October. George stood in a green kitchen with grey and orange lino watching his Aunt iron. His special vest scratched at his thin chest and the windows reflected back to him an intense, pale faced boy always waiting to be fed . The old room was sharply scented with steam. Clean steam his Aunt would say and she watched the boy hungrily monitoring her face and mouth for some spark of a story. She was cloaked in inconsistency for him. Some days everything worked in his favour. He would feel original, freshened, privileged by her attention and words: on other days it was as if he was standing on cinders, waiting for her dismissal.
‘Have I ever told you about Mr Chaplin George? ‘
She did not wait for him to speak. She talked on, glancing this way and that, at names, places. oblique family scandals, gossip. George listened, devouring each detail, completed somehow by this world of connected, spontaneous words. This was a world where ‘this’ did lead to ‘that’, and words were like branches reaching upwards to names and places with their own jokes, and family faces: bright voices just over a wall.
George was transparent to his Aunt. He always had to be fed.There he stood restless by the door until she raised the dead again. She respected his tough impatience though. His held breath. He wanted resurrection and no matter how much she thought she could get away with starving him of the past, she would find herself speaking out of an imposed silence, breathing strange fire over figures who had gone their own way years before. When she finished she always had a sense of clarity, of definition, of something unmeshed. She needed the particularities of the past. Her words had given some heartbeat back to who she was. But then George would go away back to school and leave her in the cold shadows of this present.She adjusted the collar on her husband’s grey shirt. She needed more steam.
George shook the boy from his head and walked towards the tall girl who was standing in sunshine on his lawn. He was thirsty for talk. But she already was smiling,she had seen his visitor, and her tenderness was umistakeably elsewhere. Defeated he waved at Mrs Smith’s eldest Amy, who had come to borrow some Hardy. He would make coffee instead.