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Homecoming
Now
With a screech of the brakes,I pull the car up on the kerb outside the local shop. It’s a double yellow but I just need to get some milk, bread, margarine, and well. . . actually, I need to get everything.
I got home yesterday.
Ten years after leaving.
Mum stood on the paved driveway and asked if I was Meals on Wheels. My mum and I have always maintained a strained relationship. My resentment for her defies all boundaries, so having her expect a hot meal from me the moment I arrived wasn’t a great start. The doctors had warned me she may not recognise me, may not see me for who I am now—her only daughter. But… Meals on Wheels? I told her it was me… her daughter; however she was insistent that I should have a spaghetti Bolognese in the back of the car.
All my worldly belongings, yes. Spaghetti Bolognese, no.
Then I walked through the front door and straight into a spider’s web. It should have been a warning of what was to come.
Isaac gave me a pointed look, disgust painting his expression with a sour nose-wrinkling grimace. “Really, you want us to live here?”
I nodded encouragingly and tried not to freak out as I ran around the place, my hands flying in the air because I was covered in spider shit.
My former home looked on the very edge of being derelict. The four walls had always been chilled, crackling with unspoken frost, but seeing it in a state of disrepair, littered with dirty china, lined with old newspapers, and filmed in a greasy layer of dust made me doubt my choice of leaving ten years ago more than ever, and, more importantly, my decision to come back.
I did the right thing. Didn’t I?
You see, I’m the grown up now. Ten years ago, I left home, my heart broken and ego bruised. No, not bruised, more like crushed like a spring petal under a five-inch stiletto heel. Now, with the hindsight of age that has come too late to provide the much-needed sticky plaster on my teenage angst, I realise my heart wasn’t really that broken, I probably wasn’t even really that in love. For the last ten years I’ve only had room for Isaac in my heart. Isaac is mine.
Draggingmy mind back from my sadly lacking welcome home yesterday, I focus on the present and scan the shelves of the grocery store searching for anything my mother might like to eat. The shop hasn’t changed at all. The floor still has the same unique surface texture of sticky and slippery. The bread still has to be eaten today because tomorrow morning it will get a cloying smell that hits you in the face when you open the bag. Even the shelves are all still precariously balanced with an unpredictable selection: spam next to peaches, tinned spaghetti next to sanitary towels, and shoelaces next to the cheese.
The question is, what do women with early onset dementia like to eat? This morning, somewhat unfortunately for my gag reflex, she was cooking cat food. I didn’t know she’d ever owned a cat. My shock at her deteriorated condition mingled in an unpleasant way with the stench of hotWhiskers. My anxiety and guilt quickly transformed into frustration when she kept calling me Cynthia, which is her sister’s name. “I’m Amber,” I kept saying over and over again, my attempt to keep my voice light seriously pushed to the border of shouting, but she just looked at me blankly with no flicker of recognition on her face.
I’m just grabbing another loaf of bread because I’m sure Isaac will want his standard half a loaf loaded withMarmitefor breakfast, when the door of the shop chimes. Ignoring it, I continue to load my arms with pretty much anything I can fit in my grabby hands.
A packet of chocolate digestives wiggles its way free from under my armpit and rolls beneath a shelf just as I hear the shop assistant call to the newcomer, “Morning, Mrs Bale, what can I do for you?”
Mrs Bale. I stop.
Mrs Bale.
Last time I was here, Mrs Bale was dead. Interesting.
This is the quandary about me returning home after all these years. I haven’t spoken to anyone in the village since I left apart from my parents, and their conversations have bordered on sporadic. Mainly because back then I was a black sheep about to ruin her life by not going to university. I ran away, didn’t go to university, nearly ruined my life anyway, but managed to pull it all back from the brink because of Isaac.
So I haven’t spoken to anyone, not a dicky bird, and I’m pretty sure my parents were never proudly walking around the village telling everyone what I was up to.
Pretty sure indeed.
Pulling into town yesterday, it looked like nothing had changed, apart from the level of dust on my mother’s sideboard. But I know I’ve changed. That said, I do have a little niggle to find out what Mrs Bale looks like. I’ll just have a quick peek and then forget all about it.
Edging my way around a shelf, I peer between two cornflake boxes and catch a glimpse of the lady standing by the counter. Then, with a dramatic movie script worthy crash, I drop every item I’ve picked up: tins of beans and spaghetti roll noisily this way and that across the floor. I duck as the people at the till turn, but I’m too late, my knees letting me down on an impromptu squat.
Damn you knees.
And bloody damn this.
A pair of flip-flops walks into view as I try to roll myself like a woodlouse into a tight ball of invisibility, hand still holding chocolate biscuits.
“Amber French?” the flip-flops question.
Straightening from my crouch, and picking up my dropped goods, I look up at my childhood friend. “Dani,” I reply. There isn’t anything else to say. Dani was one of the things I left behind, and yeah, I thought about her over the years, wondered if she would forgive me for ditching our friendship all because some boy broke my heart and my mother was to blame, but my pride got in the way of calling.
