We present an extract from Twenty-Twenty Vision, the new short story collection by Mary Morrissy - read an extract from her story Fingerpost below.
Intricately layered and deftly woven together, Twenty-Twenty Vision is a collection of stories concerned with hindsight, honesty and late middle-age regret – the fruits of life lived, love lost and secrets buried.
From Fingerpost
Christine is sitting in her car having a panic attack. At least, that's what she thinks is happening. It’s both more and less frightening than she expected. No gasping for breath or throat closing up, or heart going like the clappers. No, it’s just this. It’s 4:30 pm, a mild February afternoon, the bare trees shrouded in a blurred light and she hasn’t a clue where she is. There’s no one about. Even though the street where she has parked, or abandoned herself, is homely with a cottage-style terrace on one side facing a large green, the houses have a stand-offish air, curtains drawn, no cars in the driveway and no evident signs of life.
Enter the Mount Helicon Demesne, the Google directions she’d printed out had instructed. When she drove in, it was like entering an alternate universe. Each development led into another and she felt like she was trapped in a Rubik’s Cube. Enormous, detached McMansions with mock Tudor beams and double garages gave way to more modest gingerbready two-storeys with dormer windows and faux shutters. Then came little courts of maisonettes that were boxy and Swedish-looking, or what Christine imagined as Swedish from browsing Ikea catalogues. She’d driven past a dozen landscaped green spaces, some flat and planted with single, spindly-looking trees, others sloping like the grassy knolls of a golf course. Take a right on to Granary Hill was the next direction on the Google sheet. But nothing appeared that looked like a granary, not to speak of a proper hill. It was as if she’d entered a world where the names had no relationship to the landmarks. And it was totally deserted. Not a sinner about. She might as well be in the Gobi Desert.
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She’d been smug starting out. Head south on Empress Avenue towards Marine Road. I know how to get to the end of my own road, she’d muttered to herself. When they’d bought the car, Jim had suggested a sat nav, but she didn’t like the idea of a woman in the car (they’re always women, aren’t they?) barking instructions at her. Don’t I have you for that, she’d said to Jim. Jim’s specialty is telling her to turn when it’s too late and then getting impatient with her as if she’s some kind of dimwit. So she savours the experience of driving alone, because she neither has to speak nor listen. It’s a matter of policy with her that on trips like this, she never brings her mobile. She likes the feeling of being untethered, being in nowhere land, unreachable. That feels transgressive these days.
Veer left on to ramp for Circular Road. Her whole life is veering just now. Sniffing her armpits to see has she developed the old lady smell yet, that perfumed mix of sweet decay she remembers from aunts of long ago – talcum powder, sherry and eau de something like cologne. Who’s she codding? She’s trying to avoid thinking about death. Delma’s kind of death, in particular. Delma is her best friend. That sounds meagre and inadequate; her life-long companion, that’s more like it. Pace Jim.
Before Delma went into the nursing home, Jim had begun to get tetchy about the time Christine spent with her. Her visits to Delma’s increasingly chaotic house took longer and longer, partly because Delma told her everything twice over. There was always a bottle of wine on the go, even if she called in the morning, and when she tried to leave there were scenes.
Don’t go, Delma would say, clutching her sleeve, don’t leave me.
Christine had felt torn, afraid of Delma’s drowning grip and dreading Jim’s low-lying hostility. All he was worried about was that she was spilling the beans to Delma.
About our sex lives, Christine had asked, trying to humour him.
That’s what Jim thinks women talk about – even at their age. But it’s intimacy he means. He suspects she might share more of herself with Delma than with him. And that’s probably true. Or, at least, it was in the past. She kept the details of Delma’s decline from him. She didn’t know why. To protect Delma? But to protect her from what?
Merge on to the South Link was the next instruction. There was a lot of merging in the Google directions. People say that about the elderly – how they merge into the background, become invisible. Not true of Delma who had become more defined, more definite as she aged. Once she’d given up on colour, her hair underneath turned out to be a majestic and uniform white. She’d acquired a whole new wardrobe. Suddenly she could wear reds and purples because they no longer shouted at her hair. Titian, Delma used to joke, that’s the posh name for my shade of carrot. She’d become more flamboyant, buying roomy shift dresses with big pockets and swaddling a pashmina around her neck. A more youthful style than the sober office wardrobe she’d had to wear all her working life. It was a bit mutton dressed as lamb, if you asked Christine, but she said nothing. Now she wonders if this new freedom of expression had been the early signs of Delma’s illness taking hold?
Her decline had been so gradual, it was hard to say. It was only when her drinking got out of hand – there’d been some incident with her cleaner – that Delma’s niece took charge and moved her into the Mount Helicon Nursing Home.
Twenty-Twenty Vision is published by The Lilliput Press
