Of Things Gone Astray. Janina Matthewson

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       Delia.

      DELIA TRIED TO BE QUIET, she tried really hard, but there was that door, that one door, the one into the kitchen, which always, every time, in spite of her best efforts, banged just a little as she closed it.

      ‘Bloody bollocks,’ she muttered, screwing her eyes closed and waiting.

      It was thirty seconds before the tremulous ‘Dee?’ floated down the hall, but it felt longer. Still, it was always going to come, obviously.

      ‘Morning, Mum,’ Delia called back. ‘Go back to sleep. I’m heading out for a couple of hours. Not long. I’ll be back to make breakfast before you’re ready to get up.’

      ‘Why? Why are you going out? It’s so early.’

      Delia fought the urge to answer with a petulant ‘I do what I want’.

      ‘It’s a clear morning, Mum,’ she said instead. ‘There’s not another forecast for ages.’

      Delia waited hopefully, barely breathing, until she was sure there was going to be no further reply. She grabbed her bag off the floor, where she’d left it in preparation, and let herself out. The heavy front door was so much easier to control than the flighty ones inside.

      The two girls who lived together over the road, the ones Delia always thought seemed about twelve, were coming back from a party, turning into their house casually, as if this was a perfectly normal thing to be doing shortly after five o’clock in the morning on a weekday. Watching them, Delia felt immediately that she was always, and by nature, simultaneously underdressed and wearing too many clothes. She didn’t remember ever going out with so little covered, not even in what she had always considered a comparatively wild first year of university.

      She wondered briefly what was going on with teenagers these days, whether they ever properly considered the impression they were making on the world, before she felt suddenly that she was in danger of turning into the worst kind of maiden aunt. At least, she would be if she had any brothers or sisters. The worst kind of nosy spinster. If she continued on this way, she’d end up a bitter old woman who lived alone and never spoke to anyone. Who resented the laughter she heard on the street because it interrupted her peaceful, isolated days; trapped in a prison of her own bitterness, she’d wither and die and no one would know.

      She sighed, and resolved, not for the first time, to be less judgemental of how stupid all the young people were. To be less judgemental in general. After all, those girls couldn’t have been twelve – they lived alone, that would be ridiculous. Probably they were twenty, maybe even as old as twenty-two. They may have been at high school at the same time as Delia. If they’d gone to the same school, she could have been their prefect. She could have told them that skirts are traditionally worn to conceal the buttocks, rather than to reveal them, and that they can actually do so and still look quite alluring. Presuming that still held true, of course; Delia suddenly felt unsure.

      As she wended her way through the neighbourhood, Delia began constructing a detailed fantasy in which the two girls ran into a string of amusing mishaps, and came to Delia for advice. They looked at her in wide-eyed gratitude as she dispensed the theories she held on life and love and the world, that a serious lack of life experience had thus far prevented her from proving correct.

      She walked with a kind of sick eagerness. It had rained brutally for the last two weeks, leaving her in dire need of escape.

      There was a small square on a small hill a short walk away from the house. Delia planned to sit in it, on a certain bench, and breathe the air, and let the world wake around her.

      After half an hour she realised to her surprise that, instead of being at the small square, she was drawing close to the much larger park. She was disconcerted, the park wasn’t anywhere near the square, she couldn’t figure out how she’d got there. Probably she’d just not been paying attention to where she was going. Her feet had heard park and her head had said square and the two hadn’t communicated. She told herself to be more of a grown up, and headed into the park.

      This was a park she’d once gone to every fine day.

      There was a picnic rug she used to take, and a thermos, and a basket with room for books as well as food to last her hours. She’d sit near a particular tree, an oak tree, moving in and out of the shade every so often, books and notes spread out around her, which she’d weighed down with rocks to stop them flying away.

      Being outside had made her feel like her studying was less fevered and panicked. It had made her feel like the stakes were lower, or as if the outcome was already assured. When she was outside, even if it was the day before an exam, it felt like a gentle, pleasant pastime, rather than a stressful and emotionally fraught step on the way to her happy and successful future. She always did better with assignments and tests when the weather was fine. When she’d moved away to university, she’d spent an entire month trying to find a tree as effective as the one in this park.

      Delia wandered through the park looking around; suddenly she wanted to find her old study tree. Maybe she’d read beside it for a while. Maybe she’d just sit there and watch the sun rise. She walked around what she thought was the entire park without finding it, wondering if maybe it had been cut down. Of course that was a ridiculous thing to think; the tree had been large and healthy, and if someone had been foolish enough to slay it, there would have been a giant tree trunk in place of the tree itself.

      Delia was becoming petulant. The tree, her tree, СКАЧАТЬ