16. STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN

The cause was different but the result the same when my dear mother passed away in 1963

STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN

16 The Fall

The world became a twisted garden in which serpents writhed and little bald men danced themselves to death while singing songs of love and hate in voices exactly like a choir of skiffle singers. And Isabel was there in the middle of it, a slender girl twirling a baton and conducting her anti-paradise with a haunting sort of beauty..

In the end she just had to wake up. Continuing the dream was a non-runner because it threatened to drive her insane and anyway dreams, all dreams, must end sometime or other. If they didn’t the dreamer would surely die.

“Mum!” she called for not better reason than she wanted a breath of normality and loud enough to shatter the last dischord of her fantasy, “Mum!”

Daisy was downstairs. She’d got up early because she had no idea that it was, in fact, early. The sun had risen, but then that’s what suns do in summer, she reasoned, and this was summer, wasn’t it? And anyway she didn’t feel at all tired now that she was up. And there was something she must do downstairs.

What was it?

She stood by the hearth and decided it must be lighting the fire. Yes, she needed to light the fire because that’s what mothers do to fires in the morning.

“Now where’s the coal?” she asked herself, and forced her eyes shut so that she could picture the last place she’d seen the coal. Where was it?

Twenty years earlier, no, maybe even only ten years earlier, she would have known it was in the coal skuttle parked neatly next to the fire, but now, in her fifty-ninth year, it ceased to be a coal skuttle but something to do with Brian’s school work and best ignored. After all, brian was a clever boy knew science and hard things likle that, and would do with it what needed to be done when he came home from camp.

The only thing she got right was Brian being at camp, though there was no doubt that he was also clever enough to have won the place at summer camp.

Then she heard a voice through the shadows in her mind.
“Mum!” that voice called, “Mum!”

I know who that is, she decided, it’s my little brother Ian and he’s done something silly like little brothers do, she decided, probably got his whatsit caught in his shorts button and needs a big sister to help him…

But rationality began to take over.

No, it can’t be him, she went on to consider the source of what might be a desperate cry for help, he joined the army, didn’t he, went off to fight the hun, bold and brave, my sweet little brother Ian…

The her mind moved on. Of course he left the army with ribbons and medals! He bought that caravan in Skegness, didn’t he, and we went there once. Or was it twice? My memory isn’t what it used to be…

And finally, when the urgently voiced “Mum!” came again it must have struck a more recent chord.

Isabel, that’s who it is, of course it is, she’d probably getting ready for school… I’ll go up the stairs and make sure she’s all right. I know what little girls can be like when they’re so excited. I was a little girl once, wasn’t?”…

She stared one last time at the fireplace, shook her head when she realised that of course it was summer and they didn’t need a fire lighting anyway, and called out, “Isabel, is that you, precious.” and somehow found her way to the foot of the stairs/

“Mum, it’s all right, I was only dreaming,” came down to her, and she sighed her own relief at the news.

“I’m coming down,” called Isabel, “just you wait, I’ll be in the bathroom cleaning my teeth and then I’ll be down with you and I’ll make you a nice cup of tea…”

There were too many words there for Daisy to get her head round. And she needed one of her pills. Doctor Horne didn’t give her so many these days, he said they had side effects and she should be wary of taking too many, but she wasn’t at all certain why. And how many were too many? He hadn’t said that, had he?

What are side effects anyway?

Anyway, she sorted out some sense in what Isabel had shouted down to her.

“I’m coming up,” she shouted to Isabel, knowing in her heart that this was the right thing for her to be doing.

And she looked up the stairs once she’d reached the bottom via a cloakroom where she looked to see what she might need and decided that she needed nothing because she didn’t think it was raining upstairs, and then the kitchen where she filled the kettle with water and failed to light the gas ring or even turn the gas on, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

The stairs looked steep today, and it seemed an anwfully long way up them. But Isabel needed her, and up she would go.

And up she went until she was even with the window that looked out on next door’s landing window.

There’s Tiddles, she thought as the black and white cat living next door and sleeping on the landing window sill in that house waved at her with its long black tail

Cheeky thing! she thought, and she waved at it with her right arm, the one that had been holding on to the banister, the one that had kept her almost safe.

Then she decided that the cat needed to be stroked. If she opened her window she might just be able to reach across the gap between the two houses and Tiddles might open their window and reach her head out, and she could stroke it.

Nobody could have told right then, but as her feet slipped and slithered and lost their grip on the stairs, and gravity did its thing and took over, what her immediate thought was and whether it was her last thought.

Because, when Isabel went out of the bathroom, toothbrush in hand, to see what all the noise was, there was her mother Daisy quite still at the bottom of the stairs.

She knew, instinctively, that she was dead. Her precious mother who had been fighting against the strains of living, of bringing up a daughter and a son on her own, that woman, was dead.

THE END

© Peter Rogerson 12.03.23

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