Like Snow Falling In Summer: a collection of short stories

By louise dunn

The stories in this book explore the unpredictable territory of human experience with nuance and insight. Each tale is a separate gust of wind in a storm of shifting perspectives, distorted reflections and surprising destinations.
Parallel Lines emits ghostly chills without veering from the contemporary flavour of the prose; Lifeline explores the

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blue Cat Books
• Release date: Sep 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9780648938514

Book preview

1

TEA AND SHORTBREAD

I once would have said that murder is murder, whatever the circumstances. However, the law states that there are different degrees of murder, and after everything that has happened I have to agree. Who decides when murder becomes justifiable homicide, or even euthanasia?

This afternoon I’ll be leaving here for good, but there’s something I have to do first. The piece of paper, where Rob had scrawled his address, is carefully folded in my pocket. When I get back I’ll be checking out of the motel, handing over my door key for the last time. While I wait for the taxi to arrive, I look around the room I have called home for the last few months. My suitcases are packed and standing at the bottom of the bed. The room is small and sparsely furnished. The motel manager’s wife cleans it every second day and I am grateful for the lack of clutter and most of all for the absence of dust.

There was dust everywhere in the grandmother’s house, even in the cracks on her face. She would sit up in bed, her shoulders hunched inside her pink nylon bed-jacket, when she powdered her cheeks.

‘It keeps me cool,’ she’d say if she caught me watching her, but I knew it was vanity.

The silver-framed hand mirror would tremble in her grasp as she stroked on bright lipstick, following an imaginary outline that bore no resemblance to the actual shape of her mouth and blotting with a lace-edged handkerchief. When I took her a cup of tea and some of my freshly made shortbread sprinkled with icing sugar, she would pull her overdone lips into a smudged smile. When I forgot that she didn’t take sugar in her tea, or sprinkled salt on her lunch instead of giving her the salt cellar, she would pout at me with a squashed cherry mouth. The lipstick looked like dribbled juice in the puckered lines around her lips. She left red lip prints on the chipped china cups and when I washed her dishes I’d think, there really isn’t any point in buying a new tea set when you’re about to die.

The grandmother was my sister Margaret’s mother-in-law. She was Rob’s grandmother, not mine. Rob came to visit twice a week.

‘He’s such a good boy,’ my sister twittered every second Friday, when she came to give me my meagre wage. ‘Not many seventeen-year-olds would be bothered with an old lady.’

I would have liked to tell Margaret that he had never been upstairs to his grandmother’s room. I would have liked to tell her that it was me he came to see. I would have liked to see her vague smugness crumple, her freshly rouged cheeks become blotchy and puffy with tears, as they never did at any of the funerals. I would have liked her to know that there is more to life than her credit cards and her five bedroom house with neatly manicured rose bushes out the front and her husband in a silver urn on the mantelpiece.

Margaret’s husband and our parents all died within a fortnight of each other. Mother fell down the steps of the nursing home and broke her neck. Father had a major heart attack when he was told and for five days they fought to keep him alive, while he fought equally as hard to follow his wife. In the end he won. Nine days later Brian drove his car under a semi-trailer on the way home from work. He was killed instantly. Margaret didn’t know which one to grieve for, so she went shopping and bought a new outfit for each funeral.

‘Life’s for the living, Eleanor,’ she told me. ‘We just have to get on with things.’

There was no need for her to tell me that. I’d been getting on with things for as long as I could remember. Margaret was twenty five when I was born. In between there was a brother. He went to Canada before I was born and has never been seen or heard of since. He doesn’t even know I exist. I was a mistake, as Margaret has always taken great delight in telling me. A useful one however, as when our mother became ill I was there to help our father take care of her, and when she went into the nursing home I would rush home from school to take care of him. When I left school he said how wonderful it was going to be to have me there all day, and Margaret wondered aloud how I could even think of going out to work and leaving him.

In all my memories of them they are old and, in the more recent ones, sick. When they died I was sad, but relieved that now I could start my life. Margaret had other ideas. It was only meant to be a few weeks at first, at least that’s what she told me.

‘It’s Brian’s mum,’ she sighed down the phone. ‘His death hit her hard and she’s gone downhill fast. Now the nurse has left, and she can’t be on her own. It’s just until I find a new nurse, Eleanor. I’d do it myself but I’m so busy, and of course there’s Rob. He can’t do without me.’

As Rob was only three years younger than I was, I thought that highly unlikely. I would have refused, but then we had to sell our parents’ house, the only home I’d ever known, to pay for their funerals and outstanding bills at the nursing home.

‘You can’t expect me to pay,’ Margaret said. ‘I’ve got Rob to think about. At least you won’t be homeless. You can stay at Brian’s mum’s rent free. We don’t need to bother with getting another nurse.’

In case I forgot, she often reminded me how lucky I was to have a job and a house to go with it. When I queried the amount she paid me she would say condescendingly, ‘But Eleanor, you’re not a professional nurse.’

