The Hollow Shell
Malina Douglas
Emptiness. That’s what she feels now. Long streets that go on for ages and one row house after another. All with beige façades, square white windows, protruding stone vestibules topped with little glass balconies. The white doors all with glossy brass letter-slots, and the bins are all lined in a row.
She walks on – in small steps with short legs.
The emptiness of the open grass field with its small square of playground. Hemmed in by two sides of beige flats and the road – long and curving and ending in the flat line of the field beyond. Balbriggan. Not that far up the coast from Dublin but far enough to be another world.
The emptiness of sky, leached of emotion and colour – pale white, and the surface of the clouds is knitted together. Reminds her of how her mam knits. Whose stern voice stirred her from daydreams and told her to get on with the housework. Those scarves from her are still folded in the back of the wardrobe, but they’ve gone musty now. She really should wash them.
She used to go all the way across the field – where the land sort of rises and the grasses are high and a small strip of land goes up through them – where you turn and catch your breath a little and there, across the green mass of the field, are the buildings spread out before her, white and beige with their glassy window stares, behind them the soothing straight line of the sea.
Now she hardly even goes to the field’s edge – her old legs are not what they used to be. Yet she finds herself tracing the paths she walked countless times with Frankie, even though he’s long since dead and gone. She walks as if there’s a ghost dog beside her, and sometimes she stretches one arm out, as if he’s pulling, ever so gently, on the lead.
There’s beauty in the lawn, its long, gently curved stretches, in the tiny white flowers sometimes sprinkled along it, in the departing sun gilding the grasses at the corner of the long field. But you get immune to it, as if you’ve taken too much medication. She stops. Frowns. Has she taken her tablets? She really should take them.
She turns back towards the flats.
A white flat in a row of white flats. Inside smells of disinfectant and the saccharine potpourri she uses to mask it. As always, it’s steeped in silence.
They’ve moved out, her girls. Fluttered off to live lives of their own. One to the Killarney Lakes, the other to County Cork. She’s alone with the photos of the children on the wall, with shelves of dolls who gaze out vacantly, with the china handed down from her mother, with old Barney the cat who sleeps most of the day.
Her flat is like a hollowed-out shell, left empty by a hermit crab departing.
It’s a fine flat, a council flat – she ought to be happy, really – the sun always shines the same on the white walls surrounding and opposite her – but she isn’t.
Every year the bills go up and new walls go up and new people move in and the neighbourhood gets more crowded and expensive and dangerous – Oh mercy me!
She wipes her brow.
She wants to slow it all down – stop everything from moving – but she can’t and because of that she feels helpless.
And she really ought not to go out too much now, not with all those robbers and murderers and paedophiles at large. The spectres that haunt suburbia. Summoned by the serious voices of newscasters.
She rubs her temples. Oh, she really ought not to think of it. She should simply get on with things.
She plunges her hands into warm soapy water and resumes scrubbing dishes.
She has small hands with short fingers, so small she used to be teased for them. But these little hands have raised two girls and done decades of housework. Even after Stephen left, they’ve carried on doing everything, as always.
Because it has to be done.
She sets down the last plate, its immaculate surface pale and round as a moon-disc. She can’t remember the last time she saw the moon.
She straightens up, sighs, and peels off her blue rubber gloves. Sets them down by the sink.
Totters over to the window. The street of the cul-de-sac is empty and the white flats opposite stare back benignly as ever. Or malignly. For there are people behind those shuttered curtains who gossip about her, who spread poisonous thoughts. There are people somewhere behind those walls who are jealous that she was given this flat by the council while they had to pay for it. There are people who would like to see it taken away from her.
But what then? She can’t imagine life beyond these walls. There is only white blankness, negation.
They could be watching her, the neighbours. Or other dark forces. She closes the curtains.
They’re getting more brazen, those bandits. Breaking into homes in broad daylight. Not that she’s seen them but that’s what the newscasters say. They could be watching her out there – spying that she’s a single woman alone. Alone except for a drowsy old cat who sleeps all day.
They’re like gravity holding your feet down – you never see them, but you know that they’re there.
She puts on the kettle and makes a cup of tea. Dash of milk and two sugars. Totters into the sitting room. Flicks on the telly.
Barney in the armchair beside her stirs faintly and settles back into slumber. She runs a little hand across his charcoal grey fur.
How much time has passed? She doesn’t know. Her brow creases. Has she taken her medication? Better take some just in case. She goes back into the kitchen. Shakes two tablets, round and white, into her palm. She’s so used to taking them she can swallow them without water.
On the way back to the sitting room pauses. Walks to the window. Gently parts the curtain.
The sky is pearlescent now and beyond the row of white flats, invisible but surely felt, is the long flat line of the soothing sea. She used to go for walks, sit on the rocks there. The sea used to soothe her. She’s put shells on the windowsills and in the mornings she can hear the wailing of the gulls.
But it’s not what it used to be.
These days junkies and pot-smoking teenagers and all kinds of ruffians hang out there. She’s found needles in the sand. Shakes her head at the thought.
Just down the road the long soft waves are crashing. Over and over.
She picks up a shell from the windowsill, turns it over in her little wrinkled hands. A memory of a beach walk stirs to life, when her daughter’s hand folded into hers. She shakes her head. Puts it down.
The sky’s pale peach and yellow now. To be true, there is beauty in small things like this, the scalloped spread of clouds, the last light on the buildings. An invitation perhaps, to the world outside, where the near-but-far wavelets are foaming…
Oh, but never mind the sky. She yanks the curtain shut. It’s dangerous out there and there are dishes in the sink and Barney needs feeding and the mail needs sorting and her mam’s scarves piled up in the wardrobe – she really should wash them.
Malina Douglas enjoys exploring diverse perspectives, delving into the minds of characters, and evoking place. She has been published in Flash Fiction Magazine, Metamorphose V2, Indigo: A Western Australian Journal of Writing, and Every Second Sunday: A Seoul Writers’ Anthology. She was nominated as the Gold Writer of the ArtAscent Bliss issue. Other publications include Foilate Oak, Consequence Magazine, Rhythm & Bone, The Antipodean, Secret Attic and Sobotka Literary Magazine. She has been published in the anthologies Sea Glass Hearts, When it is Time, The Monsters We Forgot and Gothic Blue Books Vol 6: A Krampus Carol. She tweets @iridescentwords.
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