A PERFECT LIFE

A woman's life under a microscope

      Glenys Fisher had never had it so good, or that’s what she truly believed. Except for her childhood that is. That hadn’t been so special because back in those days there had always been fear in the air. There were H-bombs in the news just about every day, and her parents worried about what such monstrous things might do to their town when they fell. Might one make digging the garden and planting cauliflowers into a waste of time? It wasn’t if they fell but always when. In fact, her father, the man she both feared and hated most in all the world, thought it might comfort her if he cuddled her, and he cuddled her a bit too intimately for her own peace of mind, and the tragedy to beat all tragedies was her mother knew and didn’t mind because when the swine was cuddling Glenys he wasn’t cuddling the mother.

Then there was Mr Cradditch at school, the caretaker who had a reputation for liking little girls, and he had taken a liking to her until she decided enough was enough and screamed loud enough to waken the dead, which had got her into a whole lot of trouble including the cane on her right hand, her writing hand.

But that had all been in her childhood, and when she left school she surprisingly discovered that the world was a good place to explore. The H-bomb fears had somehow dissolved away and there was more confidence in the smiling faces that surrounded her when she started work in Wooleorth’s on the High Street.

It was there she met Anthony, a customer who turned out to be her first boy friend. And it was then when she found out that her mother warned her there are some things that she should be wary of when it came to boys.

“You don’t want to bring shame on your family,” warned that good and very patient woman.

“What do you mean,” mum?” she had asked.

“You know, duckie, what your father sometimes tries to do to me,” replied her mother coyly.

“And says he wants to do to me one day,” Glenys braved to say, and the older mother rose up in a volcano of indignation and looked so shocked Glenys wished that she’d not said any such thing.

“What are you doing, trying to ruin a good man’s reputation?” she shouted, “and don’t you say that to anyone else or you’ll find yourself out on the streets with no pillow for your head! He’s a good man, is your father, and don’t you forget it!”

She had left home to live with Anthony soon after that .She knew her father was +anything but a good man, had the proof if grubby fingermarks on her underwear and since washed off constituted proof, and never spoke of her father again. Until he died, that is, cancer they said, and she was working in the store at the time of the funeral and hadn’t gone.

Maybe she should have said a kind of hesitant farewell to the man who had provided her mother with the sperm that had made her. But no. Her good life had started and there was no way she was going to let it stop if it came to taking time off work for the burial of that man. So in order to make some kind of amends she had walked with Anthony through the cemetery where he’d been laid to rest and paused by the newly dug plot with tits simple wooden marker bearing his name in what .looked like marker ink, and said to the boyfriend,

“That’s where they put my dad.”

“I heard he died,” said Anthony, “didn’t you like him?”

“He was all right,” conceded Glenys, “Like dads are.”

“Mine’s a b*****d,” Anthony had told her, “which is why I’ve got the flat that we share. I wasn’t going to spend another minute under the same roof as him in his house, the way he found fault with every single thing I did.”

Life with Anthony became a drag after a few months but even so it was better than life at home had been, but now her father was dead she began to wonder about seeing if mum would welcome her back. After all, her room was still there and mum probably needed some company especially during the long grey winters like this one.

But mum didn’t want her back because she’d found Simon, an elderly lonely man who said he really loved her. But there was a huge plus. Simon had a son who was visiting, and that son, Barry, was like an angel. He looked right, dressed properly and when he opened his mouth a sounded right. And what’s more, he was on the look out for a girl his father would approve of, and his father, Simon, besotted by Glenys’s mum was bound to see little wrong with Glenys. Which is how it worked out, so it was goodbye to boring Anthony and hello to the best of all worlds, a good looking man with a whole house (his family home) to himself, and an intense fondness for Glenys, right from the very beginning.

So she left Woolworth’s store when she got pregnant, an event that was swiftly followed by wedding bells. Barry wasn’t the sort of man to want to admit that he’d fathered a child out of wedlock, though he had, but it wasn’t so far out of wedlock to cause him more than a small sniff of worry.

So she was a married woman and still in her teens. Barry had a good job (with the council) and a steady income was coming in, and he was caring in every possible way. All she had to do in return was prepare his meals, which is something she loved doing anyway, and Barry, being the angel that he was, always demonstrated his willingness to help even if that willingness was simply standing as close to her as he could and whispering the sort of things a young wife likes to hear into her ears.

Nothing was wrong in her world, though her mother passed away before she should have, and the years mounted up as the family grew, four children by the time they’d forged it, two of each, which was practically perfect. The children even did well at school and they all went on the either college or university, leaving more time for Glenys to enjoy life and love.

Until, that is, just after her sixtieth birthday, there came a knock on the door, and when he answered it Barry went whiter than driven snow, if that’s possible.

It was a policeman and he looked so severe it made Glenys shudder.

“Barry Hunter,” said the policeman, “I have here a warrant for your arrest for the murder of Cynthia Fisher You do not have to say anything. But, it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”

Cynthia Fisher was Glenys’s mother, and she had been dead for several years. And the perfect Barry was the one who had se nt her to the hereafter, was he? She looked beseechingly at him, but his face told the truth like it always did. Her perfect life had suddenly and horribly come to an end.

© Peter Rogerson 03.02.24

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Reviews

[Lorry]

Just goes to show you what a perfext life contains, too many flaws and too much past migh5 catch us, but its what we make of our lives for ourselves.
Until a Barry comes along and cant wait to balance the scales more in their favour.
Great story, very well told. I think this bamboozled my head so much it tried to run away in 14 directions at once.
And as we know, just when we think life is just peachy and all is tickety boo, well theres usually not much of a gap between thinking that and SLAM!!! 😊

[emmajoygreen]

What a finely written story, sad as sad for some time leading to a life with problems and doubts bound to cause mayhem in Glenys' life. poor woman. Your words truly flow, drawing in the reader, a story neither too bereft of details yet enough to create a very clear theatrical performance. Your characters are more than visual, your dialogue 'on the nose' . Fare more people should stop a while and read your words, they are well worth a few minutes' focus in Cafe world

'But mum didn’t want her back because she’d found Simon, an elderly lonely man who said he really loved her. But there was a huge plus. Simon had a son who was visiting, and that son, Barry, was like an angel. He looked right, dressed properly and when he opened his mouth a sounded right. And what’s more .. ... '