I wasn’t sure what a professional nurse would do that I wasn’t doing. The only time the grandmother left her bed was three or four times a day when, with my help, she made the short trip to the bathroom. Even that exhausted her and there were days we had to resort to the bedpan and a sponge bath. I was at her beck and call, and I made many trips up and down stairs every day with her meals; her assortment of pills; cups of tea; books, which sometimes she read herself and sometimes I had to read to her; or to fetch her makeup bag or her hairbrush from the bathroom. I knew she had dementia which was getting worse, although some days she remembered more than others. She had something wrong with her liver and, according to the labels on two of her pill bottles, there was a problem with her heart and blood pressure. I didn’t need to know the details, only how many pills to count out and how often.

‘Shouldn’t she be in hospital, or a nursing home?’ I asked Margaret.

Margaret looked at me, aghast. ‘She’s dying, Eleanor. And she is happy and comfortable at home. It’s best for her to stay where she’s happy, for the time she has left.’

I suspected Margaret was thinking about the purse strings rather than the grandmother’s happiness, and feared that the time she had left could be a lot longer than Margaret’s estimate.

‘Come to see the old lady,’ Rob said, the first time he visited.

I’d already been there for six months and was surprised to see him, but pleased as well. Anything that broke the monotony of looking after a sick old lady was welcome.

‘Sit down,’ I said. ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea. Or coffee?’

‘Coffee.’ He threw himself onto the sofa. When I came back, with a coffee for him and a tea for myself, he was lying stretched out, his dirty boots resting on the green velvet upholstery.

‘Sorry,’ he muttered, but he made no move to sit up.

I didn’t know what to say to him, so I sipped the hot tea.

‘My mother is spending money like the world’s going to end tomorrow,’ he said eventually.

‘How nice,’ I said.

He pushed his hair out of his eyes and grinned at me. ‘It’s all right, El. You don’t have to pretend with me. I know she treats you like a poor relative. She treats me like I’m ten.’

I remembered that Margaret used to make him call me Aunt Eleanor.

‘So, what’s she going to do when the money runs out?’

Margaret had never worked a day in her life, marrying Brian straight out of school.

‘She’ll have the old lady’s. Now Dad’s gone it will all go to her.’

I stared at him over the rim of my teacup. ‘Your grandmother doesn’t have any money, Rob.’

‘She’s got a stack of it,’ he said, swinging his legs to the floor and sitting up.

‘But her house is full of junk.’

I looked around at the china ornaments; trinket boxes, many filled with trinkets; decorative ashtrays never blackened with ash; picture plates hanging in rows on every wall; and the display cabinet filled with tiny china thimbles and silver teaspoons. Ornate frames surrounded faded sepia photographs and a silver carriage clock on the mantelpiece reminded me when to make its owner’s meals and cups of tea. Embroidered cushions and tapestries sat neatly on the chairs, like staid old ladies. I dusted and tidied these things every day, and silently cursed the grandmother for her excess of frippery and knickknacks. I picked up one of the framed memories from the nearest coffee table.

‘Look, she met the Queen Mother at a garden party,’ I said, handing it to Rob.

He took the back off the frame and removed the photo. He handed it back to me, unimpressed by the story it told.

‘This frame is worth about six hundred,’ he said.

‘How do you know that? I don’t believe you.’

‘Tell you what; I’ve got a mate who works in an antique shop. I’ll get it valued. Just for fun. I’ll come back on Friday.’

When he left, I realised he hadn’t gone up to see his grandmother, and he hadn’t drunk the coffee. There was a ring on the table because I’d forgotten to give him a coaster.

‘I don’t really like coffee. Have you got a coke?’ he said on his next visit, and he held out a handful of money.

‘What’s this?’

‘The frame. It was worth eight hundred. Four each.’

‘You sold it?’ I was standing with my hands by my sides and we just looked at each other for what seemed a long time. I felt like he was years older than me and I was the child not knowing what was the right thing to do. Then he reached out and pulled me towards him and put the money into my hand.

‘You deserve it,’ he whispered. ‘She’ll never miss it. It will all be my mother’s soon. We might as well get something while we can.’

I could feel his breath hot on my cheek, as I closed my fingers around more money than I had ever had in my life and slipped it into my pocket. When he left he took a matching pair of picture plates and a china dog with an ugly, but ultimately profitable, face.

‘What are you going to do with all this money, Rob?’ I asked him one day, the split from the latest sale making a reassuring bulge in my back pocket.

‘Buy a bike. A Harley maybe. And get my own place.’

He was sitting with his feet up on the coffee table and I had put a cushion under them. He laughed and said I treated him like a king, but it was to protect the table. His eyes were shut and his lips slightly parted, and for a moment I wanted to reach out, stroke his cheek, and tell him he could live here with me and that bikes were dangerous.

‘I’d like to travel,’ I told him, even though he hadn’t asked. ‘Go to Canada, maybe, and find my brother. But we’d have to sell everything in the house for that.’

‘Not if the old lady leaves everything to you.’

I laughed, but he just looked at me and raised his eyebrows. There was a long silence and I realised he was serious. I thought of the months of dust and bedpans ahead, maybe years, as the clock ticked away the passing of my life.

‘I’m listening,’ I said, and as he spoke I realised this was no spur of the moment idea – this was a plan he had been thinking about for some time, before the first visit even.

The first part was easy, and gradually the devoted, loving daughter-in-law became a lying, thieving gold-digger. Two months later the