paid out to find a foothold. Her thoughts returned again and again to home, the gleam of the Norfolk Broads silky with silent yachts. She pictured her Mum brushing her hair, her head sinking into a soft feather pillow. Why would anyone battle London when they could go home?
So here she was, the engine of her sports car still ticking on the driveway, the house patient and safe. She gazed up at it. Turned out the old girl was ageing as much as she was. Weeds tufted the gravel and one of the front-step lions had become decapitated. It was easy to forget, in London, that Dad was gone. Not in another room, or golfing, but forever gone. Well. Ella was back now.
‘Only me,’ she called.
Annie had orange smears across her pinny. ‘You said you’d be here an hour ago.’
Her sister’s embrace smelt of garlic and sweat and parsley.
‘Traffic. Have I mucked up your menu?’
Annie sighed in that way she had. ‘I knew you’d be late so I didn’t start the main. Mum’s on the terrace.’
Ella dumped her bag, kicked off her loafers and sauntered through the sunny sitting room on bare feet. It was as glorious as she’d imagined.
‘El, darling.’
‘Mum!’ She squeezed her. ‘You’ve got thin.’ She held her mother at arm’s length and tried to hide her surprise. Her hair was wispy and wild, face hatched with lines she hadn’t dressed in make-up. She looked like an old lady. ‘Any wine? I’ve had a God-awful week.’ Potted lavenders bristled as Ella moved further outdoors. ‘Need a pint of Chardonn – Oh!’
There was a man sitting at the head of the table: skinny, brown as old leather. Had the look of a salty mussel which had been washed but not scrubbed, scraps of beard still clinging to him.
‘Morris,’ he said, leaning forwards to shake hands and bumping the table to set all the water in the cups sloshing. ‘Heard a lot about you, El.’
His grin showed a missing left canine.
‘Who –’
‘He’ll hear you!’ Annie hissed. ‘Make a vinaigrette at least, if you’re going to hide in here.’
‘He’s twenty years younger than her. Where did she find him?’
Annie’s mouth was set in a hard line. ‘I tried to tell you. She met him at church. Not in church. He’s the gardener or something.’
‘Not the ‘New Chances’ scheme?’
Annie raised her eyebrows at her samphire, cold water running out of the bottom of the colander in streams.
‘Mum’s replaced Dad with a druggie?’
‘Recovering alcoholic.’
‘He’s wearing one of Dad’s shirts.’
‘He sleeps over.’
Ella turned and looked out of the window. Morris had his arm around their mum’s shoulder, a black skull tattoo lurking amongst a forest of short hairs.
‘She said my coming was a surprise.’
‘Hmm?’
‘But I told her last week. On Wednesday. We talked all about it.’
Annie put her samphire down. ‘I did say. Her memory’s getting worse.’
As Ella watched, her mother’s delicate chin turned towards Morris and their lips met. Her puckered mouth opened and Ella saw a glint of tongue, purply-pink, gleaming moistly in the sunset.
The kitchen was quiet and golden, as it always was on summer mornings. They sat together, their forearms nearly touching, almost but not quite how they used to be.
‘So, then,’ Ella said. ‘Morris.’
Her mother laughed, her birdlike hand drifting to the pendant on her chest. ‘He’s wonderful, isn’t he? He cooks, El. We’re – what does he call it? – plant-based.’ She curled her fingers around Ella’s wrist and for a moment it was as if she were still herself. ‘Can you picture your father cooking tofu, dear?’
A flash of Dad in his ridiculous shirts sweating over the barbecue, beer glistening with condensation, big chest bouncing as he laughed at some comment of Ella’s, or forehead creasing in sympathy at one of Annie’s grievances. Massive coronary. Because his heart was too big, they said at his funeral.
Her mother was twisting one of their cork coasters around on the scrubbed-top table. How many years had they had those awful coasters? Ella wanted to snatch it from her. The kitchen needed updating, and she’d give the hall a fresh lick of paint.
‘Mum – I was thinking about coming back.’
The coaster stopped spinning. ‘You are back, dear.’
