short thing #8

a cup of tea

Nan told Mum about this dream. She told Mum while they were both sitting at the kitchen table, at Nan’s kitchen table. Not that that is particularly distinctive, considering that both Mum and Nan are hoarders, both of their kitchen tables are messy, both keep too many things linking them to their pasts. Both keep too many things.

Nan and Mum were drinking tea, but that is not distinctive either. Nan drinks tea black, with a small squeeze of lemon. Mum drinks tea white with one sugar. Mum prefers mugs of tea, but Nan only has cups. Nan likes cups and saucers.

Nan is wearing an apron. Mum never wears aprons. Nan is sitting at the head of the table, closest to the sink. Closest to the stove. Closest to the cupboard next to the stove. The cupboard that Dad calls the Black Whole of Calcutta. The cupboard that takes things but never returns them.

I wasn’t at the kitchen table when Nan told Mum about the dream. Mum didn’t think it was a dream but that is Mum’s opinion. Which she is entitled to.

Nan hadn’t made scones that day. Mum and Dad and my little brother and I hadn’t gone to Nan’s that morning, to go down the street, to eat rolls for lunch. To help make scones afterwards. To go with the tea

Mum had gone to Nan’s by herself. Nan seemed to want it that way. That day.

Pop had died a while before that day. Nan and Pop were married young to the sound of the proverbial shotgun. Nan was swept away but not for long. And Pop was drunken. Irish. Catholic.

Pop listened to the dog races on Saturday afternoons while we ate rolls and made scones and drank tea.

Pop never really liked Nan that much. He certainly didn’t show it if he did. That would be weak. And irrelevant, in any case.

But Pop was dead now. I had sat on the back step with dark grey clouds heavy above me the day that Pop died. I cried and the tears and the summer rain were the same temperature on my face.

But Pop was dead now.

Nan had redecorated the little house that she and Pop had lived in for fifty something years. She painted the walls in the lounge room green, in her bedroom brown and in the kitchen pink.

In the kitchen. At the kitchen table. Tea. Nan. Mum.

Nan told Mum about this dream.

Nan had been having a dream and then she woke up in her dream. Dreams distort reality, it is their purpose, Nan said. But on waking, from her dream, in her dream, Nan had gone to the lounge room. She could hear somebody crying and she was scared. She was an old woman, living alone, and that isn’t safe nowadays.

In the lounge room, Nan saw him. He was sitting next to the cabinet, curled up into a ball. On the floor. His face was stained with tears. He was looking at her terrified. He said, “I’m sorry.”

Nan said she bent down next to him. In her baby blue, cotton nightie. In her floral slippers. In her green lounge room.

She bent down next to him and said it was ok. She comforted him. She forgave him.

She let him go.

Mum held Nan’s hand. And my Nan actually cried.

Dripping into her cup of tea.

(c) Samantha Florence, 2012.