Without Mother by Emma Kinnear
As he taps a broken pen, his fingers turn inky blue. Beyond the office, outside, there are rows of matchstick conifers, tall and brittle boned: what a fire they would make. The sky is grey with just a blink of sunlight.
Every day he washes and dresses to the ticking of an inherited grandfather clock, drinks grainy black coffee as he walks to work. Without fail, a woman with cat’s eyes and knotted curls scrambles for the bus, misses the bus. Air conditioning in his office ensures the temperature is constant. Each day is the same day.
As a boy, the house he grew up in had a view that stretched all across the moors, overgrown with purple heather and mustard-yellow gorse. They could hear the far away lowing and mewing. He loaded-up branches, then, from five or six feet, with a flick from a tin can, his father doused the bonfire in petrol. After a gossamer moment, the flames flared. He was thrilled by it, dreamt of it, flapped his hands as he watched it, jumping up and down, shouting. Sometimes his giant of a father flung two potatoes into the heart of the flames. The morning after his father and he used to rise up early, scattering ashes across the fields. From those ashes, how rich the new potatoes would taste, how sweet were the baby carrots.
An office cleaner is folding up linen cloths and yellow dusters, and then she rattles tubs of bleach along glass corridors. Old Jones is slipping post into trays. Voices are humming. He tries hard to ignore the view of the forest as he flicks through files, half-reads emails. Though it is wrong: he pauses and turns to look up, momentarily glancing at a colleague. Quickly, then away, then one more sideways look. Examining her sucked-in, flushed cheeks and bulging glass eyes. She too, just for a moment, is quite still, as though she is somewhere else. Perhaps he is not utterly alone.
An apprentice slips into his office. He still forgets her name — Jennie, Julie, Josie? ‘Good morning. We’re ready!’ She beckons him in the same sing-song voice. So there it is, again — he slips thin latex blue gloves on, skin-upon-skin. They are always too tight, gluey; their plastic flesh tugs at his hairy hands.
One evening, on the verge of autumn, when his father, the patriarch, was demolishing a shed, he had poked at the edges of the dying fire. There, with black-pin eyes glaring, he saw a hedgehog; she was burning. He beat the fire down around her, frantically stamping it out with his feet, bashing it away with a stick. The fire scorched the tips of his fingers, melted the soles of his Wellington boots, and took her away. He placed the remains in a cardboard box with leaves all around. It was the hedgehog’s eyes: he could not forget her eyes desperately hoping, waiting.
Afterwards, his father sat him on a high stool, gave him a cherry cola and laughed that such was the way of life. It occurred to him then, as he watched the sun setting and the midges gathering, that if his mother had been alive, she would have held him, talked to him.
He slips his office door shut, so gently that it makes no sound. Then, treading on the shadows of the sing-song voiced intern, with her fawn heels slipping up and down, he follows behind. He turns once more to glance at the clouds gathering around the forest like smoke and then descends down to the floor where there are no windows.
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After recently completing a creative writing course, Emma Kinnear published a story in Montreal Writes. She trained as a lawyer and has also published articles on environment justice, legal aid cuts and land rights in international journals. She lives in Norwich with her novelist husband, kids and cats
Twitter: @embazkin