The end of Chap 7 has changed, you might want to read it again.
Chapter eight.
Hearing a third vehicle drive past the house, this time leaving the street, George McGreal was once again sitting on his toilet, feeling proper pissed-off that this was how he’d spent most of every night for the last three weeks. Only now it seemed to be getting worse on a daily basis, getting deeper into his system, and nothing the doctors could say or do for him, helped in any way. Already it’d spread into his spine and started working its way up into his brain.
Two months tops they’d said at his last appointment, and that was seven weeks ago. Doctor Grayson had told him to visit the surgery every week, but George didn’t see the point in doing that, didn’t see the point in wasting what little time he had left on God’s good Earth, just to be told by some kid in a white coat that he was still going to die. A car accident or even a shooting accident he could fully understand, at least that way he’d have someone to blame, but this, this was a faceless … blameless assassin.
With a tear in her eye, Mary, his loving wife for the past forty-four years, knelt before him in her white nightdress on the bathroom’s cold linoleum floor, holding his hand and offering a weak smile. He noted the sadness in her still, bright-blue eyes, her face, creased by seventy-one years, but still ever so beautiful, her once thick, vibrant blonde hair, now grey and thinning. He felt her cold skeletal hand, held it in his, rubbed the back of it.
‘You go back to bed, honey, I’ll be fine,’ he said, forcing a smile.
‘What for, George, so you can sit here all alone, thinking about the things we didn’t get to do? Or the places we didn’t get to see?’
A tear rolled down his cheek. ‘But you shouldn’t have to-’
Mary placed a hand on his face and stroked away the tear with her thumb, the rasp of his grey stubble in the intermittent silence voluminous. ‘Now, now, George McGreal, what I have to do, and what I want to do, are my choices entirely. And right now …’ she said, holding his troubled face in both hands. ‘I choose this.’
George tried, but the knot clogging his throat wouldn’t allow him to swallow. Taking her hands in both his, he held them to his chest. ‘I don’t deserve you, do you know that?’
She smiled, released a short laugh. ‘So now you decide to listen to my mother?’
Silence fell between them for a while. George, wondering what will happen to her after he’s gone, and, at the same time, hoping above all else, she wasn’t wondering the same.
‘I’ll make us some tea?’ Mary announced, rising to her feet.
‘That’d be nice,’ George said, another smile forcing its way out.
Downstairs in the kitchen, Mary had the kettle over a flame on the stove that George bought her for her seventieth birthday, and spent the following two days cussing as he fitted it. It was two weeks later that he’d told her what the doctor said to him on his visit a month previous, when he’d first complained of having slight bladder trouble. That day turned out to be the worst day of her life … so far.
Languishing in a soft, half-light, emanating from an old oil lamp, the kitchen still held the aroma of the blueberry pie that won her first prize at the town fair yesterday, and, other than the sound of water just before the boil, the house was almost silent. Almost, because when she listened hard enough, broken sobs could be heard echoing in the bathroom. George had always been the proudest of men, but the cancer had reduced him to little more than a scared child. The tear she wiped from his cheek wasn’t the first he’d shed since finding out about his condition, although, it was the first he’d shared.
She couldn’t bear to hear him cry like that, nor did she want to leave him alone to do it, but if she went to console him, he’d try his best to hide his feelings, and she didn’t want that either, didn’t want him to bottle it all up, he needed to let it out, and if being alone was the only time he could do it, then she’d heart-wrenchingly have to abide by that.
Stifling her own sobs with a raised hand, Mary unlocked the back door and stepped out onto the stoop where she felt the night’s warm air almost comforting. A clear sky above, but for some low cloud, showed a magnificent array of glistening stars, made all the more brighter by her welling tears.
Wiping her face over the sleeve of her nightdress and taking a deep breath to calm her sobs, Mary started to cough; there was a rancid stench in the air, a burning stench. She looked again at the low cloud, realised it was lower and moving faster than any cloud she’d seen before. She looked to her left to see a faint, distant, orange glow, reflecting off the tall pine trees at the bottom of Mrs Winkle’s garden. Her brewing antics had never smelled like this before, and, as far as she can remember, Mary had never seen visual evidence of fire.
Walking passed and ignoring the whistle of the boiling kettle; she carried on through the house and out the front door. But it wasn’t until she reached the middle of the road did she see flames coming from the front of Mrs Winkle’s. Back inside she fumbled through her phonebook looking for Dennis Howell’s telephone number, all the time, the kettle screamed to be lifted from the heat.
It rang three times before anyone picked up. ‘Dennis … this is Mary McGreal … what? Hold on.’ She put the phone down and with her hand wrapped inside an oven-glove, removed the kettle from the stove. She then picked up again. ‘I said … oh, never mind, just get your truck out to Dorothy Winkle’s. I’ve just been out front, her house is on fire!’
Mary heard the phone immediately go dead, and once again silence reigned. Forgetting about the kettle and the tea, she called up the stairs to George to let him know about the fire and that she’d be going up there to see Mrs Winkle was all right, she listened but didn’t hear his reply, with a bit of luck he’d climbed back into bed and gone off to sleep.
