Here is another short story I have recently written. Hopefully this should be in my Universities creative arts magazine, so hopefully you enjoy it! It was done based on the theme of memory.
Enjoy.
***
'I forget where we were now, but back in the 50's... or
maybe it was the sixties? When was it the war ended?'
'It doesn't matter Meredith, it's time to take your medicine
now,' with a sigh Peter pushed the pill towards her face one more time 'come
on, doctors’ orders!'
'No no no it must've been in the 60's, I remember I was just
starting as an estate agent,'
'Meredith you were a landlord,' the lack of life this woman
held made him feel even more despondent than his job normally did.
'Oh. No I was sure... really? Oh.' Meredith turned her eyes
back towards the window, tracing the drops of rain down, watching them
dissipate when they reached the bottom. She took her pill.
'Good girl, I'll be back at three to give you your next
batch,' he was sure she hadn't heard him, but it mattered nonetheless. By now
she had probably forgotten he had even been in, hell she probably lost the
notion of time long ago.
'Hey Pete can I....’
'No.' Peter didn't have many friends here, so shrugging
probably a simple request off didn't bother him in the slightest. He had
finished his morning rounds, and come hell or high water he would have his
cigarette at eleven on the dot. Stepping onto the front steps, underneath a
grand yet age tainted Georgian pillar, he blew out toxins into the fresh air.
There was something soothing in the steady burning of tobacco that calmed him
after the rigorous morning rounds left him feeling isolated and imperturbable.
Transfixed by the pluming of the smoke rising upwards, through winter’s rain
and into the clouds, Peter finally felt relieved. This place had become a
plague on his optimism, with all of its bleached walls and fine, green gardens,
the nursing home had steadily changed from a place of rest for life's survivors
into a cesspit of the damned, the entry parlour of the river Styx. Recently his
joints had been aching more than normal, his relative sleep pattern had died a
death and forced him into the realms of the insomniac and he became more and
more disillusioned with the current fashions and pop culture. Technology had
become that spectral concept that evaded him whilst the practises he had been
raised with were now renamed as the 'old fashioned ways'. Day by day, minute by
minute, the monotony of his career as a carer, one of which he was particularly
proud, reshaped his understanding of himself and his patients. The issue was
that he was seeing more of himself in these ghouls every day, so much so that
he begun to imagine he could feel the wrinkles on his brow deepening, his organs
slowing down. Beforehand, the elderly had been respected by him. He came into
this line of work because he loved to hear their stories, of riches and
adventures, of love and loss and survival. It was the tales of youth he craved,
the ability to talk to people who had experienced all life had to offer and
learn from them, whilst helping them finish the final chapter of their own
existence. Yet when it came to it, it was nothing like he had imagined. There
hadn't been nights sat in a chair listening to them talk about their exotic and
dangerous lives, but rather mornings when he would come in to find bedpans
clean whilst bed sheets lay soiled, not tales and memories and lives but rather
aloofness and unawareness accompanied by symphonies of 'umm, err, I do remember
dear just give me a second, what was that, who did you say you were?' Loathing
the prospects of business and a life led in dedication to money, he had instead
opted to care for the elderly, yet reaching his 'golden' years himself he had
found that he held very little nostalgia for his past and even less hope for
his future. He had not seen the world, he had not found love and he had not
been a success. The only true adventure he had been on was when he moved to
Australia in his twenties. He had fallen blindly and totally in love, and for
the briefest window it felt as if he could claim the happiness that had always
evaded him. But his fear of having children and her subsequently cheating on
him led to his heart breaking after 5 years of youthful happiness and eventually
leaving the country without a penny to his name. In one fell swoop his lust for
travelling, money and monogamy had been demolished, leaving him a husk of the
man he could have been. Even know he still held her photograph, 13 years had passed
yet he still went to bed with her image painted across his iris. They spoke
occasionally as old friends, yet neither of them seemed to be able to forgive
the other. He would always be hers, but he would be damned if she were ever to
find that out. Instead, he chose to listen to the lives of others, of
everything that could never be his. Lusting after tales of youthful adventures
of the old had led any chance of his own youthful adventures to wither away
with age. Oh the irony of hindsight! What was the point in happiness if it has
an expiration date? What was the point of existence if you couldn't remember
where you had come from? It all sounded a little bit too much like purgatory to
him. Sucking the final drag from what had turned into his third cigarette and
glancing up at the stormy sky, he returned to the vegetables.
Regular as clockwork, three O’clock struck once again.
Another set of pills for Meredith, another trivial conversation about nothing
because she no longer understands anything. Wonderful.
‘Come on Meredith, up you get, its three O’clock, it’s time
for your medication,’ he droned, not even crediting her with a glance, ‘Meredith
get up.’ Turning away from the medication on the cabinet he had been paying
attention too, he faced the bed. Crinkles in the sheet and a duvet pulled open
at one end showed she hadn’t been a figment of his imagination, but Meredith
herself had left. She hadn’t been scheduled for social time, nor did she have
any appointments or scheduled reason for her not being in her room for her
three O’clock medication; no this was an escape, a 60+ course in espionage.
