Fireworks

By Mary Brooks

Another entertaining selection of short stories by author Mary Brooks.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Aug 12, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503508361

Book preview

Copyright © 2015 by Mary Brooks.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2015912695

ISBN:      Hardcover   978-1-5035-0834-7

                 Softcover    978-1-5035-0835-4

                 eBook          978-1-5035-0836-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 08/05/2015

Xlibris

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Contents

A Salutary Lesson

Adelaide

Alone

Alzheimer’s Disease

Back to School

Beth and Simon

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

Childcare

Come On

Fireworks

Graffiti Argument

I’m Pregnant

In Threes

Jingle Bells

Joy

Lies Uncovered

Marcus

Marty and Jo

Melbourne Cup Day Lunch

Solitaire

Spotty

Stewart

The Book Launch

The Car Crash

The Last Cruise

The Trip

Tibbles

A Salutary Lesson

T he sun baked the earth with dry heat. It was autumn, and the muggy heat of summer had abated. There were still some days the temperature reached the thirties around midday, although the mornings and evenings were now cool at twelve degrees. People were relieved to be able to pull up a light blanket after the beastly hot summer nights when it was difficult to sleep despite fans and air-conditioning.

Gary, Susan, and Diane, three teenage friends, decided to spend a few hours at City Beach, lathered with sunscreen and wearing a hat and sunglasses. For about an hour, they were in and out of the water, enjoying the temperature of the waves cooling their hot skin.

The sky was a brilliant cobalt with feathery clouds, and the colour of the sky was making the sea a deep blue green as well. The ocean was flat, and gently the waves splashed rhythmically on to the beach’s edge, then retreated, all bubbly and frothy, leaving little rivulets and tiny hollow streaks in the wet sand.

Saturday afternoon was a popular time, and more cars drove down from the main road through the dunes to the car park. More families appeared, and groups of teenagers and young adults. Gary was fascinated by a family of three young children all wearing colourful long-sleeved rashies and sunhats and sunglasses.

‘That’s taking it a bit far in this weather,’ he said.

‘No,’ answered Diane, ‘the parents are being careful and teaching the kids good habits. The Australian sun can be vicious, especially around midday, even if the temperature is only about thirty degrees.’

‘You’re right, I suppose. They didn’t have sunscreen when my parents grew up, and they’re always getting sunspots burnt off. It was nothing for people to sunbake for hours to get a good tan.’

‘Well, enough of that. We’d better reapply our own sunscreen because it’s probably washed off by now. We were in the sea quite a long time.’

‘You can. I’m not bothered,’ said Susan.

‘Let’s have lunch.’

‘Okay, unpack the esky.’

They sat around the esky, helping themselves to ham-and-cheese sandwiches, fruit muffins, bananas, and cans of lemonade.

‘The heat always makes me tired, especially after a good meal,’ said Susan.

‘Yes, we’ve had enough sun. Let’s go to your place, Gary.’

Diane and Gary packed up the esky, brushed off all the sand, and headed up to the car park. Susan decided to stay longer and catch the bus home. She lay back on her towel, watching the thin streaks of cloud glide slowly overhead. Now a soft breeze brought the kites out. They were beautiful long arcs of colours, lifting high in the air and being buffeted by the gusts of wind.

Susan lay there watching the eight kites for about ten minutes, then closed her eyes and fell asleep. She was woken by two young boys running close by, kicking sand on to her belly. She sat up, checked her watch, and was surprised to see that she had slept so long. Before she left to go home, Susan had another swim to wake herself up and wash off the sand. She wove a sari around her waist and pulled on a light shirt. Holding her sandals and her rolled-up towel in her beach bag and swigging from her water bottle, she made her way up through the dunes, on to the main road, and to the bus stop. Fifteen minutes later, she caught the bus to the stop near her home in Cottesloe.

The plan had been that the three friends would meet up again on Sunday with another group of young people for a barbecue. Unfortunately, when she got home on Saturday, Susan looked like a boiled lobster, bright red with sunburn. And on Saturday night, she slept restlessly despite covering her body with aloe vera gel. She had to keep up her fluids too. She knew the procedure, having been sunburnt before. All Sunday she was in pain, and on Monday morning, she couldn’t go to work.

This wasn’t the last time Susan would be off work with sunburn in the coming years. When Susan and Diane were twenty-five, they were still close friends. Susan was married, and they both had little sons. The toddlers grew up together, and both were walking and starting to talk.

