Read Online The Backs (2013) by Alison Bruce - Free Book Online Page A

delivering it to her own doorstep. Both the newspapers and the leaflets ran on a weekly loop, their headlines so bland that after the first few front pages each had less impact than the two-for-one pizza offer announced on the sidebar next to it. How many takeaway menus did one house ever need?
    Occasionally an envelope lay amidst the other papers. The first few were white with printed labels and postage paid by someone running a stack of envelopes through a franking machine. A couple more had cellophane windows and advertised their sender with a logo printed on the front. Jane didn’t feel so bereft of a life that she needed to investigate correspondence from Bar-claycard to feel part of the human race, yet she did reach for the first handwritten envelope with perhaps a little too much keenness. It was pale lemon in colour, and the front read
The Osborne Family
– which probably explained why it had slipped through the postal-redirection service. Whatever her father had registered with the Post Office, it wouldn’t have included the word
Family.
The writing was shaky, its uneven strokes trying to recreate a once beautiful hand.
Aunt Gwen!
The name flashed into her head, just a name – and the memory of her mother’s aunt once sighted at a family wedding. A rarity, in fact, like the sighting of a barred warbler; a name you knew but a face you wouldn’t recognize in your own back yard.
    It contained some kind of greetings card, and Jane slid it from the envelope. The front carried an uninspired photograph of a bunch of daffodils.
Happy Easter.
Months old now and from a relative disconnected by almost a decade.
To Gerry, Mary and family.
    Jane stood it on the floor, and glanced at it every few minutes as she worked through the rest of the pile.
    She didn’t consider herself as having one of those addictive personalities. Yes, she’d tried cigarettes, risked £1 each week on the lottery and enjoyed a couple of bottles of beer at the weekend, but she changed her behaviour often too. Dependence scared her: it felt like avoidable baggage. Now she could understand why alcoholics needed to not drink at all, not even a sip, because, after all these years, she could still taste her childhood and it was too intoxicating to ignore.
    It surrounded her: the cracks, dents and scars in this old house that were suddenly so familiar, and the unfurling of other random, inconsequential memories that they unlocked. Familiar shouts from the other end of the house. The smell of bolognaise catching the bottom of the pan. Waking early to the strimmer clipping off the top of the grass in their tiny lawn.
    It hadn’t all been bad, after all.
    Under the carpet the varnished floorboards were dappled with darker knot holes. Did the largest of them still look like an eye? Would the third tread on the stairs still creak at the right-hand end, and had there ever been a secret compartment behind the rectangular repair made to the landing ceiling?
    Something inside her gave way. It tremored and then it burst.
    Instinctively she scrambled towards her own room, stumbling up the stairs and grabbing at the door handle.
Running to ground.
A tangle of truths and doubts hit her all at once.
She hadn’t been wrong. Coming home had been the mistake. Not the leaving. Not her anger. Now she had to stay and face them all. Because coming home was necessary.
    She clutched the handle, with her forehead pressed to the paintwork of the door, simultaneously wanting it open but not letting herself enter the bedroom that had acted like her comfort blanket for so many years. Neither her hand nor her head won the contest; the cold smoothness of the gloss itself was enough. Her nose and lips pressed against it . . . and she fell back twenty years, to jars of white spirit and her mother picking loose black bristles from the drying paint. Her father masking windows, then scraping streaks of dried emulsion from the glass where stray drips had still found their mark. The smell