‘I know. But properly. London’s just – work, and travel, and expense. Out here there’s space to think.’ Ella didn’t say, And it’s rent free. ‘So, would that be ok?’
‘What, dear?’
‘If I came home?’
‘Morning, ladies!’ Morris was dressed in her mother’s dressing gown and a pair of plastic Nike sliders and Ella found her eyes pulled like magnets towards his knees and three inches of scrawny thigh. ‘What’s new?’ When he sat, the dressing gown rode up and she caught a flash of pale skin, thick with curly hairs.
‘El was thinking about coming back for a holiday.’
If she didn’t know better, Ella would’ve sworn her mother was nervous.
The twinkle stilled in Morris’s eye. ‘Beautiful part of the world for a break.’ He picked up her mother’s cup of tea and drank from it, his other hand clamped on her thigh. ‘Stay nearby, would you?’
Ella laughed, looked across at Mum, who met her gaze enquiringly.
‘Well. Obviously, I’d stay here.’
Morris sucked his teeth. ‘Not a lot of space. Not with all my gear to store.’
Her mother’s head moved backwards and forwards politely, a disinterested spectator at a tennis match. Ella felt heat spread across her chest.
‘There are loads of rooms.’
‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you?’
‘Mum?’
‘Yes, dear?’
‘What do you think?’
Her eyes were milky as sea-glass. ‘Morris does need a lot of space for his things, El. For his business, you know. He’s a landscape gardener.’
The coffee shop was bustly. A drizzle had forced holidaymakers indoors, their squeaky waterproofs dripping puddles onto the laminate floor, spades clattering in sand-rimed buckets.
‘But what does he want?’ Ella said again.
‘He seems to want Mum. Don’t roll your eyes! She’s attractive for her age.’
‘Attractive house, more like.’
Annie sighed. ‘I was a bit worried when I saw the van –’
‘Van?’ Ella sliced a corner of carrot cake, the edge of her fork scraping the plate. There was a clatter and a cry as someone spilled a drink.
‘Mum said he needed it for work. But – it seemed a bit extravagant. More of a motorhome than a pick-up truck. Very … shiny.’
Ella picked up her phone and stabbed her fingers into it. ‘Motorhome – brand new? – Upwards of sixty grand! You’re not telling me Morris has got that kind of cash.’
‘Mum said it was a gift. Because Morris looks after her so well. She sold one of Dad’s cottages.’
Ella’s mouth fell open. ‘But – those are our cottages. Our retirement.’
Annie rolled her eyes. ‘As if you need to worry about that with your flash job. But if Joe trades me in? I’ve no pension, no career … ‘
Ella frowned. There were dozens of women like Annie working on the tills in M&S, women who had cut their lives into a patchwork so they could love and raise their children, then found themselves old and alone, kids living on the other side of the world, husbands shopping for hot tubs with their second wives. Is that where they’d end up, her and Annie on neighbouring aisles, scanning edamame bean salads for yummy mummies?
Their own father had sacrificed so many weekends to work, poured himself into building up his property portfolio, trying to create something that would endure. Ella thought of Morris’s hand on her mother’s thigh and imagined the houses popping like bubbles. Poof! All that effort.
‘Mum likes him,’ Annie said doubtfully. She forked another mound of fudge cake into her mouth and shrugged apologetically. ‘He looks after her, El.’
‘If your mother’s in sound mind, she has control of her assets. It isn’t a crime to gift property.’
The solicitor tucked his chin into his shirt collar, a raw cut on his cheek where he’d caught himself shaving.
‘But she’s vulnerable. Her ‘friend’ is taking advantage. And he’s an alcoholic.’
‘Have you got a doctor’s certification that she’s medically vulnerable?’
Ella felt as if the world were tilting and everything she knew was sliding away. The leatherbound books on his shelves, the framed certificate, these things suggested the law was solid. Sensible. It should be on her side, not on the side of a man like Morris. Dad would have called him a ‘waster’.
The solicitor patted Ella on the back of her hand. ‘Your Mum’s a generous woman, Ella. I know it’s hard but you have to remember – it’s her property. She can do what she wants with it.’
