Loft Door
The chairs are pink, like insides; the walls watery green
in the day room. It makes it hard to think, as if we’re in a womb.
But what we’re talking of is death and its uncanny timing;
how Ian’s mother and grandmother were both seventy-nine
when
it swallowed them; folks wouldn’t credit it but facts are facts;
a father and son both cheated out of breath by massive
heart attacks;
his son too seventy years further down the line. And two more
relatives dying, not from strokes but from pneumonia that
followed them.
We move on to the Ripper, the Yorkshire one. Another man
who took
a name and a pattern from someone who’d gone before.
Ian says
those women weren’t no more to blame than anyone else
and should never have had to die, whores having been around
since the world was young. And then, to name a different
kind of slaughter
as if he’s covering every means by which a person can take
their trip to heaven, he tells me that his brother’s daughter’s
husband
drank a bottle of Scotch last week, then went up to the loft
and hung himself. He made his six children - the oldest,
seven - watch.
Though his sister calls the man indecent and a coward, Ian,
who has also looked
death in the face - and recently - says he wasn’t soft.
Though what
it’s put in the children’s minds...that maybe later on if life
becomes unkind
and drink’s been tried and found wanting... well, the path is
there.
And even if they move house, they might, says Ian, be
always looking upwards
at the loft door in fear of what’s upstairs. But now the
trolley’s here
the woman’s asking if he takes his tea sugared. The
answer nowadays is no
not when even going to Morrison’s with the wife to do the
weekly shop
leaves him buggered. He stares into his cup, lost in his vital
recce
checking the maps; continually researching this new and
unfamiliar territory.
Page(s) 33-34
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