Elizabeth's Melody

My short story is now part of a Bournemouth Writing Prize Anthology called Passages, published in August 2022.

Here's the link if you're interested in purchasing: https://amzn.eu/d/fKJH8h7

A shallow sigh left his lips. He revelled in the pleasurable feeling of muscle against the nape of her neck. Wisps of flaxen hair bustled in all directions, as uncontrollable as the changeable autumn day. The skin of her neck tugged against her clavicle as she rolled her slender neck upwards, resting on his shoulder and watching sycamore seeds dally through the air. He placed his hand on the protrusion in her lower belly, nuzzling her ear, the scent of petrichor and warm pomegranate littering her skin.

“Don’t think I’ve forgotten.” He bit gently on her earlobe and chuckled.

She sat and peered at him curiously, letting out a burst of high-pitched laughter, her eyes golden and dancing, shimmering like heat on a sun-baked road.

“You shouldn’t be here, not yet,” she said.

Opening her mouth, she bared gums greyed with putrefying rot, vomiting a clouded vision of absurd memories, not those of happiness but of regretful times, times where he’d hurt her, times when he’d made her feel like nothing.

The desire to flee walloped him in the gut. The ground rocked and splintered beneath him, falling away, creating a fissure in the earth.

They both fell together.

He gained purchase, dangling by one hand, his fingers embedded in brittle lacewood grain. His other hand released hers without thought, and she fell through greyed cotton, emerald foliage, into a stinging and slimed leaf nightfall.

He found himself suspended, hanging there, over the chasm, his hand chafed by barbs, legs encased in brambles. His wits, those he still recognised, were balanced on the gyroplane of a seedling that rotated past his face as if taunting him.

His grasp loosened, and he began to slip.

The bookcase jarred, aggravated.

*

“Dad, what are you doing at the window?” Elizabeth asked as she cleaned the crumbs from a leather wingback chair, hopping over the elderly tortoiseshell cat, Robert the Bruce, who moved faster than expected, almost tripping her.

“The cigarette factory is working hard again.” He stopped humming a tune and peered out from behind the net curtains. “I smell it all the time,” he said absently.

Elizabeth frowned. If a cigarette factory were producing its product, it would hardly be sending the smoke out through its chimneys. She slapped a throw pillow and shook her head with a sigh. The odour was probably from the neighbour with the discoloured jardinière drapes.

“Come and sit down, dad. I’ll cook you some dinner.”

She closed the window, took him by the elbow and led him to the easy chair. He struggled with those few steps, his feet shuffling, indenting the pile with his green embroidered slippers. They were a gift from the care home manager; he wasn’t allowed shoes since he’d absconded over the fence and became lost in the village. She later found him waiting for a bus at a decaying stop last servicing the area in 1982.

“I’m not hungry, Charlotte,” he replied, turning on the TV to the local news. She heard the low rumbling chatter between the hosts but filtered out the white noise.

Opening the kitchen cupboards she’d restocked only yesterday, Elizabeth gulped back tears that hit her with such ferocity they almost overwhelmed her. Charlotte had been her father’s sister. Not being recognised by one’s parent was like a stab to the heart from one of the Jacobean swords she’d carefully removed from his belongings when he’d moved into Mount House.

A crumpled bag from a large granary loaf lay on the worktop. The crumbs on his chair now made sense. He’d eaten it all.

She cleared her throat.

“Daddy, what happened to the bread?”

“There is no bread, Charlotte. Anya will get some on her way home from work.”

Elizabeth leaned her head against the cupboard, using the MDF to cool her flushed face. She clenched her fists. Anya had been his father’s first wife, a Spanish woman he’d met as a young man travelling in Barcelona before gaining his doctorate in psychology. Her throat felt blocked as she realised that he didn’t remember her mother, who’d died only a few weeks before, following forty years of marriage.

The situation with the bread reminded her of the sausage incident. It had occurred on the day of their mother’s funeral after Elizabeth had driven him back to Mount House. Her father had placed two packets of sausages under the gas grill and forgotten them, causing much smoke and a complete evacuation, though luckily not setting fire to the kitchen. At 8 pm, when Elizabeth was about to take a sedative and go to bed, she received a call from the home advising her that the fire brigade had been called.

Driving five miles, she had arrived to find her father refusing to leave his supported flat, holding a plate of cremated sausages which he was stuffing into his mouth. He shouted and fought against a paramedic, the manager, and a large firefighter while accusing them of trying to steal his sausages. It may have been comical had it not been so distressing.

That night the manager had told her they could no longer care for him in his current state, that he needed a residential home. Then she knew she would have to put him into care or care for him herself.

They say dementia can be compared to two bookcases—one containing memories, the most recent at the top, like brand new paperbacks. The lower you peruse on rickety shelves, the tomes are dusty, akin to those you might find in an old bookshop. Oddly, these are the ones you remember when you recall nothing else.

The second bookshelf contains your feelings. A staunch and hard-wearing piece of grained oak furniture, it never wavers. It holds your emotions like a bank vault. It compels you to say; I don’t know who you are, but I know I love you, with no idea why.

