Angry Moon

Chapter 19a

     Margaret Lewis bustled busily around the house, dusting and polishing.

     She'd already done the kitchen and the bathroom, leaving every surface spotless and gleaming. Now she was doing the living room. Wiping the dust from the framed photographs of the family and from the shelves and cupboards that lined the walls. Plumping the cushions on the chairs and sofa and wiping fingerprints from the mirror and the television screen.

     The radio was playing in the background, something from the last century, but she was barely listening to it. In her mind, she was replaying memories of her life here. The happy times, such as when they'd first moved in with two young children who could no longer share a bedroom. The frightening times, such as when one of the children had come down with a mystery illness, or Paul was waiting to hear whether he was going to be made unemployed with debts that they couldn’t possibly repay on a job seeker’s allowance. In her mind, the walls echoed with laughter and tears, emotions that had soaked in over the past twenty years, making the house almost an extension of her soul. She and Paul had talked about selling up and buying something smaller now that the children had left home, but in their hearts they had both known that they were going to grow old in this house together. It had become so much a part of them that they hadn't been able to imagine living anywhere else.

     She would vacuum the carpet next and then, if she had time, she would do the bedrooms and the spare room. She wanted the whole house to be spotless. She would be leaving soon. Leaving forever in all likelihood, and even though she knew what would happen to the house when the floodwaters came, she wanted her last memory of it to be like this. Spotless and immaculate. The house that she and Paul had made into a home and in which they had raised two fine children.

     The phone rang. Space Oddity by David Bowie. Chosen by their son Richard as a joke when Paul had been chosen to go up to the Space Station. “Answer phone,” she said, straightening up and leaving the duster lying across the arm of the sofa.

     “Hi, Mum,” said Hazel, her daughter, her voice issuing from the speakers around the living room. The same speakers used by the television and the music system. The radio continued to play, but at a lower volume. “Just wanted to let you know that the car's come. You okay?”

     “Fine,” Margaret replied, wiping the tears from her eyes and trying to keep her voice under control. “I'm just doing a bit of cleaning and polishing while I wait. Just something to keep my mind occupied. How are you?”

     “We're okay,” Hazel replied. She did indeed sound okay, Margaret thought, a little bitterly. She and Len had only moved into their house a few months ago. She didn't have the same emotional investment in it that Margaret did in hers. Her house was just bricks and mortar. It hadn't become a home yet. They hadn't even had time to decorate. As for her childhood home, she'd severed her emotional bonds with the place when she'd moved out. Her happy memories of the place were just that, memories. She’d already moved on from it.

     “Len’s loading everything in, all the stuff we're taking with us,” she continued. “It's not much. They said two suitcases. One for clothes, the other for valuables and memorabilia. We haven’t really got much, though. To be honest, we're having trouble filling two suitcases.”

     Margaret made a sound of agreement while looking around the house. Everything she could see held a memory. The expensive china on display in a wall cabinet, for instance. She'd inherited it from her mother, who’d been taken from them early by a nasty new cancer they hadn't found a cure for yet, just a year after her husband, Margaret’s father, a Commander in the navy and a member of the peacekeeping force, had been killed by an IED in South Africa. Then there was the chest of drawers they'd brought with them from their first home. Scratched and dented, but which they’d never dreamt of replacing. And the clay dinosaur that Richard had made in school at the age of seven. It had pride of place on the shelf over the fireplace despite having been broken and glued together after Hazel had hit it with a ball that had bounced in an unexpected direction. So many things. So many memories.