**You can listen to this story via the audio version, recorded by me, here**
The van that came to clear Patty’s house was so small it didn’t even fill the drive. Three men emptied the contents of her home onto the front lawn so that it sat there, trailing like the guts of a flattened bird at the side of the road. Boxes of books and files spilled into each other. Faded side tables, useful for years, sat empty and lost in the thin shade of Patty’s silver birch.
It was the pans that got me. Stacked together maybe for the final time. I could still see her bony hands curled around the handles. The shake of her loose skin as she talked and shook the pan that fried her weekend eggs. I looked at them nestled, big to small and thought about the years of sweet breakfast milk warmed before school, the piles of potatoes peeled and boiled week in, week out for a hungry family of boys. Not these boys though, not these boys now scraping out her insides onto her lawn. Boys she did not know. A square pile of neatly pressed sheets, snatched from their cupboard, tried to stay together in the breeze. I wondered how many nights of her long life she’d spent pressed into each of them. The top one trailed across the grass and was trodden on, back and forth as Patty’s possessions were turfed out in piles on her lawn. I had never pressed any of my sheets. I knew it that moment, l never would.
The sofa came out, wobbling in the arms of its bearers, as if it still held Patty’s weight. Her TV chair appeared next, sagging with the shape of her. The arm covers had slipped in the man-handling, the worn patches on show beneath. Patty would have hated that. I stared at the side of the van after the seats disappeared. I felt like she was in there.
Her family had been the only ones to have ever lived in the house. They bought it brand new more than 60 years ago, she had told me proudly, the first day we met. In time she would tell me again and again. And how her boys had gone to the village schools. How her husband, Harry, had been on the council until his early death at 62. I had known her only in her years of living without any of them. She’d welcomed us to the street with intrigue, often enquiring about our children, marveling at their eyes and hair, height and smiles, seeing her own children in their actions, in that way that older people do.
On warm days she’d invite them - and me into her garden. Stooping in wide beige slacks to give the children ice lollies and lime cordial. She had a way of smiling at them lingeringly, then stopping me in my tracks with asides that pricked my skin with goose bumps. ‘Isn’t motherhood so deathly dull?’ she’d once grinned and ‘being married is a lot like having a lobotomy I imagine,’ she’d said out of nowhere, another time.
Patty’s stooped body, heavy and slow was at odds with the life in her face. With pink cheeks, penciled brows and bright lipstick that sometimes clung in flecks to her teeth, Patty had the face of a clown - albeit it softer - on the body of a woman rounded and misshapen by life, held together like an overstuffed package in browns and pale blues.
Our neighbourly friendship ebbed and flowed through kind smiles and waves, moments of chit chat, punctuated by invites into her Formica filled house. And those sudden swipes at life, that escaped her. Observations that always seemed to lay one or the other of us so bare, that I’d scramble to cover it all over and get back home.
One of the last times I had visited Patty, an August heat was dry-boiling the country. We sat, damp and agitated in the shade of her yellow kitchen. Her fridge door was covered with postcards. All from her sons she told me. I asked about the places she’d seen over the years. Folkestone, once or twice she said after a moment. Brittany, just after she and Harry moved here.
Oh, I had said a little too pitying.
Harry was far too involved, in far too many things here to ever go anywhere, she’d said before looking down at herself and adding, when I asked if we might have a beach holiday he said ‘Would you feel comfortable on a beach in a swimming costume, Patty?’ So that was that for me, I suppose, she’d sighed. I always thought of those words whenever I saw her bent over her shopping trolley after that.
I’d been comforted by her comings and goings. She was always ‘Patty from across the road.’ On the nights I closed my curtains and saw her watching the world through the TV I wondered who Patty was in her own conversations.
She had been there long before me. And now I’d be here long after her. I’d be the Patty, I thought, suddenly, for whoever lived there next. It felt like one of those lines, she might have delivered to me, deadpan.
Hadn’t she ever felt like moving I asked her one of the Saturday mornings she invited me in. She fried her egg and stirred tea while her soft voice told me, oh no, no, though her body had stilled at the question. She told me how long she’d been there, again and how happy her sons had been in the village. But they had moved away now. They had busy jobs and barn conversions in far away towns. Patty talked of these towns with wide eyes. You didn’t want to move there, Patty? You didn’t ever feel like a change? No, no, she said and punctured her egg.
