Heralds of Spring

It's been some time since I posted anything into this blog but i hope you enjoy this one.

Heralds of spring.


Kevin and Karen did as their parents had asked; scattered their ashes from the bridge at the edge of town beside their old home. The request, made just after the golden wedding celebrations had, surprised them a little but their mother had explained in her usual soft yet firm tone,
“One day you will both understand.”
Their father had merely nodded his head, and said nothing. Although older than Lily once their mother had her mind made up on anything it had never been in Stephens nature to either question or try to alter her decision.
They had been born within six weeks of each other to parents who lived at the opposite ends of the same town. It was a small country town with a small close knit community and Stephen and Lily grew up together, They attended the same schools and, except for the few years Lily spent away at college qualifying as a teacher, until their final days, they never knew what it meant to be separated. They had also known, since Stephens eighth birthday, that one day they would marry.
It was Stephens home that stood beside the bridge spanning both river and water meadow at the edge of town, and Lily was spending the afternoon helping him prepare for his party later that evening. She loved flowers, especially the early ones that heralded the approach of warmer days, and she had talked Stephen into going with her into the water meadow where snowdrops had just appeared.
Leaning forward to reach something trapped among the riverside rush’s, while still holding her bunch of snowdrops in one hand, she lost her footing on the damp river bank, stumbled sideways, lurched forward, then tumbled headlong into the swollen river.
Stephen higher up the slope saw her disappear from view but, in seconds, he too was in the water struggling to pull her out. The current lapped over his chest and his arm wrapped tightly around her tiny body almost crushed the air out of her lungs, but finally he managed to haul them both up onto the bank.
She’d lost the flowers she’d been carrying and was sobbing and gasping as if her lungs would never inflate again. He became terrified she might still be about to die on him so he held her in his arms, and rocked her until her retching spasms ceased. Finally she looked into his eyes and gasped almost wonderingly,
“ But Stephen… you can’t swim either!”
Something in her tone, and the way she looked at him both thrilled and embarrassed him so he muttered, “So what!…”, then jumped up and picked her a fresh bunch of snowdrops.
It was when he pressed them into her hand that she clambered to her feet, stretched up on her toes, and gave him a sudden kiss. A grown up kiss, straight onto his mouth. After that it never occurred to either of them that they might ever spend their lives with anyone else.
“ Like two breaths onto a single window pane,” was how parents and friends described them.
They married after she qualified and returned to teach in the local infant school; a post she held without any apparent desire to move or rise higher until she retired forty years later.
They moved in with Stephens parents not just because, as the only and late child, Stephen never wanted to live anywhere else, but because the house with the family grocery store occupying the ground floor was a big one. In addition Stephens parents had always doted on Lily seeing her as the daughter they never had. Indeed, sometimes in those early years Stephen would wryly observe that if he and Lily ever had a serious disagreement over anything, it would be he who was shown the door. When his parents went to live out their final years by the sea, Stephen took over the business.
Karen, their eldest, was born in the year before his parents retired, and Kevin came two years later. In almost every respect they were opposites.
Karen, whose birth was an easy one, resembled her father in both physique and temperament. Tall, well built, and easy going whatever she lacked intellectually she made up for in physical ability. It was no surprise to anyone when, in her final college year, she announced her intention to enter the police force.
Kevin, on the other hand, was tiny like his mother with her blond hair and blue eyes, and her apparent lack of any personal ambitions, other than to be liked by everyone. Even at his parents golden wedding people were still asking him,
“ Well Kevin old chap, what are you up to nowadays?”
He replied with vague descriptions of doing something in the ‘performing arts’, and then knowingly added to his enquirers subsequent confusion by adding an oblique reference to ‘ conceptual dimensions of future diversions!’
His birth had been a difficult one as if he was loathe to leave his mothers womb, as if sensing how much she enjoyed having him inside her. In consequence Lily was advised that further pregnancies would be unwise.
