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Edith phoned her only child, Christine, to tell her about her father,
Stan, being in hospital. A coronary, nothing too serious, but Edith
requested Christine and Jimayka move down so that Jimayka, an only grandchild,
could spend a bit of time with Stan, in case he didn't make it. Within
a week of their arrival, Stan was dead after another coronary.
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Stan's sisters gathered after the funeral while Edith gave out precious
things her husband would've wanted them to have. They'd been a close
family, Stan and his four sisters.
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"SISTERHOOD: FEMINIST HEADGEAR WORN BY SIBLINGS," Edith said as she
closed the door on her last visitor. And that was the beginning of
her creative recovery. She had rediscovered the joy of words.
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Stan had never taken to her verbal pleasures.
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"She'd be better off saving money by spending time sewing and knitting.
Not mucking around with words," he'd once been heard to say.
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Stan had been as good to edith as he knew how. She was the first
amongst her friends to get a colour tv, microwave, computerised washing
machine. He'd been a good provider and a good father.
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Christine's father. Had he forgiven her before he died?
He once said he should never have let her go overseas.
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She had lived in London for some years in a squat. That wasn't
so bad. She had worked in a pub, that was okay too. But when
she took up with a Jamaican Londoner, that was kept pretty quiet.
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"How about this?" Edith enquired,
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"SEVENTIES: HOLY AMOUNT OF NECKWARE FROM DECADES AGO. The seventies
is the decade, seven's a holy number and ties are neckware. Not bad."
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Christine's relationship with Jimayka's father hadn't lasted long,
it hadn't meant much to either of them. The day Christine saw him
for the last time at the Notting Hill festival with a smiling blonde woman
was the same day she'd had a positive pregnancy result.
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"ALBINO: VERY PALE, WHEN RELEASED ON BAIL. See? On bail
is albino mixed up. Not bad." Edith wrote in her notebook as she recalled,
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"He was pale, Stan was. People thought he was albino sometimes."
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Christine was familiar with her mother's grieving processes since her
father had died. All she had to do was listen. Fond memories
of motherhood and family life were often awakened as they watched Jimayka
playing, toddling around inside her cardboard boxes, hiding the keys, getting
into the pots and pans cupboard, rearranging the clothes-pegs and squirreling
them away for later, so that when christine or edith came to hang out the
washing, neither could find any pegs.
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Edith remembered how she had settled into becoming a wife and mother,
gradually giving away the intersts of her single life: tennis-playing and
short story writing, and replacing them with more suitable pastimes like
dressmaking, cooking, and gardening.
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"SINISTER PLOT:" hollered Edith. "WHERE EVIL IDEAS ARE GROWN
BY A LEFT-HANDED GARDENER."
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Long summer evenings saw Edith sitting outside reading about Thomas
the Tank Engine to Jimayka, who was fascinated by the way the text looked,
the pictures seemed to be less important. Jimayka also loved to sort
through Edith's stack of paper printed with black and white squares patterned
unevenly, which was always near to Edith, who would exclaim puzzlingly,
quickly writing things down before she forgot.
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"TRAIN: TEACH IT TO STAY ON TRACK."
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"AXLE: ALEX THINKS THE WORLD REVOLVES AROUND HIM."
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"SCENARIO: DRAMATIC CAR NOISE IS PART OF IT."
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"CARMEN: THE CHAPS WHO DRIVE BIZET."
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Edith sent her crosswords away hopefully to The Times newspaper in
London. She died at summer's end, Edith passed away quietly in the
night.
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EPITAPH: COMMEMORATIVE TIP HEAP.
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