No waiting, no waiting, no waiting today.
No waiting, no waiting, no waiting today,
No waiting, no waiting, no waiting AT ALL!
Daddy always laughs at the last part, and so do I. I ask him what color the word ‘encyclopedia’ is and he says he doesn’t know. It is, of course, a bright, electric blue. ‘What color is January, then?’ he asks me. ‘Like a garnet’, I say. I hold my book close in my cold hands.
The farmer was here again. I saw him leave. He takes the cows down to the field after milking, and on the way back he stops at my mother’s for coffee. He laughs a lot, and has black hair like my mother. I thought he might be there, so I waited among the trees until he had gone.
‘Rockin Around the Christmas tree.’ Auntie Betty has come to live with us. Listen to this Brenda Lee! I want pale face make-up and some shadow for my eyes and pale lipstick - but I’m not allowed. Betty steps into a green shift dress with navy trim, and a pair of navy high-heeled shoes. Her bag matches. She backcombs her short brown hair and sprays it with hairspray from an aerosol can. From beneath her fringe, two enormous, long-lashed eyes peer, brown and wide as a doe’s. In a haze of scent she leaves, hand in hand with Peter. Oh! I go and explore her dressing table, lifting bottles to study their contents, sniffing vials, reading mysterious sounding labels.
I don’t know how often they fought, I only know the times I heard them, usually at night. I would steal out of my bedroom and pit-pat half way down the stairs to listen. I sat on my carpet seat until I was cold, then pit-patted back to bed.
Mum wouldn’t allow me to have pop. When I went to Alison’s house, we always had pop; we had orangeade, Dandelion and Burdock, and my favorite, Sarsaparilla. I always wondered why that name was spelled such a different way from how you said it, but I never let on. I wished we could have pop when Ali came over. That time, we wanted to go in for a drink of water but the door was locked. I thought it was me, and I tried the big black handle again but it didn’t budge. I felt hot. I knew my mum was in there because the farmer had come by after he took the cows back. I said ‘oh well’ to Ali and we galloped back up the field on our pretend horses. Mine was a thoroughbred.
She is shouting and bawling. I go into the bathroom where I can hear daddy to ask what is the matter. Suddenly he is clinging to me, his body shaking with sobs, my father, a grown man, is crying, his face is trying to bury in my shoulder, and I am frozen. Frozen. Daddy is crying. Is mummy going? Is she?
My father took my brother and I to the station with our dour faced other aunt to see her off. Then we went to my aunt’s for lunch.
“A holiday will do her the world of good,” my aunt said reassuringly. “You’ll see.”
Then she and Daddy spoke in low tones the rest of the afternoon so that we couldn’t hear.
My mother never came back. The last we saw of her was that day at the station. She sat waving at us through the window before a grey smudge of steam obscured her from our view. As the train slowly pulled away, she was already gone.
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