Does life change

It had been a tight world and, as a child, it seemed constant. Whether the sun shone or rain belted their broken windows nothing inside their house ever changed.
Always reluctant to put her toes down onto the chilly lino floor;careful not to kick the po under ber bed. In bed she was safe,warm and secure and he, their tormenter,asleep in his bed. He had to be asleep. If he was awake she would hear his voice bouncing and imposing itself on everyone. She could hear her budgie flattering his wings and then his claws scratching his sandpaper floor as she crept down the stairs; adjusting her school tie as she went. Jack-de-manio was on the wireless and her mum was still singing in the dark. She was always singing and dancing in the dark no matter what he said or did to her. Outwardly it looked like the cruel words that rushed from his tormented,booze filled mind, didn't touch her, but Sybil knew that it did. She knew more of her mum's dark feelings when she read the last letter she had typed before leaving them forever to die sad and belson thin in a hospice bed some miles away from their town.

She would sit by her bed in the dark, as her children slept in their cots and her husband back into his bed to grab a bit more sleep, and look at the woman who had always been her mum. Sybil was still scared of death and of seeing a dead body but this was her mum and she needed her now more than ever. There would be fits of wakefulness when her mum would talk of a miracle and she would agree with her as chinks of early light spilt into the room and she told her she loved her again. Her mum never told her she loved her back. Not once did she say she loved her but she thought that she did as they walked and laughed through their town and ate cream cakes from their corner shop or walked past the cricket field and heard the church clock strike telling them to go home as she had to get him his tea or get his fags and beer from the corner shop.

She would pull her little red tartan trolley,with its wonky wheels, along their long street containing his essential needs back to him and whistle as she walked. She counted her steps back to him and past the house where she had lived as a child and played in the dark as a child as buttercup yellows and cherry red trees flounced their sharp bright clothes, that she never saw of course,back at her.

Wherever she walked, even now, she saw her figure skirting their pretty town singing and whistling as the dog, who wasn't a trained guide dog, guided her to the post office on Mondays or to the Co-op or their corner shop where everything was got on tick.