A Distant Shore Read Online Free PDF Page A

you can spend time with. You don’t have to be by yourself.”
    “Well, I can’t stop them talking.” It was difficult to remove the anger from my voice, and Mrs. Lawson seemed to accept the fact that there was little further to be said on this, or any other, subject.
    “Well, I’m sorry, but I really just came to tell you that Carla won’t be coming back for any more piano lessons.” With this said, she got to her feet and bade me good morning. I look at her now as she leans forward and unlocks her car door. She climbs in and starts the hatchback’s engine, and soon she is indicating right and then turning into the traffic and making her way to work.
    There is a young man weeding in the graveyard. He is there almost every time I visit. What makes his labour strange is the fact that he does this job by hand. Not with a scythe, a trowel, or even a pair of scissors; this young man pulls out the weeds by hand and stuffs them into a black plastic bag that is looped to his belt with a piece of frayed rope. As I walk up the short incline I can see that he has finished my parents’ grave. They lie side by side, Mum having died first and then Dad a year later. They planned this final resting-place together, and they arrived in almost perfect harmony. One day, while Dad was down at his allotment, Mum’s heart gave out. He said goodbye to her in the morning and left the house which they had shared for almost fifty years. When he arrived home at the end of the day she was gone. According to the neighbours, she collapsed in the back yard while taking out the rubbish, and one of them called the ambulance while the others tried to bring her round. There had been a few minor scares over the years, including a mild stroke when they went abroad, for the first and only time, to Majorca. She had to be flown back, on insurance, and she spent a fortnight in hospital. But this final blow was swift and sudden, like a hammer falling, and there was no time to do anything but react. Dad phoned me and I travelled up from Birmingham. I made him a cup of tea and we sat together in silence, a banked fire glowing red in the grate, until the weak sun came up the next morning. I knew that he’d not be able to last long without her.
    In the morning he asked me to get hold of my sister, and so I said I would, although I had an address but no phone number. It turned out her number was unlisted, but it wasn’t that difficult to find Sheila’s number in London and so I called her and broke the news about Mum. She was silent, and then when I asked her if she was coming to the funeral she simply said “yes.” When, two days later, she turned up with her friend, it took all my self-control to stop myself from saying something to my younger sister. Now was not the time to be introducing Dad to such lifestyle choices, for he was fragile enough as it was. In fact, I couldn’t remember a time when I’d been more angry, but luckily Dad was too grief-stricken to notice what Sheila had done. My so-called husband Brian played the role of peacemaker, and somehow we all survived the funeral. And then Dad started to get worse. His ailments seemed to all flare up together. The chest from all the years on the pipe. Then his hips, which had long been riddled with arthritis, went from bad to worse, and then finally his eyes started to mist over with glaucoma. Six months after we buried Mum he had become so bad that he couldn’t go to the toilet, or take a bath, or do much of anything by himself. To start with, I was travelling up from Birmingham and spending every weekend with him, but his doctor finally told me that unless we got a nurse he’d have to go into a home. So I asked the doctor to be honest with me and say how long he’d got left. He knotted his fingers together and said maybe a year, but probably less, and so we arranged for a retired midwife to live in the spare room. Soon Dad couldn’t leave his bed, but he still made the poor woman’s life