Member-only story
Jackdaw Junior
Mother kept a dark secret from me
The house had died with Mother. It had been two weeks since her emaciated body gave up the fight at Saint Luke’s Hospital in town, and when she stopped breathing, the heart of the house was also stilled.
I let myself into the frigid hallway. Tightly shut windows kept in the chilled air, on which hung the faint smell of cold cooking fat. In the now inappropriately named living room, dead flowers hung limp over the rim of a vase on the windowsill, and a brace of dead flies lay on their backs on the white paintwork. What had once been a living, breathing home was now a cold, dead house.
A skeleton in fact, because most of the furniture had been removed and divided up between Mother’s close friends and a local charity that provides household goods for those in need. As an only child earning good money as a commercial photographer, and the owner of a spacious house that was new when I took possession of it, I had no use for the old-fashioned furniture that Mother loved so much. “There’s no substitute for good, honest craftsmanship,” she used to say whenever I suggested she modernise. She stuck firmly to this belief too; the layout of the house had barely changed since we moved in when I was a small boy. And now it was almost all gone.