Her sons seemed nice enough. Both round with red cheeks and shiny heads. They visited Patty in the way people visit a stately house or a gallery. They disappeared inside to see her. Then left again. She only went with them on Christmas morning and was home by teatime, returned, like an item, to make the house complete.
When it snowed I took her supplies. It was just once. She sat under a blanket, painting her nails a deep pink. She told me she didn’t know why she was painting her nails when she’d be back out building snowmen with her boys soon. I laughed and couldn’t soften it. She did not laugh back, just said she was tired and I left. She didn’t emerge for days. I remember how I had wished I’d stayed. When the snow cleared, she ventured out again, though it was after that she started calling me by the name of a lady who had once lived in my house. I’m not Gill, I’m Lucy remember, I’d tell her gently. Sometimes she’d touch my arm and her face would fall, Oh Lucy, yes. Sometimes her stare would be ice cold, her mottled eyes glistening, a tremble in her face. I know who you are, she’d say.
Her stoop became rounder, her once bulging shopping trolley only there as an aid. It’s a shame about Patty the neighbours would say when her curtains stayed drawn all day. In there, in that house, locked up all these years, said one, as we fell in step on our way out of the cul-de-sac. Was she not happy there? I asked. Well, Harry was, the neighbour said.
A heart attack had taken Harry. Patty had said it was sudden. No signs of any illness. Right as rain, she told me when I asked too many questions, no more to say than that, she always said.
The lawn was clearing now. The building blocks of Patty’s days demolished, carefully curated cupboards turned to rubble. I heard the clang of metal shifting, the soft slide of boxes as the houses insides were taken away. No fanfare. And all the while Patty’s shopping trolley, sat quivering, its cover flapping in the breeze, just outside her front door.
I had not seen Patty for months when she died. Carers had slipped in and out. One son visited now and then. A stoop developing that matched his mother’s.
The last time I had seen her, a soft sun was filling the day. Her carer was lowering her into a wheelchair for a walk. It’s nice to see you Patty, I said, kneeling because she could not fully lift her head. Her eyes were milky, kind.
Are you new here? she asked me hopefully.
Ish, I told her, sad.
At least the other one’s gone for good, she brightened.
I knew by now not to ask for clarification. There was never any to be found. A few days later, as morning simmered, an ambulance rolled silently onto Patty’s drive.
At her funeral we listened to her sons say words about a woman who always put them first. A Patty who stood by her word, with a heart, they said, she seemed to forget was actually beating for her.
Should have moved on, after Harry went, a relative said, cutting through the stiffness at the bar.
A heart attack wasn’t it? I chimed, I knew so little of Harry and their marriage.
A broken heart more like, he said, as whisky stung his throat.
We all knew that. Gill went. And then so did Harry.
Patty’s flowers bloomed, smothering the front of her house. I could see the shape of her hunched and tending, the roots of her trapped and tangled there. The house sagged beneath the thick bursts of petals, it’s out of shape hedges shook with the in and out flit of spring birds, oblivious. The lawn grew, creeping onto the crumbling path as families, trooped in and out to see if they might make Patty’s house their home.
It was our house that sold first though. Just two weeks after the sign was hammered in. Ours and Patty’s, like wooden flags, waving a stilted goodbye to each other as the season turned.
But now the little van slapped its doors shut on her drive. It rocked as the three men shuffled into its cab, moving off slowly, dragging the pieces of Patty’s life behind them. I made my way down, but she was gone.
I stood at the edge of her lawn, looking. And I saw her. Her face, there, in the pinks of her long ago planted Peonys. Felt her soft silence in the clutch of tulips, tall and still. I reached out to hold the weight of the decades that shimmered in the pearl of her magnolia, still clinging to its petals, so late.
This is a wonderful piece, Penny. This is life. Beautiful and bitter and ugly. This is the one of the best “normal” shorts I’ve read in weeks. You are a very gifted writer with a very warm and generous heart. Thank you for this stellar story!
I absolutely love how you've drawn so much story, so much of a life, out of casual neighborly interactions on the lawn. Just beautiful, and my heart ached for Patty.