The
entrance to the attic is a two foot by three foot oblong cut into the landing
ceiling, and with the covering panel removed she sits on its edge with her bare
feet dangling out above the step-ladder below. With every breath she feels as
though her self is sinking, subject to that familiar vertiginous sense of
falling asleep.
The
air moving about her head is cold as outside, this space so infrequently
visited it seems as if far distant, and yet is and always has been right here and
just these few feet above her head.
Lit
by a single bare bulb, the fixture screwed directly into one of the beams near
the entry hole, its farther reaches appear exponentially and inaccessibly dark,
the entirety empty now save for its skinny layer of deteriorating fibreglass
insulation.
She
has a sudden unwelcome memory of her husband as he had sat in his chair downstairs,
day after day, week after week, silently reading through western novels borrowed
from the town’s library, sometimes even two a day, cover to cover.
Old
curtains; carpet offcuts retained to replace those sections as might suffer
damage; two sets of crockery complete for a family of four; cheap prints of
non-descript paintings in their suitably cheap frames; ornaments of which she
had so little memory they may not ever have belonged to her, and no single
thing pertaining to her long-dead husband, nor any memory thereof: with all such
else having been incrementally removed and discarded all that remains now and
at her side, and not for the first time, this final box, the strips of
Sellotape which had once held it together now long dried out and hanging off in
brittle lengths, and the cardboard itself a little damp to the touch, soft and
absorbent, as unable to resist she opens it up, proceeding with the inevitable
and involuntary momentum of someone falling down stairs.
Content:
one Lone Ranger doll; one folded tabloid with its blunt headline “ELVIS PRESLEY
IS DEAD”; one envelope addressed, in a child’s handwriting, to “Mr Elvis Presley,
North America, USA”; and one small round Sellotape tin.
The
doll had been her eventual concession to that wish for toy guns from which she
had hoped to dissuade him, now curated by her long years after he himself had
outgrown and discarded it.
Removing
and replacing the mis-shapen white rubber stetson these years has left the
black hair underneath abraded back to the flesh-coloured plastic of the moulded
head, in the features of which she infers an unintended cruelty.
Once
crisp and bright blue, the garments are now faded out with age to an
almost-white, a strip of red material round the neck replacing the original
neckerchief he had lost in colour only, and again she considers the little
design painted onto the handle of both revolvers, wondering at whoever painted
this particular pair, employed in such daily fulfilment of all little boys’
violent desires, these tiny weapons to be lost inside their tiny hands.
The
plastic limbs shriek across and off each other as she moves them, the right leg
broken and glued together at its knee, a figure which were it to move at all
might do so only with a befittingly stiff and off-kilter limp.
Placing
her thumb firmly upon the figure’s groin, she is unsurprised and satisfied to
find this void, nothing but flat plastic beneath the relatively oversized stud
fastener on the fly.
Held
to her face it smells only of dust, her nose itching with expectation of the
sneeze which does not come.
Unfolded
from its envelope, she reads the words he had so carefully placed upon the writing paper,
each neat line the result of his having traced over a ruled sheet underneath.
Mother
(reading): “Dear Elvis Presley, I hope you are well. My favourite song of yours
is Rock a Hula Baby which I dance to with my mum. We have watched a lot of your
films on the television and my favourite is the one where you are wearing a
mask like the Lone Ranger.”
and
stops, in thinking back frustrated to no longer recall the reason she never did post the letter as she later reassured him that she indeed had*, failing
also to locate any memory of his ever having been disappointed at receiving no
response, understanding perhaps even at his age that Elvis was simply far too
busy to answer such volume of fan mail.
And
this time without recourse to the newspaper remembering too the day they learned
of his death, and having sent him on up to his bed found him shortly after
crying in the bathroom, and his desperate attempt at convincing her it was his
ankle as grieved him so, and not a heart broken upon its unfathomable
loss.
Again,
she carefully returns each of the items to their box, replaces the box itself
back within reach within the otherwise empty attic, and manoeuvres herself out
and onto the ladder, switching off the bulb, pulling down and bolting the cover
behind her before climbing back down into the familiarity of her home.
For
just one more year the wasps will have to share this space with the remnant of
her memories, until they can finally claim it as their own.
*She
will be abandoned by her sanity before ever recalling such depth of concern suffered
that it might be her son, and not her, with whom the man might communicate.
