The Brightlings

11. More than blood

The public waiting area is sparsely furnished and devoid of life, aside from a seemingly comatose man slumped on one of the wall-mounted seats, wrapped in a Mexican-style poncho. The peak of a royal blue baseball cap, with a request to 'Keep Calm And Drink Beer' emblazoned on the front in bold white letters, shields his eyes from the sun that streams through the window, framing him in a parallelogram of light.

His outstretched legs are clad in stained pin-striped navy blue suit trousers. His feet are adorned with green speckled socks, and a pair of grimy flip-flops. His head is tilted back and his mouth hangs wide open, a stream of spittle running from his lower lip down into to his unruly grey beard. He reeks of an alcohol that is clearly far stronger than the hat suggests might be his tipple of choice.

Lucy carefully steps around him, and takes a seat a safe distance away next to a payphone that looks like it has had oxtail soup thrown at it, and not been wiped down in the weeks since it took the hit. Crusty brown splats cover the entire keypad, coin-slot, receiver and surrounding wall. She shuffles against the backrest to try and find some comfort, but the cold metal chair is functional at best, and she quickly realises that it is probably screwed to the wall for a reason. God only knows what happens in this room on a Saturday night, but at least the floor looks like it has been recently mopped.

Battle police station could not be described as modern in its choice of decor. The building itself must be well over a hundred years old. It's not her idea of a nice way to spend the morning, but they asked her to come, and now she is here.

She stares at a drugs awareness poster on the grubby mint green wall opposite. At least that is one thing that she doesn't feel too worried about. Felix has never shown an interest in drinking, let alone drugs.

Although he did have a lighter. He's bloody stupid if he's taken up smoking. Where would he get the money for cigarettes anyway?

She sighs under her breath, and for the umpteenth time that morning she pleads with herself to accept the fact that it is impossible to watch over her children every minute of the day. Besides, Felix will soon be an adult, and he needs to learn to make his own decisions. He has has already learned the hard way that if he makes mistakes, then he will have to live with the consequences of those mistakes for years to come.

You just can't keep them under your wing forever.

She reaches into her handbag for her purse, and flips it open to reveal a photograph behind a plastic panel framed by the brown leather. She has studied every detail many times before, but she will never tire of looking at it. It means more to her than any other. The very first photograph of her complete family unit, snapped at the hospital soon after Cookie was born. She cannot help but feel nostalgia and longing for that much simpler time, when life was still hard, but their problems were fewer. Felix looks so innocent, sitting on her lap smiling, clinging onto his sleeping baby brother, like he has been given a new toy and is refusing to let anybody else play with it. Alan is rarely captured on camera, but here he looks so proud, his arms wrapped tightly around his family, pulling them all together.

Together...

Lucy had known from a very early age that, one day, she wanted to have children, and when Alan came into her life, soon after university, it had been what her mother used to describe as 'a whirlwind romance'. They had married on a sunny Saturday in the autumn of 1984, a day of celebrations amid the bleakness of the cold war, the British miners strike and the Ethiopian famine. She can still picture their first dance, surrounded by family and friends, clinging onto each other, while they swayed around the make-shift dance floor in the old Constitutional Club.

When she loses herself in her memories, and cancels out the surrounding world, she can even hear the music and the applause.

Together in Electric Dreams...