Mother's Pride (1)
The first instalment of my new short story, published exclusively on Substack
Doris moved her little finger back and forth across the pile of the Axminster carpet at the bottom of her stairs. The daylight slipped away through the reeded glass of the front door. It soothed her, knowing that she’d vacuumed this morning. Doris had cared for the carpet longer than her son Gordon and it had lasted longer than her marriage. What a brilliant investment, she thought. Professionally cleaned every year; she banned outdoor shoes in the house. But as lovely and springy as the carpet was, it had not been enough to insulate Doris’s frail body from hitting every step on the way down.
Doris feared that the cracking noise she’d heard as she fell was not the wooden spindles being knocked out of place on her way down, but her hip. Her teeth would not stop chattering. The searing pain from her hip was becoming unbearable.
The day she went into labour with Gordon twenty-four years ago, a nurse told her to breathe through her pains. Trying to take a deep breath through her nose, she felt like she needed to burp. It wasn’t helping. Intense heat surged up from her chest to her cheeks. Her heart raced.
She hoped the Shepherd's pie would be good for another day in the fridge.
There was only one man in Doris’s life and that was her son, Gordon. There was certainly nothing wrong with an adult son living with his mum. She just loved looking after him.
At fifty-two years old, Doris took pride in being independent. Since Len, Doris’s husband had gone, she had to get used to taking the bus. This wasn't a problem, except for the times when the bus driver would offer her a concessionary fare, causing her to snap back, ‘I'm not a bloody OAP, you idiot. I’m nowhere near sixty yet!’
This was not a one-off occasion, either. The poor conductor who had once jumped off the bus to offer her assistance with her shopping trolley, had got his chivalry battered out of him by her leather bag around the back of his head. ‘I don’t need any bloody help. I’m not an invalid,’ she’d scolded him. And she certainly wasn’t. As the saying goes, you can’t judge a book by its cover. But Doris was not one to conform to any beauty standards. She admired Queen Elizabeth II and Margaret Thatcher—noble, dignified, and stoic. That sort of elegance and grace didn’t come with fast fashion and youth. Looks faded after all.
Len had been gone for ten years now. He dropped dead behind the wheel of their metallic green Ford Fiesta one day whilst driving to the garden centre to fetch some peat-free compost. After loading the car and getting halfway home, Len’s heart stopped beating at a set of traffic lights. Unfortunately, the bread van in front wasn’t expecting Len’s dead, heavy foot to get jammed on the accelerator. Len and the whole car ended up parked in the back of the van. A metal tray had cleanly sliced off Len’s head on impact, leaving the ambulance crew a platter of head and milk rolls on arrival.