Yet Kevin was the one in the years following the anniversary who noticed his parents failing mental health, and it was he who persuaded them both to sell first the shop, then the house, and use the proceeds along with their pensions to finance secure and sheltered accommodation.
By this time Karen was married to another policeman and living with him and her four children at the opposite end of the country and he, Kevin, as well as being constantly on the road with one project or another was in a single sex relationship which even Lily had difficulty dealing with. So a home where they could still be together, but cared for and safe appeared the most sensible option.
It was neither Kevin, nor Karens fault that the brochures issued, and the preliminary visits arranged to the ‘Happy Days Retirement Home’ were so misleading. Especially the Home’s claim that resident couples need to remain together would always be respected. In fact for the first time in their married lives Stephen and Lily found themselves occupying separate bedrooms.
At first it wasn’t too bad. The bedrooms were on the same floor and next to each other. In his lucid moments Stephen even amused himself planning how he would install an adjoining door, but then after a while and for some reason never clearly explained to either of them, they were both moved to rooms which were not only not adjacent but in separate wings of the building. It reminded Stephen of their childhood. Then he found that in the evening he could no longer take a walk to Lily’s part of the Home.
They had a new matron, a large officious woman with a growth of hair on her upper lip which prompted Stephen to nickname her ‘Mother Adolph.’ She carried a bundle of keys everywhere and at night locked the corridor door dividing off the two wings. It bothered him.
“Something to do with fire regulations,” he complained in a letter to Kevin but then, when he didn’t receive an answer immediately, he began to wonder if his mail was being censored, or even confiscated. He found it very hard to trust Mother Adolph. She seemed to have a problem with any residents touching however innocently…. and lately his need to touch Lily whenever they met had become anything but innocent!
One afternoon in the residents lounge he had managed to reach around Lily’s shoulder, under her armpit, and then press his palm against her breast. At first she had tried to move away but had then started to giggle and cough. They were still laughing together when Mother Adolph walked in and, in a loud voice, ordered Stephen out of the lounge.
He became so upset he forgot where his own room was--- even where he was supposed to be going, and ended up standing in a corridor he didn’t remember ever seeing before. He started to cry.
One of the trainee carers: ( he realised she was a trainee because she had glasses and was wearing one of those green pinafore things over what looked like a white gown,) approached him.
“ Where are you going?” she asked not too unkindly.
“I don’t remember,” he tried to explain, but the damn gulps got in the way.
She was still interrogating him as she took a firm grip onto his arm. He remembered Karen telling him that she had to interrogate people sometimes as part of her job…. but she didn’t wear glasses! Not even when her mum advised her to for the sake of her eyes.
“Can you not sleep?” the carer asked.
At least when he got angry he didn’t gulp. “ Of course I can’t bloody sleep!” he shouted.
So later the trainee carer, who actually did care, wrote three words at the top of his file. Three words that signposted his and Lily’s escape route.
‘ Needs help sleeping.’
It took him some time to formulate his plan so that he wouldn’t forget anything, or get so confused that the details went out of focus, but he found that now he had a purpose again his forgetfulness and confusion decreased. He hid the white tablets they started giving him at night in a small pill bottle inside one of his shoes in his wardrobe.
‘Mind you,’ he thought, ‘ I mustn’t let see me getting any better.’ So her started pretending to be even worse than he suspected he really was. What really started to worry him though was how quickly Lily seemed to be deteriorating now that Mother Adolph had even issued instructions that they were not to sit next to each other in the recreation lounge, But at least that separation prevented him accidentally letting slip the surprise he was planning.
He started grinning at the matron whenever he met her, and began following her around without ever answering her frequent demands to know,
“What do you want Stephen?”
What he wanted, of course, what he needed for his plan to succeed, was to find out where she kept her keys when she went off duty every night. When he finally found out by following her late one evening straight into her office on the ground floor, he couldn’t believe his luck. She actually hung them onto a hook beside her black gaberdine overcoat.
