Smoke and Mirrors
written by: Adele Evershed
@AdLibby1
The attic had that smell you also found in a church hall, musty with a tang of lost potential. Sheila moved a wooden crate full of yellowing paper curling at the corners; they bore an uncanny resemblance to her fingernails after a life of nicotine use. Sighing, she took out her packet of cigarettes, struck a match, and sucked down the smoke like a hard-won compliment.
Everyone who lived in the narrow terraced house where Sheila had grown up smoked. Her Aunt Nan used a tortoiseshell holder, which gave her the slightly scandalous air of an actress; her mother smoked strong, unfiltered Woodbines, and her father rolled skinny white worm-like ciggies, which he called fags. Thinking about it now, it seemed to Sheila that her whole childhood had been shrouded in a creeping sepia. The net curtains, which gave an outward air of respectability, had started out virginal, but by the time her Aunt had been living with them for two years, resembled the urine poured from the chamber pot each morning.
Sheila had been a change of life baby; her mother had been fifty-three when she gave birth. To the young Sheila, her mother was always an old woman; she looked nothing like her sister Nan. Sheila picked up a photograph from the top of a tea crate. It was a family portrait; Nan’s hair puffing around her head like a dark halo, whereas her mother’s hair was flat and downtrodden. According to her mother, Sheila was a colicky baby, constantly crying, and in the photograph, even as a baby, Sheila looked like she had nothing to look forward to.
Once she left school, Sheila started working in a haberdashery. She loved the quiet order of the wooden shelves stacked with straw hats, ribbons, blouses, calicoes, and hosiery. She also loved the busyness of the shop, the flow of customers, and the company of the two other assistants, Bess and Josie, who were both Sheila’s age. When the war started, working at the shop also meant she could get away from her mother’s suffocating worrying about her brother Gerald.
Bess had left the shop when she married her childhood sweetheart. Bob had come back from the war missing a leg, but luckily, his family owned a butcher’s shop, so he had a guaranteed income and, in Bess, a willing worker. Josie’s beau had died at the Somme, and her brother had been gassed; his lungs were weakened, so Josie left to nurse him. Sheila still worked at the shop with a young woman who gave her pitying looks when she started talking about how she didn’t understand how they could be on the brink of another war when the Great War was supposed to end all wars.
Apart from Sheila, everyone in the photograph was now dead. Her bother, Gerald, was killed in the Great War, and on hearing the news, her father suffered a stroke that meant he was bed-bound for the rest of his life. The house that had already been quiet became silent. Her mother and Aunt passed each other like strangers on the stairs as they took turns to nurse him. Only later in life did Sheila realize her Aunt and mother never spoke directly to each other. They would use Sheila as a go-between, telling Sheila something they wished the other to hear, like, “Father seemed a bit brighter this morning. Maybe he’d manage some of my soup today.” Or tasking Sheila to pass on a message, “Go find Nan and tell her we are all out of soap so she can get some at the market.” Once her father passed away, her Aunt faded into her room, taking her meals on a tray and only going out to attend church. But her mother seemed energized. She removed the net curtains, unpinned her hair, and stopped attending church.
Sheila wrapped the photograph in newspaper and pushed up her sleeves. She started moving boxes and trunks until she found what she sought. Hidden away in a dusty corner was her Aunt’s suitcase. When her Aunt passed away, Sheila’s mother gave away all her clothes to the church jumble sale and told Sheila to burn anything else. When Sheila had started sorting through her Aunt’s bedroom, she found a small pink suitcase full of notebooks. When she flicked through them, she realized they were her Aunt’s diaries. The writing was small and cramped. Sheila had thought she would sit down and read them one day, so she pushed them into the attic so her mother would not know she had kept them.
Her mother had lived well into her nineties, and Sheila and she had rubbed along like a washcloth and soap, very different from each other but mutually dependent. In the last years of her life, her mother often told Sheila that she never wanted her as a daughter and that things would have been so different if Gerald had come home from the war. Once, she even said she had stopped loving Sheila’s father once Nan had moved in. The doctor told Sheila that her mother didn’t mean what she was saying, but Sheila felt they rang with the peal of truth.
In the attic, she ran her fingers over her Aunt’s words. There, in blue-black ink, her Aunt had written, “George tells me it is not a sin to love. If that is true why do I feel I am betraying my sister.” And then Sheila read, “Nell has said she will bring up my Sheila as her own. She called me a whore but I think it suits her that George sleeps with me to save her the bother. My sadness is that my sweet girl will never know I am her mother but at least I will be near to watch her grow.”
- Smoke and Mirrors - September 12, 2024
- Moving On - June 22, 2024
- Hard Cheese - February 25, 2024
