SEARCHING... FIFTY SHADES OF SIGHT by Audrey Ellis

Author:Audrey Ellis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

The only bucket he had kicked was the one Esther had foolishly left out. He had stumbled as he felt his way, with a shilling for the meter in the cubby hole beneath the stairs. On his trousers (thinning then at the knees) he picked up ribbons of mouldy wallpaper that Esther had stripped off their sitting room walls several evenings before in an effort to make their home look better. There had been something of a ceasefire in their house and the hall doorway slammed a little less, and his Bakelite radio, stored on a shelf above his head, a few decibels lower as he sat with his Braille books of particular knowledge opened on his knee, his hands flitting left to right with intermittent breaks for mugs of tea proffered by May.

The purpose of this break in his routine was to second-guess the type of questions he might face when he went to London and the ‘This Morning’ on the light wave which they all listened to whilst and then heading off for school.

A candy floss of memories of local buses, a fifteen-minute walk down a pretty, leafy road, a train then a taxi, a newspaper vendor on the frosty pavement, coughing and sniffling as he tried to sing and banging his boots on the pavement. He smiled at them, and didn’t try to sell them a newspaper as they headed for the revolving doors at Broadcasting House. A world within a world of elegance and suits, with a receptionist connecting and disconnecting spaghetti of switchboard leads from row upon row of clicking dolls-eyes on his switchboard. Into an escalator, then a soundproof recording room with a headset firm to his silver-Grey wavy hair and her in an external office watching this apparently innocuous figure. Initially he tackled with ease the volley of questions until he froze and was beaten by a deputy headmaster from Leicester, leaving him furious about that injustice, he proclaimed later as they sat on a park bench nearby eating fish and chips out of yesterday’s news on Profumo.

Again he declared,

“My mind just froze. I knew that question really. My fingers weren’t quite quick enough on the button, that was all!” bewailed Blank, grasping his new dog’s harness, her bright eyes looking back, soft paws at St Pancras platform three, steam creating a magic that wasn’t really there. Then down beside the long corridors and compartments where feet and bags and suitcases stowed above dark figures with broadsheets or popular papers of the day, desperately trying not to look at the three of them as Esther’s thin fingers pulled back the sliding door and they went to their scratchy seats, with the desiccated sick on the floor and posters in the compartment showing happy nuclear families complete with a bright coloured ball that hung in the air like a pink moon inviting a trip to Southend. Esther still held onto memories of a happier time when life could be easily understood.

He talked with

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