Waste Not, Want Not in Applewell by Lilac Mills

Author:Lilac Mills
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canelo
Published: 2021-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 24

George

‘What else was I to do?’ George muttered under his breath as he changed his mind about going into the village, and stormed off in the direction of the cove instead. So what if he didn’t buy a newspaper today? The only person who’d notice would be Sid, and if the viability of his shop depended on selling a copy of today’s paper to a man who didn’t even read it, then Sid was in dire straits.

George was about to push open the kissing gate leading to the field, but he hesitated as he considered what he’d just thought.

He didn’t even read it.

So why did he buy it every day?

‘Dad, Dad…’ he groaned, thinking about how he used to go out every morning and pick up a paper for his father, bring it back to the bungalow and sit by the old man’s bedside and read it to him. He missed that ritual with a fierceness which took his breath away, and suddenly the memory of the night his father died came into his mind.

It had been bitterly cold out, the moon a frozen crescent hanging in a clear sky. Breath had clouded around his head as he’d waited for the doctor to arrive, his father lying still and empty in the borrowed hospital bed.

He also remembered the pitying looks on the faces of the men who’d arrived to take away his father’s body, and how they had struggled to manoeuvre the stretcher through the house and all the accumulated things.

He’d turned away then, unable to watch, only turning back when his father was gone. But his father – the man who’d taught him to dibble for crabs in the rock pools, who’d taught him how to replace a pane of glass, who’d taught him that all things had value and might one day come in handy – that man had gone long ago. For years he’d only been a shell of the man, of the father, he’d once been. And now the shell had gone, too.

What had George done, alone in the house for the very first time?

Once all the palaver had temporarily abated (there would be more, what with registering the death, arranging the funeral and then the ceremony itself) and the sun had risen, he’d walked into the village and had bought his father one final newspaper.

Except, it hadn’t been the final one, had it?

There had been others. So many others that they now filled his hallway, having joined the ones he’d read to his father and had promised not to throw away – because you never knew when a couple of pages of the Daily Trumpet would come in handy.

But they never had come in handy.

They might, he knew they might. But so far, they hadn’t. And he had no idea what he was going to do with them all.

He had no idea what he was going to do with any of it. Or with himself.

One thing was certain – he couldn’t go on like this.

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