When the girls had been teenagers, both had had the usual teenage pimples, and Diane had needed to take antibiotics to get rid of them. Susan’s acne had left a few scars, and she went to a skin clinic to see if anything could be done. The specialist noticed a small pigmented lesion on her right arm, and he suggested he biopsy it in case it was a melanoma.

‘Did you know, Susan, that Australia has a very high incidence of this deadly skin cancer?’ he said.

Fortunately, it was a simple mole. However, the experience worried Susan. Suddenly, she became very aware of the damage the sun could cause and was especially careful with little George. He wore his rashie whenever he went to the beach, and hat, sunscreen, and sunglasses. Susan did so too.

At thirty, Susan and Diane took the children to Queensland to go to the theme parks.

Susan said, ‘Now that George is six and his brother, Damon, is four and your Tony is six and his little sister, Jodie, is three, they’re sure to enjoy Movie World, Wet ’n’ Wild, and Sea World.’

All the children wore rashies, sunscreen, hats, and sunglasses as did Diane and Susan—sunscreen, hats, and sunglasses, that is. Everyone was very sun-conscious.

‘The heat here seems more humid, but not the intense heat that burns into your skin,’ said Diane. At the theme parks, they all had lots of fun on the slippery dips, the tubes, and the pool. The children loved the penguins, seals, and sea lions, and little Jodie laughed so loudly at the clown’s antics that the whole audience was amused and applauded her. Diane took dozens of photographs, and everyone looked back on those days with joy.

When Susan and Diane were forty, their children were sixteen and fourteen and sixteen and thirteen respectively, and Susan and Diane decided to make the long trek to Disney World in Florida.

Everyone liked the Magic Kingdom best, but Epcot came in second. Young Tony and Jodie were whooping for joy, with beaming smiles that infected their friends George and Damon too. They were exhausted each day and slept deep, restful sleep filled with dreams of magic and fun.

‘Because you have been wearing sunscreen, hats, and sunglasses, you four teenagers had never been sunburnt like I was all those years ago.’

Another ten years down the track, and George and Tony and Jodie all had children of their own. Susan and Diane were aged fifty. Susan was still happily married, but Diane and her de facto partner had split up. Nevertheless, Diane and Peter were still friends and went together to important events like Tony’s wedding and Jodie’s graduation from university. Susan’s youngest son, Damon, was a medical practitioner, had never found time to have a girlfriend, and was doing radiology. Susan and John were very proud.

One day there was a television show about skin cancer, and Susan decided to go to a dermatologist, especially as she had had the scare about a possible melanoma years ago. The dermatologist commented on the amount of solar damage she had to her skin, and ruefully Susan explained she had not taken care of herself as a teenager but had been very particular ever since and with her family as well.

The dermatologist decided to biopsy a lesion on Susan’s right cheek and also on her right arm. Susan wasn’t too worried about her face because she thought it was an old acne scar, but she agreed that the spot on her forearm did look like the pictures of basal cell carcinomas that she had seen on the dermatologist’s wall posters.

‘Oh my goodness, what a shock,’ gasped Susan when it turned out that it was the scar on her face that was a squamous cell carcinoma and that the spot on her forearm was only a scar.

The dermatologist was surprised too and explained to Susan that on the head and neck, though not necessarily on the face, the squamous cell carcinomas could metastasise throughout the body and some had to be removed in very drastic disfiguring surgery.

Susan’s lips quivered, and she sucked in a deep breath, with tears in her eyes.

‘What happens next?’ she asked shakily.

‘Well,’ explained the dermatologist, ‘I have to operate again and take a wide section of tissue from around the cancer.’

Susan just about fainted, but nevertheless, she begged him to do it immediately. The idea of cancer in her body frightened her, and his description of drastic surgery if the cancer spread filled her with trepidation.

The dermatologist had her lie down on his operating bed, covered her face with a sterile sheet except for the area where he had to operate, and injected her cheek with local anaesthetic. For about three quarters of an hour, Susan lay there. The surgeon removed a big circle of tissue from her cheek and united the edges in a long scar from under her eye to just about the corner of her mouth. He spent a long time using very tiny sutures to make a neat line down her cheek. Susan didn’t see it but was dismayed to see the size of the dressing.

At her next visit, Susan was shown the scar with all the tiny blue sutures. She trembled and bit her lip and said quietly to the nurse, ‘Did he get it all?’

‘The histology will be