But it’s not really, Ella wanted to say. It’s ours. It’s mine.
The locksmith didn’t bat an eyelid. ‘You can never be too careful. They wander,’ he said. ‘Mine was the same.’
His drill pierced the air and Ella sat on the terrace trying to block out the noise. She left her Mum hovering at the window, a frown cobwebbing her forehead. Think about Dad. She was protecting Mum, Dad’s legacy. And where would she live, if Mum didn’t let her move back home? The drill whined and Ella found herself biting her manicured fingernails.
Mum went to sleep after she’d had her pills so she didn’t hear Morris’s footstep crunch across the gravel, but Ella did. It gave her a distinct pleasure to hear his key scrabble the lock. A pause, then another attempt. She pulled the door open.
Morris was perfumed in marijuana, fingertips laced in soil. She fished out the duffel bag she’d packed and dropped it Morris’s feet. ‘Your things.’
‘What do you –’ He craned over her shoulder. ‘What are you doing? Ang? Ang, it’s me. It’s Morris! What’s going on, Ang?’
Ella scraped her foot on the step to cover the sound of her mother’s voice, reedy and confused.
‘She doesn’t want this,’ Morris said, a glint in his eye and for a moment Ella was afraid because addicts were wild and unpredictable. ‘You can’t do this – it ain’t your house.’ He stepped closer. ‘You want to get rid of me. But you do that and who’s gonna look after her? Eh? You with your fancy career, Annie with her kids.’ He looked her up and down. ‘You’ll get bored after five minutes.’ He took another step closer and El could smell the sweat from under his arms, the chemical tang of an energy drink. Under his baggy clothes she could see his muscles twisted like wire.
She raised her phone, let him see her dial ‘999’.
‘Bitch,’ he hissed, before he stumbled away.
In the weeks after Morris left Ella’s mother sat in the drawing room window watching the driveway, a frown over her eyes. ‘If you say so, dear,’ was her constant refrain. She said it to the offer of scrambled eggs, the notion of a walk after lunch, the new gardener Ella found, her fingers always fretting at a cuff or a button or an earlobe, eyes always on the driveway. ‘If you say so.’ Her hope burned down slowly. One day she was too tired for her walk, then she stopped opening her bedroom curtains.
Ella found the medications confusing. Eight pills a day, all different colours, uppers and downers and blood thinners and heart slowers, and all the time, Mother limp as an unwashed nightie. It wasn’t what Ella had wanted. She’d wanted her strong mum, lamp-bright, to help put her pieces back together. She’d wanted to be soothed.
‘Have you seen Morris?’ Mum said in the morning as if she were looking for cornflakes. Then, after a couple of months, ‘Have you seen your father?’ Then it was phantom dogs from a lost childhood which haunted the house and – in the end – the ghosts of Ella and Annie themselves that Mother set her to hunting.
Ella saw Morris in town four days after Mum’s funeral. He was on the high street, palm flat against the wall of Superdrug, urinating onto a sleeping bag. He had aged: his beard was wiry and grey, trousers black at their seams. He glimpsed her when he turned, wiping his hand on his thigh. He paused, staggered, then pointed one finger.
‘I know you,’ he cried. ‘Thief! Murderer!’
His voice was a whip on the quiet street. People paused with their shopping bags in their sensible shoes, turned to see who was accused.
Ella tipped her sunglasses onto her nose and hurried back to her new car, the passenger seat thick with colour charts and fabric samples. I did the right thing. She turned her radio up to a roar and gunned the engine towards home – her home, now – where she’d throw open the dining room doors, pour wine and watch the sun slide into the serpent river. I did it for you, Mum. For Dad.
Her mother’s voice was quiet in her head, almost a whisper or a breeze. ‘If you say so,’ she said. ‘If you say so, dear.’
Abigail Williams is a northerner living in Devon. She’s a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer of flash, short stories and longer form fiction. She has won the Flash500, Molotov Cocktail’s Monster Flash and placed third in both the Bath and Oxford Flash Fiction competitions. Abby likes exploring family relationships in her work and loves historical fiction. She has an MA (Distinction) Creative Writing from the University of Exeter.
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