Reluctantly Home by Imogen Clark

Author:Imogen Clark [Clark, Imogen]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Published: 2021-04-28T16:00:00+00:00

26

2019

When Evelyn woke, the sky outside was a milky pink. It would rain, she thought. Not that it mattered, as she wouldn’t be going outside. She never went outside any more. Slowly she shifted her position, every inch of her back and hips crying out in pain. She felt so very old these days. It was as if simply moving was a luxury granted only to younger people, whilst she was expected to bear the agony of stiff and frozen joints until she died. She had to remind herself that she was only seventy. That was no age, she knew, and yet she felt every single month of it.

Nicholas told her endlessly that if she insisted on sleeping in her chair then she only had herself to blame, but really, what was the point of shuffling from chair to bed? At least she could get up from her chair when she needed to. If she took to her bed, there was no guarantee that she’d ever bother to raise herself out of it again. They would find her, if they came looking, flat on her back, her body rigid and unmoving even as her heart still pumped blood around her veins.

Reaching for her spectacles, Evelyn placed them on her nose and peered out at the street beyond her window. In truth, it was becoming increasingly difficult to see out. The salt together with the grime from the street below and decades of dirty rain had combined to coat the glass in a smeary film. Maybe she should ask Nicholas to clean this one pane. She didn’t care about the other windows, but she missed having a clear line of sight to the street and the sea beyond. Almost nothing ever happened directly outside the house, but it would be a shame to miss what little there was to see because she couldn’t make it out through the murk.

That girl yesterday, for example. She had stood in the street and stared up at the house for five minutes straight. The staring wasn’t that unusual. People often stared – children, mainly, and those who had nothing better to do than waste their time wondering about what went on behind her front door. But they didn’t often stand and stare quite so blatantly, or for quite as long. Evelyn hadn’t recognised her either, although that meant nothing. She knew no one in the town any more. Nobody visited other than Nicholas, and that suited her just fine.

On a side table next to her chair sat a mobile phone and a diary with a pen tucked into its spine. She didn’t keep a diary these days, not like she had done. She had stopped all that when she’d realised there was nothing in her life worth recording, but she did like to keep a track of the days as they passed. Otherwise they all ran into one another with no way of telling them apart.

Today was a Friday. Friday was the day her groceries were delivered.

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