Later he would chastise himself for his own mind, but his initial reaction was
to panic at the inconvenience of losing his job thanks to some old woman going
walk about. How could it be fair that his life would be ruined for losing some
mediocre old lady who probably only had 6 months in her at best? Pacing through
the corridors, he searched for her in the most subtle way possible, by acting
as if he was very busy and couldn’t talk to anyone whilst searching every
toilet, rec room and ward in the place. The walls began to appear more lucid,
the cracks far wider than before. A single lightbulb hanging from its own cord
gave the corridors a morbid air that worked itself into Peters mind. It began
to feel like she could have slipped into any crack, fallen down any drain. She
was nowhere, it was if she had evaporated from existence like a plume of smoke
in the winter’s rain, dissipating into the atmosphere. Sweat began to trickle
as the realisation came that the media would probably get a hold of this, he
would become one of those evil caricatures that despise the elderly, the ones
who get eggs thrown at them and beaten in the streets. As the image became
clearer the exact gravity of the situation hit him, making his lungs begin to
fail. With breaths becoming shorter, near the point of hyperventilation, Peter
ran outside for cigarette to offset the encroaching panic attack. Dragging deep
on the cigarette, he allowed himself briefly to stop and clear his mind when
suddenly he felt the touch of hope for himself and Meredith. Standing in front
of the tree line opposite the care home stood a shrunken, frail looking figure.
The flow of her hospital gown in the wind gave her a ghostly presence as the
woods ahead drew her in.
Winters rain had always been far more poetic when Peter wasn’t
running through it in nothing but his scrubs. The tiny molecules of water
numbed his skin, making the continuous onslaught of water feel as if it was
tearing the flesh from his very arms. The wind got deep into his chest, making
him wheeze as the mud slowed his progress into the wood, for the first time in
his life he regretted that last cigarette. But he could see her, albeit
obscurely, through the tree line, skipping deeper into the woods that
surrounded Ms Morgan’s Care home. Wait skipping? He had barely seen her move
from her bed to her wheel chair without aid, how could she be skipping. Dodging
the roots that grabbed at his feet and the foliage that ripped at his clothing,
he closed the gap between them.
‘Meredith what are you doing? You’ll give yourself pneumonia,
its January for Christ sakes!’ Each word felt like agony in his chest, yet she hadn’t
seemed to of broken a sweat getting here, ‘please Meredith, I don’t want you
dying because of my irresponsibility.’
‘Oh honey, if I die it will be because I chose too, not
because you didn’t poke your head round the door to make sure I hadn’t tunnelled
out of my room.’ A grin illuminated her face, revealing a distinct lack of
teeth that did her smile no favours. Just two hours ago she wouldn’t have been
able to tell Peter her own name, yet now she seemed to of gained her own mind
back. As she spoke she walked in circles, letting the trickles of rain run onto
her skin as she stroked incandescent branches that shimmered at her touch.
‘These were my father’s woods an era ago. That prison up
there was once my home, before the Doctors and the carers claimed it from me,
finances were never quite my forte. Some of my greatest memories lie in the
earth surrounding this Oak tree, sometimes it feels as if geysers lay beneath
this earth filled to the brim with trickles from my life, waiting to burst open
when this anchor, myself my dear, chooses to give itself back to the soil…’
The rain and the wind became irrelevant after that. Peter didn’t
even notice when the sun fell from the sky and tiny pinholes of light burst
through the blackness. The lucidity of her mind, the dementia and the confusion
had left, and she poured forth about her own life. About the elements of her
being resting in these woods; it was here she had run when her father’s wrath
had scared her as a child, the salt from her tears tainting the trunk of the
Oak with sorrow. He had died when she was 20 whilst hunting game from what she
had suspected to be a heart attack, his body found leant against the very trunk
that soothed his child from him. These woods housed her first taste of whiskey
that numbed her tongue and warmed her insides surrounded by the comfort of
friends, and it was here she had first felt the lovers touch. Similarly it was
here that very lover was buried on his return from the war, with nothing but an
unmarked Oak tree to represent his place of rest. Today was his birthday, and
she never failed to visit him on his birthday. She explained how she could
still smell him pulsating from the trunk, as if the roots themselves had become
intertwined with his remains, letting his blood mingle with the sap within the
tree, giving him a new lease of life. These woods, that house, it was all her;
a nebula of relationships with each point of this great, old place. She had
been raised and lived her, and it was here she would die when God willed it to
be. Whilst she spoke she sat on a great root of that old oak tree, her
fingertips stroking the rough surface of the bark, the touch keeping the
illumination within her body alive. Stories of the war, of her subsequent
depression and her inability to move past the death of her love filled the air
that evening, life had broken her too young and she had never been able to
marry, to move onto something new, so this was all she had. No money, no
family, just an old oak tree, fertilised with the seeds of her existence. She
was the richest person Peter ever had the good fortune of meeting.
That night would be the brightest her mind would shine. When
Peter finally pulled her back to the house, a fever had set itself within her.
Two days later she was dead. Peter was instantly fired for negligence for
allowing her to go wandering about during winter, and subsequently letting her
stay out for 6 hours in the rain. He did not care though, in all honesty he
would quit after that night even if they hadn’t fired him. Yet he stayed for a
while, Meredith held no will, had pittance in her bank and specified nowhere
what was to be done with her remains. He ensured she was cremated, and
sprinkled the dust of her on the roots of the Oak himself, letting the release
of her life wash over him as it was dispelled into the earth. Taking out a
knife he brought with him he carved her name into the Oak, marking the tree
that held her life with her own epigraph, solidifying her name for as long as
the Oak would live.
Peter left the care home then. He drove straight to the
airport and bought the first ticket to Australia he could find. He had known a
girl there once. There was apologies to be made, second chances to be taken. If
fates be willing, he would still be able to grow his own Oak tree.
