Homeward Bound

Homeward Bound Chapter 9

'Is that you, Cara!' mum yelled out the minute I closed the front door behind me and wishing my throbbing knees would give over.

'Yes mum,' I called back, while muttering under my breath, 'who the hell do you think it would be.'

'You're in time for dinner,' she announced the minute I hobbled into the living room to face her.

'Dinner?' I repeated, as her eyes fell on my scrapped knees, 'Oh, what happened to you.'

'An encounter, that is all you need to know,' I ground out, eyeing the cat on the dining table again.

'I'll deal with the scrapes before I dish up dinner,' she offered.

'No, I'll do it,' I assured her, going off toward the bathroom, oh sorry wet room, to take closer look at my bashed body.

'Well, don't be long, I've just put the peas in the microwave, they shouldn't be that long,' she called out.

Peas in the microwave? What happened to actually boiling them in a bloody pan, I wondered, while sitting on the toilet seat to assess the damage to my knees, which wasn't as bad as I thought it was. Even the palms of my hands weren't too bad. It was my elbow and shoulder that had really copped it, looking red angry. I could see the bruising coming out before tomorrow.

'Dinner!' mum shouted out, which had me jumping and wishing I was else where than here but then remembering there wasn't anywhere else now.

I joined mum in the kitchen, where she was dishing up cottage pie, but not that kind that most made. Oh no, mum had to add things like carrots and baked beans to her cottage pie, along with the chunky bits of onion in a charcoal like gravy, lumpy as normal. As for the mash... I could already see it wasn't mash at all, more broken down over cooked potatoes.

'I thought we could eat of trays watching the news,' mum said, while I eyed up the cat still on the dining table, licking its arse.

'Dad would never allow that,' I reminded her, thinking nothing of swiping my arm at Tibbles, catching the creature off guard, so she skidded off the table and landed on the floor, amazingly on her feet.

'Things had changed, Cara,' mum confessed, while turning to get a tray from the shelf above the dining table, while I grabbed the slimy cloth and slapped it on the table.

'Well, I think we should eat at the table,' I overruled her.

'But the news,' she bleated.

'The ten o clock news will be much better,' I suggested, now making it clear we would eat at the table I had cleaned once again from cat hairs with a cloth that probably needed boiling or burning.

She gave in and sat with me at the table, where conversation was limited to the fact that I had been rude to leave when someone wanted to talk to me.

'It was a man, said he was your boss,' she informed me.

'He'll call back,' I replied, pretty sure that would be the case.

'I told him that you'd just stepped out to deal with a personal matter,' she stated like she didn't think it was her right to tell my so called boss the death of my dad.

'Is that all?' I pushed her, trying my best to chew the mash that wasn't mash.

'Well I mentioned we'd had a death in the family when he probed about you not stating where you'd gone. I thought that was a bit bad of you Cara,' she scolded me.

'It escaped my mind, that is all,' I snapped out, now getting up from the table because as far as I was concerned another meal was over.

'Not normally like you,' she remarked, as I took her empty plate and added my own to it before I left it by the sink to be washed up.