THE END OF EVERYTHING

Colette, aged 87...

Colette lowered herself so slowly she was barely aware of the movement, into her bed, and sighed.

It had been a long day and at eighty seven she was exhausted even though she hadn’t achieved much with all that time and all those years. But that was par for the course.

Her mind slowly slipped from worrying about today and went quietly to a sort of nowhere, and it was in that nowhere she could hear a discordant muttering of familiar voices. Quiet voices, well-known voices, friends from the Home where she had been talked into spending her last few years, a background hum that both comforted her and distressed her.

Would Peter have come here had he lived a great deal longer? To this haven for the aged, the very nearly-dead? She asked her self the same question most nights as sleep descended from the nowhere that it had from her when she was awake and settled onto her like a cosy ethereal blanket when she slept.

Peter would have been her twin, but he passed away while they were still in their mother’s womb, but out of courtesy or grief he had been called Peter, and she frequently found herself wondering, What if he had lived?

The voices seemed to form themselves into a wall of not exactly sound but something closely related to it, something she could think she could hear, and she could almost detect meaning in the odd words that were part of it. But it was still a meaningless sort of mush.

How is the poor dear? Was that Gladys?

And is that what she was now? A lump of geriatric flesh that they looked on as a poor dear? In the same way as she had looked upon her own mother who had struggled through her late seventies until she finally gave up the ghost, all those years ago?

She can’t have long left…That was Janie, the quiet one from her corner...

Maybe they were planning who was going to have her bed next? After all, she knew there was a waiting list and times were getting to be hard…

She’s so still… is she still breathing​? Sounded like Sylvia

Maybe I am breathing and maybe I’m not but the fog is all around me, I can’t they see my own breath…

Call matron… I think she’s gone…

Are you sure, Karen?

Look at the colour of her dear face… she’s gone all right, the poor dear…

So she has, to her Maker, to the Elysian fields...

I’ll show them that I’m here and let them know that it’s here I’m going to stay for some time yet! Elysian fields, I don’t think… let me take a look, open my eyes, make them all jump...…

It was a battle forcing her eyes open but she won it.

The light was dazzling like it never was in the Home, and she had to blink several times to adjust to it. At least, it felt like blinking.

Then she saw him, the tall and handsome man standing there and looking down at where she lay on the grassy turves of a place she couldn’t remember seeing before and certainly not where she knew that her bed had been when she climbed into it.

But wasn’t he a looker! If only she wasn’t so old or she’d take a turn on the dance floor with him, spin around in his arms, maybe rub her bottom against his crotch…

Then he spoke.

“Colette, I’ve been waiting,” he said, his voice smooth, his eyes twinkling in all that sudden wonderful light,

What was he saying? Waiting for her? If only!

“You don’t remember, do you?” he said, still smiling, “but it was a long time ago and you were so small…”

Then, is a crazy instant, she did remember!

“Peter!” she exclaimed, “It’s you, isn’t it?”

And as a sort of memory collapsed into itself it seemed that she did remember as he bent down and took her by one hand and pulled her up.

“Come along, Colette,” he said, smiling.

“Where… I mean, how? Where to?” she stammered.

His smile softened. “To the end,” he said, almost sadly, “the end of everything.”

© Peter Rogerson 18 04.25