![]() ![]() ‘Let’s see what’s happening in the world, Mungo,’ she said with little enthusiasm. It was like watching a work of art being vandalised slowly, gradually, a little more each day. ![]() Away from Tom’s inexorable deterioration. An airplane, with supreme arrogance, drew a feathery white line across the sky on its way to…where? Somewhere different, was all that mattered, just at that moment. The first star was just visible on the horizon, above the caramel band of smog. She turned off the engine and exhaled loudly, settled back in her seat. She resented the cheerful neurologist-apparently all of twelve years old-who had proclaimed that Tom was his youngest patient ever. She resented Tom’s disability, then hated herself for resenting him. On days like this, it felt as if her veins ran with pure vinegar. ‘No!’ she slapped the steering wheel with her palms, but it made no difference. A former crosswords demon, he now stared at the black and white squares with bemused indifference. She wanted to get home before Tom fell asleep. Far, far in the distance, so far that it might as well be another country, she saw the flash of tiny blue lights. Ahead of her, merging into the distance towards the clouded horizon, stretched an endless line of stopped cars, their brake lights a ruby runway which led eventually home. Her body felt heavy, her limbs slow to respond. The brake lights on the car ahead of her glowed red, then the yellow hazard lights blinked. She felt him drifting away from her, like a boat at the end of a long rope. Janice worried sometimes that her conversations with Mungo now outstripped those with Tom. Before the stroke which changed everything, destroyed his memory, robbed him of control over his left side. Tom used to do the remembering for both of them. ‘Did I defrost the chicken?’ Janice asked Mungo, the small bobbled bear stuck to her dashboard, as she pulled into the stream of going-home traffic. ![]()
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