Thursday's Child

I turned right at the junction, passing what for years had been a crumbling wreck but is now a smart barn conversion complete, I’ll be bound, with a new, gleaming red Aga in the kitchen.  As I drove over the hill and passed the sign pointing left for the town centre my stomach knotted, just as it always does as I approach the town I left two and a half years ago.

I swung left and started to roll down the hill, braking slightly and looked to my right and upwards to a mid-terrace cottage set up a flight of steps.  The door is different, half paned with a gaudy coloured pattern in the pvc plastic panes.  The sash windows of the sitting room and bedroom are shiny new, no sign of rotting wood or the weird mark in the lower pane of the bedroom window that looked like a three-eared hare.  Even looking up from road-height, I can see that all vestiges of front garden shrubbery has gone, plants that I tended, moved and added to in the days when my gardening tools consisted of nothing more than a bread knife and soup spoon have disappeared, no remmants of Saturday mornings spent sitting on the front step drinking strong coffee with my mother as we watched the world go by, no sign of the afternoon I spent pretend pruning bushes with a new pair of secateurs, purely to place myself within eyesight of a certain 6′3″ fireman with chocolate spread eyes and catalogue man smile.  As I cruise on down the hill, I wonder if the carpet with the splat of rouge noir nail varnish has been replaced, whether the multi-coloured blobs of candle wax have been scraped off the hearth from my forays into witchy ways, if they’ve realised that the newel at the bottom of the stairs is not as it appears – a result of years of claw-sharpening by Pixel followed by a stupendous fill-in and cover-up job by the brown-eyed man some three years after I’d stood in the garden with secateurs in my hand.

I pass the bank further down the hill, the bank I opened an account with on the first day I moved to the town some seventeen years ago.  The bank manager – a small, dapper man with greying hair – came out of his office to introduce himself  and shake my hand when I handed in my completed application form.  He and I had no idea that day how much of a trial we’d be to each other in the future but also forming a grudging fondness I believe.  Known by everyone in the town, he would occasionally shout at me in the street, loudly bellowing across the road that “there’d better not be any food in that bag young lady, you know you can’t afford to eat this month!” as, it seemed, the whole townsfolk stopped to stare at the woman with the unauthorised overdraft.  I once threw stones at his office window on a Saturday afternoon when the bank was closed, knowing that he was there, to complain that my cashcard wouldn’t go in the machine and walked away with £40 from his own wallet.  I came across him one Sunday morning standing on a step ladder outside the bank watering “the girls” – rows of pansies in windowboxes.  He agreed to increase my overdraft after I threatened to push him off his ladder if he didn’t.  He retired some years ago and, to my disappointment, never saw my bank account in credit the day before I got paid which over time and increased salary became a regular occurence.  The windowboxes are empty now and the last bank manager I saw there was young enough to be my son, endeavoured to high-five his customers instead of shaking their hands and turned up on TV for a short while before having a fat finger pointed at him and told “You’re a shambles, you’re fired”.

The loosely-termed antique shop, run by a tall lady with enormous hands and dog hair covered clothes just past the bank is long gone, as are my days of foraging amongst its junk for delicate but cheap china, decorated with green dragons that I still have.  Now, it’s a shop that wafts perfume and tinkles with vintage jewellery and nightwear.  In the midst of grief four years ago, I would empty my head by running my hands over satin-smooth chemises with lacy cuffs and buying vintage necklaces.

The greengrocer – the mainstay of the town – is now closed following an apparent shocking affair that scandaled the town.  I bought my fruit and veg there for seventeen years, ignoring the modus operandi that the greengrocer and his wife, with her red-painted nails and fingers glittering with diamonds, would pick the items to weigh.  I took a dodgy head of broccoli back once and also an orange on the grounds that it was “highly disappointing” and they never gave me any truck about picking my own produce from their shelves, halving oranges for me to try before I bought any.

The antique shop proper, whose windows once glowed with burnished, polished wood chests and rich red rugs now sells cardies at £240 a pop.  The art and craft shop that sold camera film, balls of wool and tubes of glitter and glue is now a kebab shop.  The ducks on the pond waddle their way across the road to beg for pitta bread at the door.  The two swans who slip-slapped their way down the hill in the morning, frequently startling me as I chugged my way to work in my Beetle, no longer slide in to the water and glide across the pond.  I understand someone went to prison for it.  The ironmonger, where I bought my glass butter dish, is now a hair salon.  I don’t know where else you can get replacement clips for clothes airers now.  The menswear shop that shuts for lunch and half day on Thursday’s has ‘Shutting Down Sale!’ banners plastered across the windows.  The baker, that became a hugely overpriced florist, is now an art gallery.

I drove past the house I bought with the brown-eyed man and it looks the same, the columns of bricks in the front garden bought four years ago to terrace the sloping lawn still stacked and unused on the scrubby lawn.  I wonder if the bathroom now has four whole walls having been pulled apart and then abandoned for over two years, crumbled walls mirroring the crumbling relationship.  I would hide in the room that was my office, cry in corners of rooms and escape to the back garden to sit on half-finished steps drinking tea as the Tabby Panther crept amongst the undergrowth I’d created and I’d dream of shiny bathrooms and vegetable gardens.  I’d sleep on the edge of the bed, apparently mumbling in my sleep “I want to go home”.  How much I wanted to go home then, back to the lone peace of the rented house on the hill with the three-eared hare in the windowpane that ironically had stood empty since I’d left.

I made to drive away, back to the house I’ve filled with things, some of which I bought nineteen years ago, back to the house that has a bathroom that sparkles, plants in the garden I dug up from around clods of abandoned, hardened concrete two and a half years ago, with a fat, black cat buried under the apple tree, another curled up on the sofa and a vegetable garden I created two years ago.  I caught one last sight of the columns of bricks in my rearview mirror and pulled over again to send Joe Brown a text.  “On my way home, x”