‘Hitler had a coat like that,’ he thought as she shouted at him to get out, called him a few names including ‘ silly old pervert,’ and slammed the office door in his face. ‘But he didn’t leave his keys around the place!”
The following day Lily didn’t appear in the dining room at teatime and Stephen asked the trainee with the glasses where she was?
“Don’t tell matron,” he whispered, “ But I’m worried about her. She isn’t ill or anything is she?”
There was just a hint of hesitation in the trainees reply.
“Well, just a bit poorly Stephen,.. But we’re looking after her and she’ll be right as rain in no time.”
Alarm bells rang in Stephens head, and he found it difficult to eat anything. One thing seemed absolutely clear. He couldn’t delay implementing his plan any longer.
It was after midnight when he crept down the stairs, and collected the keys from Mother Adolph’s office.
“ Door wide open,” he murmured under his breath, “ There’ll be trouble in the morning!”
He unlocked the door into what he noticed the staff had now officially labelled the ‘ Female Wing’, climbed the stairs to the third floor, ( ‘lifts make noise’ he thought,) and almost skipped along the corridor to the door of Lily’s room.
He didn’t knock, saw no need to, but turned the handle and stepped quickly inside. He had expected her to be asleep in bed, in the dark; but her bedside light was on and she was sitting on the bed fully clothed, and staring up at him.
“Oh Kevin,” she exclaimed, “ Thank god you’ve come.”
“ No Lily… it’s me Stephen… it’s not Kevin…. It’s Stephen..”
For a moment she looked confused and then it seemed that something within her lit up, her blue eyes focused on him and she began, ever so slowly to sob and then gasp for breath. Sob and gasp as she had another time now lost in Stephens distant memory but experienced as if it was now.
“Ooooh yes… Stephen?…. You’re Stephen aren’t you? ….. Yes… I remember you now!”
He sat on the bed beside her and wrapped his arms around her thin little shoulders.
“Oh Lily what’s the matter? What have you done this time?”
Her head fell forward onto his chest.
“ Ooh Stephen,…. Please..,” she sobbed, “ Please… I want to go home!”
He let her cry like that for a while, rocking her in his arms and stroking her thin grey hair. Finally he turned her sideways, laid her onto the bed and, despite it being so narrow, managed to climb onto the green coverlet beside her. Then he held her once more, their legs and arms entwined and wrapped tightly around each other. When her sobs finally ceased and her eyes closed,… when she was barely breathing at all he whispered into her ear,
“ That’s why I’m here Lily…. to bring you home.”
Ironically it was Mother Adolph who found them both the following morning when, discovering her keys missing from the hook in her office, and realising that ‘security’ had been breached. she ordered a full scale search of the Female Wing.
She found them still fully clothed, but so tightly locked together that she needed two trainees to help her prise them apart. Before summoning help though she took care to dispose of the two empty pill bottles, and the tumbler of water from beside the bed
There would, she knew, be repercussions, and if the press got wind of what had happened, as they almost certainly would do, she would probably have to resign, be thrown into the bear pit of public opprobrium as a sacrificial offering.
She was so angry! Not just at herself, but at what she now considered the selfish, ungrateful pair lying on the bed!

*******************************************

Kevin and Karen scattered their parents ashes at night when they knew nobody would be crossing the bridge and see what they were doing. Just in case anyone was they both assumed innocent looks and both leaned nonchalantly over the stone parapet. They lowered the two urns they were carrying and let the ash’s slide gently down into the cold night air.
Kevin released his mothers while at the same moment Karen, still weeping, released her fathers.
Apparently from nowhere, yet they were sure from somewhere, a sudden light breeze lifted the now mingled grey cloud away from the flowing river and settled it instead onto the sloping bank of the water meadow beside their parents old home.
Kevin wondered aloud if the mantle of grey dust would be visible in daylight, but he needn’t have worried, Overnight a light fall of snow covered everything and, thawing by lunchtime, filtered the ash’s deep into the damp soil.
That afternoon they stood once more on the bridge before driving away to resume their now different and very separate lives. But in that moment together, just as their mother had promised they would, they understood.
In a few short weeks, and perhaps in every year thereafter, the first heralds of spring would appear in the water meadow. The purest, whitest snowdrops they, or anyone else, would ever see!

The End.