For most people late afternoon casually slips into early evening almost unnoticed. But not for Andrew. He could not remember a time in his life when this stretch of day did not bring with it a certain melancholic anxiety.
Now as a mature adult it had become as much a natural part of his life as eating and sleeping. There had been times, happy times when he had found it much easier to ignore this affliction.
But on days like today it overwhelmed the again single man lay on a musty single bed alone in the rented one room that served as both his sanctuary and cell.
Today had been empty. Nobody came to visit and he visited nobody. There were emails and kind words floating around but without the flesh to back them up somehow they failed to lift the spirit as the thoughtful sender had hoped. Andrew knew that today could only be saved by the silent comfort of arms around him but that was not going to happen.
His melancholy - his problem - he had been told by a succession of well meaning friends and well paid specialists, was rooted, as such problems often are, in his childhood. Andrew knew his parents had loved him very much and taken good care of him and his two older siblings. His mother had been as devoted to her children as any woman could be. In later life Andrew had decided she must have stopped being anything other than a mother once the children were born, and from this stemmed the conflict with her husband that had scarred the life of at least one of their brood. Andrew’s father had also loved the children and he worked hard for them as a plasterer on building sites until bad health slowed him down prematurely in his fifties. Becoming a father had not slowed him down however and he had continued to socialise at night almost as much as before the children were born.
Andrew’s stomach tightened and his breathing became slower and deeper as he recalled to himself how tension would build in his young body around this time every evening as he waited for signs his father was preparing to go out. The terrible sounds of upstairs taps running and a shaving razor clinking back into the glass on the bathroom shelf were the signals of doom for the nervous young boy.
Then the front door would be heard opening and closing again, his father gone without a word having given up years ago trying to talk his bride into joining him in the adult pleasures of drinking and laughing with friends.
The child would pass the next few hours lying on his bed listening to the radio on low volume but unable to concentrate on anything very much due to the steady build up of anxiety as he waited to hear the next inevitable sounds; an approaching car that stops outside the house for a minute or two with the engine running as conversations are concluded and goodbyes are said. Then the car door creaking open and slamming shut followed by footsteps mixed with the fading sound of gear changes as the driver escaped into the distance.
Finally, as the fighting downstairs gained both in volume and ferocity the boy cries and screams into his pillow wanting it all to end. The fighting to end, the anxiety to end, the tension to end, life to end.
What he really wanted, what he needed most was for somebody to have put their arms around him and comforted him, but those arms never came.
ENDS.1
