Faded Dreams
written by: Deryn Graham
Donna pulled down the retractable ladder and latched it into place. Twisting her loose hair into a ponytail, she tied it with the scrunchy from her wrist, took a deep breath, and put her foot on the first rung, feeling considerably less steady than the metal contraption apparently was.
She had never once been into the loft of her parents’ home. Since they had moved in when Donna was very small, it had been a repository for anything that her mother wanted to keep but that her father didn’t want cluttering up the cupboards in the house. Once a year, when the annual spring clean yielded something else to be consigned to eternal oblivion – gone but not forgotten, as her mother used to say – he was sent up the ladder, shaking his head, always muttering something about rubbish meant for the tip.
Donna flicked the light switch that her cell phone torch picked out and was grateful that the bulb still worked. Tucking her phone in her shirt pocket, she levered herself over the threshold of the loft into the vast space under the rafters that spanned the entire footprint of the house’s upper storey. She was immediately welcomed by the detritus of her family’s life, each year’s haul pushing the previous year’s further into the dark recesses.
Donna was assailed by a tide of memories – there was the broken rocking horse, Dobbin, its paint cracked and peeling, but its eyes still glinting in the half-light. A dressmaker’s dummy stood to attention on one side, a paper sewing pattern partially pinned to its torso. Donna had no recollection of her mother ever sewing anything and had no clue as to where it might have come from. A train set took up a large part of the floor space. Her brothers had spent hours constructing the tracks, stations, and signal system, adding trees, ponds, and passengers on the platforms. All of these figures were now toppled and covered in dust, and Donna had to wonder how on earth her father had got the whole thing up the ladder and safely stowed, only to be re-discovered many years later.
She heard Josh, her younger brother, shout from down on the landing. ‘Hey, Donna, why didn’t you wait for us? It’s not fair!” His familiar refrain, ever the underdog, made her smile, and she leaned forward and poked her head down through the square opening.
“I feel like Howard Carter when he discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb! It’s like a treasure chest, full of ‘wonderful things’!” She extended her hand to Josh. Dan, the oldest of the three siblings, stood, hands on hips, squinting up at her.
“Hey, sis, how you going up there?”
“Let’s just say we’ve got our work cut out for us,” Donna said, shifting across the struts to make room for her brothers. She shoved a pile of sealed, cardboard boxes to one side and sat atop it, dusting off the knees of her jeans.
Since their parents’ death, Dan, Donna, and Josh had pledged to get the house sorted and ready for sale. None of them wanted to keep the property – they each had their own places in three different corners of the country. With young families of their own, they were all looking forward to their share of the money the house sale would raise. The shock of losing both their parents together in the same accident had delayed them making a start, the grief at being orphaned in one fell swoop paralysing them all.
Having successfully sorted and distributed the contents of wardrobes and kitchen cabinets over the last few weeks, they were now ready to confront the ghosts residing in the loft.
The boys made straight for the train set and started blowing off the cobwebs and righting the loose pieces.
“We used to come up and play with this even after mum had us clean it out of our room,” Josh said, nostalgia creeping into his voice. “But there’s no electricity up here, except for the light, so we had to make the chuffing noises ourselves, and push the locos round by hand, so it was never the same,” he added, sadly.
“Well, that accounts for its being all set up,” said Donna, one mystery of the loft settled.
Most of the stuff was stored in sealed up cardboard boxes. Donna stood.
“Here, give me a hand with this,” she said, trying to work one end of a strip of packing tape free.
The box was full of old hardback books and had an old photo album on top. The three crowded round in the poorly lit space, and Dan took out his phone for more light as Donna lifted the album out, folded the flaps of the box closed, and laid it out on top.
Leaves of delicate tissue paper separated each of the pages. They crackled and crinkled as Donna gently turned them, peering at the pictures of the family, long divided by distance and time.
Poring over the album, they noticed that instead of moving forward in time, it retraced their history, starting with a recent past that they all recognised. Then, it went backwards. So, they started at the beginning, which was really the end.
Photos of Donna and her brothers at school proms, walking along a beachfront promenade, and digging in the sand. There were first days at school in uniforms designed to last, blazer sleeves hanging half empty at their sides. Together they turned the pages in uncustomary silence, each engrossed in their own memories.
Then, the baby years, starting with Donna and Dan, cradling a newborn Josh. Then Dan pushing Donna’s pram, and finally Dan on his own, swaddled in a blanket, nestled against a lacy pillow.
Then they came to the wedding photos, their mother looking serene in a satin dress with a sweetheart neck and long train. On closer inspection, the dashing groom next to her was not their father.
The three looked at each other, puzzled, unspoken questions on their lips. A family secret had gone with their parents to their graves.
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