I got all behind in the course and just to make it worse, we were supposed to be writing a short story of no more than a thousand words. I wrote this, but it was too muc of a struggle to get everything into such a short word-length. I wrote something else - and turned off the laptop before saving it... But I wrote another one - hey, I want to be a writer, don't I? Anyway, here's the one I didn't submit...
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There
was no point in regrets.
Carrie gripped the bag with the little dog in
it, as the bus lurched towards the nursing home. Perhaps this time, Mum would
look at the dog with the same blank expression that she now wore when she
viewed her only daughter. Perhaps.
Once upon a time, Ruth had really been Mum –
and Carrie had been her blue-eyed, little girl. Sunny childhood memories of
playing in the garden, making cakes together, picnics in the park – they
fluttered through Carrie’s mind like bright butterflies that vanished in the winter.
Mum couldn’t remember any of it now, as the illness claimed more and more of
her personality.
Of course, it was all Carrie’s fault – she
hadn’t been the perfect daughter, far from it. But what was she supposed to do?
All her friends thought that the best night out was the one where you woke up
with no idea what had happened. Carrie had a reputation to maintain – her friends
would lay bets on who could out-drink her and Carrie usually won. She could
hold her drink, could Carrie.
She used to go home to see her parents every
couple of weeks, and they never seemed to notice, at first. She always took some
vodka in her overnight bag to tide her over, because they never had any drink indoors.
It worked well, until they realised. Carrie had felt absolutely normal that day,
but she must have done something wrong because suddenly they knew she had been
drinking. They had actually gone through her things and emptied her bottles. There
was a furious row – Carrie stroked the little dog as she remembered the harsh
words and wished she could go back and unsay them.
Each time she went home, the arguments grew more
and more harsh. In the end, Dad told her to get out; they even stopped
answering the phone when she called. The worst thing was that letter from Dad –
the last contact she ever had from him – telling her she couldn’t keep upsetting
her mother like this. He actually wrote that she should go to Alcoholics
Anonymous. At the time, she’d thought her parents must be the most dull, stupid
morons in the world. Couldn’t they tell the difference between being an alcoholic
and having a bit of fun?
The bus pulled up at the nursing home and
Carrie had to pull her things together in a hurry. She had a bunch of flowers –
red tulips because Mum had always loved red. Carrie had even worn a red jumper
and put a red bow on Bobby, the dog, to try to appeal to her mother’s fading
mind.
As she walked through the tall front door, she
could smell what they’d had for lunch – cauliflower cheese, or something like
that, and boiled carrots. She wrinkled her nose as she went in and checked with
reception. Then, wearing her visitor badge, she walked upstairs, along the broad,
cream-coloured corridor, until she reached her mother’s room. She tapped on the
door. It was open, but Carrie knew that Mum would be peevish throughout the
visit if she forgot to do that.
Although Ruth turned her wasted face towards
the door, she said nothing to Carrie; she just smiled when she saw Bobby. With
a quick sigh, Carrie went in and held out the dog to be stroked. Mum was
half-sitting up in her bed, so the little Pekingese could snuggle up against
her easily. She crooned and stroked Bobby, muttering baby-talk over his little
head.
‘Thank you nurse!’ she said, with some
difficulty. Her throat had not been working very well recently and she found it
hard to swallow and speak. ‘I used to have a dog like this. I called him Bobby.
Mother gave him to me for my fifteenth birthday…’ And then the semi-lucid
moment was gone.
She cuddled Bobby close with a dreamy
expression. Carrie tried to engage her by offering the tulips, but after a shadow
of a smile, her mother went back to her vague inward stare.
Ruth had been like that at Dad’s funeral; refusing
to speak to Carrie. At the time, Carrie thought she was blaming her for the
stroke that took him. Whatever she was thinking, she would say nothing to her
daughter and neither would anyone else. Carrie walked away from the cemetery,
without going on to the wake.
After all that, what she needed was a drink… But,
instead, she remembered her father’s advice and went to AA. Carrie began to
regain some control over her life. Eventually, she decided to go back and patch
things up with her mother. Ruth still seemed vaguely distant, but also dirty
and confused. Carrie learned that Ruth had been diagnosed with dementia and she
needed Carrie to care for her.
The illness was relentless. In the last
couple of months, Ruth’s muscles had weakened so much that she was unable to
eat without a feeding tube and soon her breathing would inevitably fail, too.
So, this week, Carrie had been obliged to move Ruth into a hospice. The only
thing that made Carrie feel any better about it was that Ruth had shown no sign
that she knew what was happening.
After the visit, Carrie went back to her
parents’ house. She fed Bobby, then sat and cuddled him on the worn, red sofa.
She had discovered a box of old letters in Ruth’s wardrobe and although it
seemed voyeuristic, she had been reading her parent’s letters to each other
from years ago, when her father was away somewhere.
She realised that he had been in a sanatorium,
not national service or college. Carrie thought about her memories of her
childhood with her mother – why had she never before noticed that it was just
the pair of them? Carrie finally understood why her father had never kept a
drop of alcohol at home.
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