SUMMER WRITING COMPETITION - WINNERS

Flaming June, Frederic Leighton, 1895

Dear Readers and Writers,

Thank you so much for all of your captivating entries. Writing is hard, and yet these stories felt effortless and lyrical. Well done.

We are pleased to announce the winners below, selected on account of their strength of voice and originality.

Until next time.

Your loving writer,

Hanif xx

A Healing Bath

Jmel

A Healing Bath

Ilona loved baths as far back as I can remember. Maybe they helped calm her anxiety. Maybe she never trusted showers again. I don’t know, we didn’t discuss the reasons for this preference.

As a child she didn’t want me in the bathroom when she bathed. It didn’t seem fair; she was always there to hover over me — I think she feared I’d drown. Imagine drowning in ten inches of water. The shallow tub in our apartment did not seem at all dangerous.

One time, when I was five, I heard the water running; the bathroom door was ajar. It was easy to peak inside. The tub faced away so that your back was to the door. I was quiet, I observed her without detection. Inside, I saw mother spooning up water to her face with her beautiful soft hands - she sighed “ooOoooOoo” like you’d sooth a baby. My mother was in her mid-thirties, her hands were punctuated with firm blue veins and her perfect fingernails bright red; long slender fingers dancing like silky underwater plants in motion. Her face was smooth — creamy and taught, she was skinny and pale.

Then I saw her naked back. As she ran the washcloth over her neck, then across her shoulder blades down to her lower back I saw some shiny shimmery pinkish shapes, like fossils you learn about in school. They looked like worms of varying lengths, some one inch some five inches but not bigger. I wondered if she was made of stone but giggled to myself knowing she was soft, not hard that way — but could sometimes be mean and scary.

My mother had but a few simple habits and desires. She was steadfast in her love of long comforting baths. When she grew old she couldn’t care for herself and moved to an elder care home. Time had altered her - her mind was soft; her body plump.

The care staff were very kind. Most were obviously immigrants, usually in their twenties or thirties — Mother asked about their homelands, their histories. Her favorites bathed her twice a week in the luxurious tub with jets, which were at first scary to her but then quite exciting.

I visited her often, right after work as the building was located on my route home. Sometimes we had dinner in the community dining room. The care staff knew me and welcomed me and politely repeated their names until I knew them too.

Several months after she moved in, I was approached by Andrew who’d been nominated to be the spokesperson on behalf of mom’s care team.

“Judy, can we ask you a question about your mom?”

“Yes, of course, anything - is everything OK? I know sometimes she’s difficult.”

“Oh, no - not at all. She is most kind to all of us and wants to talk about our lives. We wonder what language she is speaking to us when not in English?”

“Yiddish, or maybe Hungarian. As people age they sometimes fall back into their native language even if they stopped speaking it years ago.”

“Oh, sure that’s probably right. But Judy can I ask you another question please?”

“Yes, what’s up?”

“Your mother’s back. It is full of scars. Deep ones, like trenches. We care for many people but have never seen a back like hers. What caused such marks on her body?”

“Ah, have none of you asked her?”

“No, we wouldn’t want to make her sad.”

“Ask her — she would love to tell you her story.”

The next time I visited, I was greeted by the care team. They pulled me aside before finding mom in her favorite chair watching TV.

“Judy, your mother was in the world war. She was a teenager and they killed her parents and beat her with a whip to make her work harder in the factory.”

“Yes, this is true.”

“She said she was a slave, she and her sisters nearly starved to death because they were Jewish people. After she was set free she came to this country.”

“That’s true as well.”

“None of us knew this was so recent a history of the world. Now we’ve learned this from your mother.”

“Did it make her sad to tell you about it?”

“No, she said she was happy to help us to learn something new. Then she held Amara who cried in her arms. She is from Ethiopia and escaped a war to come here. Your mom said to her: “We are the same, aren’t we?”

Ten Months

Linda

Three mismatched suitcases stood at the bottom of the stairs next to the hall radiator. Still in her dressing gown and curlers, Rose peeked at them through the gap in the door of the front room cum — for the past ten months — bedroom. “Good riddance!” she hissed under her breath, holding the door only slightly ajar just in case Frank suddenly appeared and she had to close it quickly. The last thing she wanted was to come face-to-face with him in what those cases suggested were the final moments of their awkward cohabitation.

‘Separated but living together’ was how the lady at the Citizens’ Advice Bureau had described it. “There’s a new divorce law,” she had explained, flourishing a bunch of leaflets as if they were holiday brochures. “It’s much easier these days”.

Divorce. The word had made Rose shudder. It may well have been the seventies and women’s lib very much the norm, but she could not help feeling a deeply ingrained sense of shame at the breakdown of her marriage.

“You just have to prove to the judge that you have effectively been living separately, even if it is under the same roof, for two years. Two if your husband agrees to it, that is. Five if he doesn’t,” the lady had continued matter-of-factly. “That means not doing anything together. No eating, no shopping, no socialising and definitely no sharing a bedroom”. Nothing new there, Rose had thought to herself. She had already started sleeping downstairs and they barely spoke anymore. Now she was going to have to go one step further and avoid him completely.

