A Day's End


"Why?"


It was a reedy, drawn-out, whining complaint against the tyranny of bed-time.


"Because!"


Shorter, sharper and abbreviated. It was a response that added the silent 'I said so' which long experience had taught would bring the accusatory 'but you aren't going to bed!' if she had given it voice. Mary could have said it was because she had a deadline to beat or because she had to do the washing-up or because he was so fussy about the packed lunch that she had to nip out to the shop before it closed for the special yoghurt with apricots that she had forgotten to buy earlier. And it wasn't at all unkind to put him to bed with a book and the light on and let him read until his eyes shut themselves.


There were many other variations of that simple 'why' that he could have voiced. He might have asked 'why had his father been nothing more than a miserable memory at birthday parties?' But he never did. 'Why not' Mary asked herself as she scooped up his clothes for washing and tiptoed to the kitchen. Once, in desperation, she had asked her son that very question sitting in a shelter on the esplanade as April showers played like a garden hose on the glistening tarmac. Jacob had slithered closer to her on the green-painted wooden slats of the antique bench with its cast-iron armrests in the form of dolphins. He had run his fingers lovingly over the iron creature's smoothly smiling head and sighed. The wooden slats were peeling now, incised and scrawled all over with generations of illiteracy, but whoever had crafted the foundry-mould had been an artist in those distant days when women wore white ruffled blouses, big hats with ostrich feather trim and foot-skimming skirts. Just when tears pricked and Mary began to regret her probing, Jacob leaned against her, took her hand and squeezed it. His warmth was more than just his closeness. He was answering in the only way he knew.


Jacob was eight. His world was simpler than his mother's. It comprised two realities. The one was his room filled with books and imagination in the little cottage in a cobbled lane ending in worn stone steps down to the river. The other reality was a noisy school in a crumbling town. There were two people who made a bridge between these worlds. Charlotte, little and shy and more understanding of him than he properly appreciated, and Liam, gawky, unpredictable, wildly imaginative and often awkwardly demanding. Of course Jacob was aware of the outer reality that encompassed them. That was the world that came into his life through the television and through all the electronic distractions that were an inescapable feature of school as much as entertainment. But it was also the world in which his father lived. Since father chose not to share that world with mother, the son cut it off as if he were drawing heavy curtains to shut out sight and sound.


Mary was twenty-four. Her world was not unlike Jacob's in that she had also drawn heavy curtains against everything that lay beyond that cottage in the crumbling town. Her reality was defined by her son. It had not been easy coping with pregnancy, GCSEs, erstwhile 'friends' upon whom no reliance could be placed, accusatory neighbours, a perpetually wailing mother and officialdom to whom she was just another statistic. Her father's lifelong taciturnity cloaked a compassion that bore her through that vale of tears and if there were anyone whose character Mary hoped Jacob might inherit it was his. As a boy he had worked with his father and an uncle on one of the last of the inshore shrimping boats. When shrimps and lobsters followed herring into decline he drove a bus for the corporation until, just after Jacob's second birthday, he died. 'Smoked like a bloater' he joked in one of his last conscious moments. His gift to Mary and Jacob was the cottage in the cobbled lane into which Mary and Jacob moved the following year after Mrs Blabey, the cottage's long-term tenant and her father's childhood sweetheart, followed him.


"Hello Tinkerbell! How's young Jacob?"


"I wish you wouldn't call me that Ran," she sighed, putting her basket next to the till. "But he's fine, thanks for asking. How's your job going?"


Ran Aziz helped out his parents in their convenience store just across from the library and had gone through school with Mary. The nickname came from a school play when she had been the fairy to his Peter Pan. They had been the sort of friends who are never especially close but seemed to share an invisible thread that, rather like the more substantial climber's safety rope, would give confidence at times of uncertainty. Of all the boys in her class, he had stood by her, through her pregnancy and that awful time when everyone else seemed to think she should give up on her GCSEs. She had repaid him, as well as she could, by encouraging him when he set his heart on Cambridge.


"It's good," he replied, scanning items. "I finally got 'em to accept that a new system could streamline production. That'll be four eighty five please.."


She handed him a fiver and waited for the change. "Why do you still work here then?


"Gives them some time off. I still live upstairs, so it's sort of quid pro quo. How's your OU course going?"


"Bit rocky at first, but got my teeth into it now!" She took the change and the shopping bag and smiled at him, noting that he looked more than just physically weary, but suppressed the urge to inquisition as she knew he would smile and say it was nothing. "You work too hard," was all she said, adding, "I can always work the odd shift, if that would help?"


It was a few minutes after eleven when Mary emailed her essay to her tutor by piggy-backing onto Mr Mulvaney's wi-fi. The kitchen was spotless and everything in its allotted place. Jacob was sound asleep, his lunch for the morrow in the fridge, his school clothes laid out and his back-pack ready. It had been a long day.