You watch and wait for the inevitable when someone you love has such a disease. Their raft floats on unmoored memories as they see life continuing around them at the bottom of a lake, one that was once crystal clear but is now polluted and blinding. To watch is torture.

Elizabeth was a nurse, a career she was unsure she would return to, not with her father to care for. She had experienced death and disease. But there was something quintessentially different between caring for strangers and caring for a loved one, especially while the spectre of grief sat on your shoulder like a vulture ready to peck out your eyes. Sometimes she wished it would.

“I hope Anya picks up some prunes too. I’m constipated,” her father mentioned, his eyes glazing over.

*

"Did I ever tell you tale of Robert the Bruce?" His father's voice burst rudely into his mind as he passed him his teddy bear. He couldn't take it. His grip on reality was already tenuous.

He shook his head.

"He was buried in my town, boy. One day I'll take you there. He's a hero Douglas, a true king of Scotland, just like you, my son."

His father leaned to kiss his cheek, somehow corporeal once more. His facial hair felt like the horsehair yarn his mother had used in her tailoring, the rolls perfectly arranged next to her sewing machine.

They never visited the King's grave. Now they never would.

He looked down to see the fissure walls lined with black-bound books decorated with gold leaf lettering—Precious, soiled, waterlogged, and mouldering like his psyche.

Once more, the earth quaked, and he realised a book cover had ripped, divided in half, falling forward into the abyss.

He heard nothing more than a rattling from the kitchen.

*

“He’s eaten a week’s worth of bread,” Elizabeth snorted. The knowledge made her chuckle, which developed into hacking laughter, causing her to wonder if she was losing her mind. Tears streamed down her face as she put the kettle on and searched for some senna. It often amused her how many of her elderly patients’ bowels became a frequent topic of conversation. Her father was no different.

“Here’s your tea. Drink it down, and then I’ll bath you, Dad.”

Her father gave her a queer look like he didn’t understand what she was saying.

“But we should be asleep.”

He looked at the clock, which pointed to 5 pm.

“No, Dad, it’s late afternoon,”

Elizabeth said soothingly. She never ceased to find it strange how life had almost reset itself, how she was the one bathing him and getting him up at night to use the lavatory for fear he might wake in a soggy bed.

“Oh, I wondered why Fiona was on the telly. She’s not usually on at night,” he replied, absently feeding Robert the Bruce more treats.

After dad’s bath, they settled down to watch mastermind, which oddly her father loved, even though he often didn’t get any answers correct. When it had finished, she tucked him into bed in her old dining room. She passed him his battered old Steiff teddy bear. It had been with him all his life, once hers, now his again.

*

He caught sight of a cabbage white floating, motionless in his peripheral vision. Those heady days of picnics within the wildflowers of Scotland reminded him of her, the dancing girl in the cheesecloth summer dress, with tiny daisies on the hem, arms spread wide as she spun until her legs gave out and she became a giggling mess. The delightful insects swam through the air above her until they swarmed towards her and covered her.

She was the ledge his foot had finally found, the stability that stopped him from slipping further. When she was born, he had heard a sound when she’d cried, and it had dampened the sound of all others, creating a melody he only heard when she was there. He hummed her tune.

He felt her hand caress his brow. The words he wanted to say wouldn't come. They were alien to him. Instead, she morphed into his mother. She had always looked so much like his mother.

“Mummy,” he said in a small voice, surrounded by blankets, the safety bar pulled up securely on the side of the bed, “I love you.”

She kissed his head gently.

“I love you too, Dad.”

*

The cat stalked below him as he cried out in his sleep.

"Help me!" he begged.

Robert sat back on his haunches, used to the night terrors, licking his paws before padding to the door of the girl.

He meowed once to rouse her then lifted his head and sniffed, distracted by the scent of food in the kitchen.

Giving up, he strolled back, flicking his tail nonchalantly.

He lifted his head as he heard another shout. Chirping a reply, he decided to answer. It seemed no one else would.

*

It was these moments that were the killer, those where she had time to think. She knew he felt secure and loved but had no way to articulate it conventionally. She could sit and cry at the injustice of it all. He had once been strong, intelligent, and unyielding against the world. Now he was reduced to a bag of bones governed by an ineffectual mechanism.

Robert the Bruce had jumped onto her father’s stomach with a small chirp as he always did, protectively curling like a serpentine creature within its egg sack. She had thought she would resent having him here. Though it was demanding, she believed she had made the right decision for them both. She knew she would never be able to live with herself if she had sent him to live with strangers.

Her phone rang. It was him again, pressing for an answer.

She placed her hand on her stomach, feeling a small flood of butterflies under her fingertips. It was good to have a secret, though it would have to come out sooner or later. These things always did.

*

The feline roamed the briars above, inhaling erstwhile scents. Douglas watched Robert’s chest undulating with his mouth wide as he breathed in the last of his lifeforce.

The disorderly refracted light of a burning lens teemed through his mind, along with a choral serenade of her melody.

He fell, allowing himself to drop.

She needed him to depart so that she could begin.