Girl in the Mirror by Jools Abrams

Author:Jools Abrams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd

September 1953

The Burnses made it to the top of the housing list and were placed in a house on the Wythenshawe Estate before Christmas. Solid and square at the end of an avenue with grass verges and trees, it had a main bedroom, a back bedroom for Annie and a box room for Billy. They had a room each. So many rooms to furnish now that Muriel had a house to make into her own palace. Furniture was hard to come by. They had struggled to squeeze Aunt May’s sideboard through the back door, and it sat dominating the small front room. Jim collected dockets at work for utility pieces, twenty-four units for two wardrobes, one in the main bedroom, one in Annie’s.

Yet Wythenshawe was not the paradise Muriel had envisioned. She missed the doorstep gossip of the city streets and it was strange being alone after the crowded company of family. She had yearned for light, and Wythenshawe, with its wide avenues and patches of green garden, had given her that. Her front bay window sparkled as she polished each pane to perfection daily, but the domestic routine kept her a captive. The kitchen became her enchanted room, her place of escape, its steaming kettle clouding the air and feeding her fantasies.

She sat at the new Formica table and wrote in her housekeeping book, watching the garden birds beyond the window as she flipped over the page from columns of pencil-drawn figures to scrawl angrily across a new blank page: ‘I feel like a flippin’ slave.’ She tore the page out in frustration and threw it in the bin with the potato peelings. Her nerves were worn down by a sickly child who was often screaming, and the frustration of chores undone. The washing line had snapped that morning and spread her smalls over their tiny borders like late-blooming pansies. She was tired all the time and the fizz spark of passion well dimmed for her husband. Most of her female friends had disappeared into marriage, motherhood and sometimes work. There was no one to chat to.

It would have to be her sister Flo who heard her complaints, although she could only bear her sanctimonious judgements in small doses. She twisted Flo’s arm and made her go to the Wednesday afternoon matinee at The Forum where Muriel sat fidgeting in the stall seats, while Flo settled beside her.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ her sister asked.

‘This bloody girdle’s too tight,’ Muriel said, wriggling her fingers below the waistband of her skirt to release the hooks pressing into her flesh. Life for me is as tight as this girdle, she thought. The titles rolled above them. ‘Give us a cigarette, Flo,’ she said. It had been a choice between affording to go to the pictures and smoke last weekend.

‘Fancy you’ll have to give up going to the pictures then,’ Jim had said. Muriel would never do that. She settled down to watch the movie, wishing it was a technicolour glare to brighten her day, letting her thoughts flirt with the wish for a big drama in her life.

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