That was ten months ago. Ten months of keeping to separate parts of their small terraced house and shutting herself behind doors whenever Frank was at home. Ten months of living in constant dread of bumping into him on the landing or coming out of the bathroom. Ten months of adhering to a strict routine based on his night shift hours so as to ensure that that never happened, that their paths never crossed. For ten months, every day at five forty-five in the afternoon, the time she knew his alarm clock was set to go off, Rose had retreated to the front room. From there, she had listened for the sounds that told her he was up and about, the toilet flushing, the cutlery scraping on the plate as he ate his breakfast in the back room while watching the Six O’clock News and smoking his first cigarette of the day. The newscasters’ voices, with their crystal clear BBC delivery, easily penetrated the thin wall dividing the two rooms. Pressing her ear up against it, Rose had been able to follow all the stories of those ten months: the miners’ strike; the oil crisis; the three-day week; and something about a plan to build a tunnel under the English Channel. “It could never be done,” she heard one interviewee comment. “Sheer folly!” said another. Finally would come the most liberating sound of all: the thud of the front door closing as he left work. Only then would she come out of hiding to reclaim the back room and its prized attraction, the television set, just in time for ’Crossroads’, but not before she had cleared his dirty plate, emptied the ashtray and squirted the room with air freshener.

Still holding the door ajar and staring at the three mismatched suitcases, Rose felt a surge of joyous relief rush through her veins as the realisation sank in that it was all over. No more hiding away. No more listening to the News through the wall. Ten months had seemingly been enough for Frank. “Good riddance!” she repeated to herself. Her heart pounded as she heard his heavy tread on the stairs and she gently pushed the door to. Behind her, the room was in disarray, yet to be transformed from bedroom back to sitting-room, the leatherette sofa-bed still open, the bedclothes ruffled, the low coffee table pushed up against the wall. There was some shuffling about with the cases then came the sound of the front door closing with a force that sent shockwaves through the whole house. She darted across to the window, just in time to see him slamming shut the trunk of a brown Vauxhall Viva before climbing into the passenger seat. She watched in numb amazement as the car drove off — far too speedily, she thought, for their narrow residential street — and disappeared round the corner.

Boxing Day

Miles

Into the cardboard box he placed the pieces of a life. The process had begun in the late afternoon, weak winter light coming through the shutters and into Andrew’s living room, as he wrote out the list in neat, small handwriting (his “schoolboy’s handwriting”, Mae would call it). Three weeks ago, it had been Andrew and Mae’s living room, in Mae and Andrew’s cramped flat in Tooting, but that was before the separation. By eight o’clock he had gathered the various items and carefully laid them out on the rug.

The heaviest items would go first. He had wanted to add them chronologically, beginning with the earliest, the first memories, but soon realised this would not do; the shot glasses stolen on their third date would shatter under the accumulating weight, the Portishead record, bought for him by Mae their first Christmas together, would scratch.

To keep the items intact he sacrificed the chronology of their story, the history of their shared life. 18 years, 11 months, 5 days.

First went in a book of Philip Larkin, a weighty hardback slab in a cream dust cover, yellowing at the corners. Andrew had bought it when they moved in together and would read out verses at random, self-conscious, half-serious, while they shivered through evenings in their first damp-filled flat. They were poor and hungry and happy.

Next went in the photo album, 100 pages showing holidays and weddings, sun-bleached buildings in foreign countries and evenings lit by hanging garden lights. Andrew picked up a pair of high heels. He felt inside the right shoe, touched the toe indentations, a finger for each toe. Size 5, in a salmon pink colour, the tips lightly scuffed. The shoes went into the box, laid on their side as though on display.

Next, a bottle of perfume, almost empty. He carefully removed the lid and, feeling a chill run through him, breathed in the cruelly familiar scent. The smell of eternal night and flushed cheeks in winter, deep and musky, redolent of winey kisses in dark corners.

Earlier that morning, he had stood at the window and watched the rush hour traffic swimming by, scanning the fleeting faces in each car. He wanted to catch the eye of a driver and mouth to them urgent words: “Turn around. Go home now. If you have someone waiting for you then hit the brakes, skid into a U-turn, fuck the speed limit, quit your job. Just get back to them. You’re making a mistake; we’ve all made a terrible mistake!”

He sealed the perfume and placed it inside a high heel. He added Mae’s keyring and her favourite fountain pen, the calculator she had once used to plan their budget while sat at the kitchen table.

It wasn’t enough. How could it ever be enough? He needed a bigger box, one that could contain all of Mae’s clothes and shoes, her jewellery, the postcards from her friends that adorned the fridge, her old bank statements and invitations to parties. A box as big as the living room, as wide and tall as the flat, that could hold all the words she had spoken, each weighted glance, the callouses on her fingers and the sleepy whispers from every Sunday morning they had woke together into morning light. A box to carry away the whole street, all of Tooting and the city. To hold a marriage. 18 years, 11 months, 5 days.

In went the two shot glasses, the Portishead record, a bottle of champagne from their last anniversary (Moet, emerald glass, unopened).

Andrew looked at his watch. It showed 9:54. Darkness outside. 9+5+4. 18 years. He took off the watch and put it in the box. Time would stop here, with the hour hand trailing behind, the minute hand closing in on 12.

He took off his wedding ring and dropped it without looking, sending it clinking down, disappearing into the box. Then he folded the lids and taped them closed. The sealed box sat before him. He felt a rebuke coming from its plainness and its size, small enough to hold in two arms, burdened by the impossible task – he could not preserve the memory of Mae with these inanimate items. He could not halt time.

He put the pieces into a box and sealed it. The rest, invisible and weightless, he kept for himself, to take with him as he followed her towards midnight.