Audrey Ellis - Searching Fifty Shades Of Grey

It was several days later that Esther woke to find her Coventry Grandmother sitting on her bed and brushing her long hair. Esther yearned to pose a question; aware of the answer but she found her courage.

“How is Daddy?”

“Your daddy died last night, hinny.

Esther sobbed until her ribs ached. Where did those tears come from? Could it be her making such noises? Why couldn't she stop crying into her pillow?

Later that week Esther watched her Nana sniff her dad's clothes.

“Why are you doing that?”

She didn’t reply but sat rocking whispering through her tears.

“It isn’t fair. Not again and so soon after your granddad; how for heaven’s sake can this be God’s will?”

Esther would have given the world to have her daddy back again.

Her lovely Nanny returned to Coventry carrying her son’s typewriter. The last thing her Nana had done was to hug them on the front door step; the step where a Daily Mirror photographer flashed his light.

“Is that the one you mean, darling?” asked the girl in the flower shop; opposite the hospital where Esther’s dad had died. There were flowers everywhere!”

She turned to her mum.

“You did promise that we could choose flowers for our Daddy didn’t you Mummy?” May was unable to answer her daughter. The man who had been her world gone.

May touched Esther on her shoulder.

“Please, darling, pick me some flowers.

“I’m doing my best writing for daddy.

The next day she said to her mum

“My tummy aches and I can’t stop thinking about Daddy in the chapel of rest. Why is it called that?”

May stood near the cluttered sink with her hand on a cornflakes packet.

“It’s where people get taken when they are dead and can rest and where their families, who will always love them, can go and pay their respects”

Esther wrinkled her nose and stood one foot on top of the other in the kitchen as her mummy poured orange juice into their plastic mugs. A robin hopped from one stone to the next in the garden before settling on the fork handle that her dad wouldn't come back for.

“What do you mean respects? They are dead. How will they know who goes to see them? Didn’t Nana say Daddy was in a garden with Jesus? Perhaps we should go there instead!”

Esther sadly watched as her beloved mummy, with a strained, pale face and red nose, began to balance eggs with lions on, one at a time, on a dessert-spoon with a plop and a splash that tickled her nose, into the bubbling water.

She turned the electric plate down and with a flick of a switch she turned off the electric kettle on the work-top; that Esther had watched her daddy install. Somehow May regained her composure.

“It’s difficult, darling but when you are older you'll understand. She turned her face away from Esther and swallowed.

“I'd rather think of him with us at the seaside, playing his accordion, or tickling my toes beneath my sheets. I know Daddy wouldn’t want us to cry!”

May didn’t know what to say to comfort anyone.

“Would you like to go and visit your Daddy in the chapel of rest? He will be in his coffin but you mustn’t think you have to go, though!”

“If he doesn’t know I am there, then why should I go?”

Esther wanted to say how scared she was of death or how she shivered when a coffin went past her anywhere. Children out with their parents stood still with the youngest not knowing why. Then an odd silence crept like a dark overcoat encasing them in a bubble away from the distant humming traffic heading towards Southend where, no more as a united family, would they ever be able to return.

“I don’t think I do want to see Daddy in a coffin. I would rather think of him in his hospital bed”.

On the kitchen windowsill there stood three little tubes with their lids now firmly back on.

“See the metal thingy inside,” her father had said to her and her brothers, only a short time before. He demonstrated, “you blow through and you will get hundreds and hundreds of bubbles”.

He was right. Their life had been brimming with bubbles. Now the bubbles would disappear and the storms take their place.

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