The End � story

When mum went, Josh had been at the children’s zoo at the holiday camp over Camber, raking up donkey and goat shit into manageable piles for local gardeners. It was hot, the first really hot summer for years and the sea shimmered silvery blue and the sand heaved with tourists. It wasn't a bad job apart from the smell. It had been more of a laugh when his mate Tom had been with him, but he'd skived off to Florida with his mum and his little sisters a week ago.

Josh wore his overalls tied around his waist and shovelled bare-chested. He’d worked up a very decent tan and the knock off aviators Amy had given him looked good. There were worse summer jobs.

Josh’s mobile went off at two forty-five. It was Stanislava, Mum’s carer, breathless, as if she was speaking right into his ear.

'You must come home, Josh,' she said. 'It is Sara, she needs you.'

He let the rake fall crashing onto the ground and leapt over the wooden fence round kiddie’s korner and ran to the road and all the way home.

Of course he’d been too late. Mum lay, pale, the colour of mushroom soup, on the bed. Josh had never seen anyone dead and he would have sworn she was just sleeping, open mouthed. But her chest was motionless under the duvet and her still-warm skin was rubbery like meat. Stanislava had hugged him, crying, and that night when the doctor had gone and the undertaker had taken mum away she had kissed him. So in the morning when his Dad turned up with his old set of keys he had found them, sleeping naked, squeezed up together on Josh’s single bed. Dad was furious.

'Josh, she’s twenty-two!' He glared.  'You’re sixteen!' David couldn’t look at Stanislava but he shouted at her and told her he’d be ringing the Home Office and that she’d be back in Slovakia before she knew what had hit her. Stan crept sideways out of the bed apologising, almost in tears. Josh was furious. He looked hard at his father. He wanted to shout at him, tell him he’d no right to come into their home. He’d been the one to leave, he’d been the one who couldn’t take it. Mum would never have survived this long without Stan.

'It should’ve been you,' Josh said it aloud as he pulled the t-shirt over his head.

'What!'

'You heard.'  Josh slammed out of the house.

He’d got as far as the sea before he stopped. The sun was already high up in the sky. Out on the channel he could see the grey cut-out shadows of ships on the horizon. He took his trainers off and felt the sand under his feet. Suddenly it was as if he was three years old, hands sticky with ice cream, feet massaged by the enveloping warm sand.

He thought, out of the corner of his eye that Mum was there, up on the sea road, waiting for him, stranded on the hard standing in her wheelchair. Then he felt his eyes filling up and his throat catching and he started walking back to the house.

The White House

When Sara Gonella  bought the pebble-dash bungalow along the coast from the power station she had known she was dying. When Josh used to ask her she’d say, ‘We’re all dying lovey, sooner or later. It’s just that I’m definitely going sooner.’

The illness meant London was too much. Sometimes Sara thought she could taste the traffic fumes in the air and then when David left for good, Sara decided to go too. She knew she would have to stop work and London reminded her in so many little ways of how her life had changed.  If someone had told her that she would ever miss using the underground she’d have never believed them.

And Sara wasn’t that interesting photographer anymore. She was – if she was lucky, that beautiful little boys’ mother – if she was unlucky, that poor, poor woman in a wheelchair.

She and Josh would drive down to the coast – she could still drive then – and with the divorce settlement they chose a sprawling unlovely bungalow so close to the sea it was never quiet. It was called The White House even though it was closer to grey and the front door was bright blue. The roof was good but the wind off the sea meant the paintwork on the windows had to be re-done every year. The garden was big too and Josh, just 10, was playing football for Arsenal, in his head at least. 

She had worried how he would fit in, David too busy in Los Angeles, was nervous on the phone.

'He’s not white, Sar, you have to remember that. It’s different outside London. It’s like the bloody middle ages!'

But it was all right, better than all right. Josh was tall and good looking and made the primary school football team and was the nearest thing to exotic the village had. Secondary school was even easier; boys wanted to be his friend, girls watched him in the corridors or on the football pitch. He was well liked and Sara relaxed. But the illness tightened its grip.

Elena from Berlin came as a sort of au pair and helped Sara get in and out of the car and did the cooking. Josh didn’t like her because she was sullen and always in her room on the phone to her boyfriend in Munich. When she left she had run up so much on the phone bill they were cut off for three weeks. Then David sent a cheque and the au pair agency sent Stanislava. She was supposed to stay a year but that had stretched to nearly two. Sara was used to her, she liked the way she only had to tell her how to do things once.

Stan was, Sara reckoned, second only to an angel in goodness. She cooked (Slovakian noodles and sour beef), she helped Sara catalogue her slides, she drove the van and she helped Mrs Disney from the village when she came to do the cleaning. And she went to English classes in Rye once a week on the day the auxiliary carer came across from Hastings.

Stan said she had a younger brother at home in Bratislava, and Sara, lying in her room, would listen to her and Josh talking loudly over the radio or watch them in the garden mucking around like brother and sister. It made her happy. She had always wanted a bigger family.

The summer was the hottest on record. She had felt rough since before Easter, her legs particularly bad at night. The heat was always bad news for MS sufferers and even with the sea breeze flapping the curtains and the fan going all day she felt too hot. Sara shut her eyes and pressed the buzzer to ask Stan to bring her some water. The sun seemed to shine directly through her closed eyelids and inside her head everything glowed and fuzzed ice-lolly orange. She moved her head away from the window but the orange didn’t go away. She thought of Josh and hoped he’d done all right, his exam results would come next week. She heard Stan come in and felt her cool hand on her forehead.

The last thing that went through her mind was that she hoped to God Josh would remember to get round to painting the window frames before winter came.

The Funeral

Josh opened his eyes. The coffin was still there. Sara was inside it in the dark, eyes shut. At least he hoped her eyes were shut. They were shut when he had seen her last, but that was close to a week ago. Some doctor, some undertaker could have opened them, how would he know? He was never going see her again. The picture of her inside his head, lying on her back in her bedroom, Stan stroking her hand, was all he’d ever have.
 
The singing started up but Josh couldn't open his mouth. His throat felt blocked and choked. There was a nerve above his right eye throbbing in his forehead. Next to him, his father was half singing along, Josh felt a kind of nausea. The coffin was moving. Josh couldn't watch it disappear behind the curtain knowing it was heading for some giant incinerator.  No one else seemed bothered.

His Grandmother, Sara’s mother, was unmoved, dry-eyed. She sat withered and empty like a human husk, her lips moving along with the music, making breathy old lady singing sounds. Why wasn’t she dead and Mum alive? Josh looked away. He was getting out. He pushed past his Dad and Takako, his wife, and out into the aisle. He kept his eyes on the checked tiled floor. The chapel was full, he knew they would all be looking at him. Nearly everyone he knew, all black and whited up like a flock of magpies for his mother.

He held his breath until he was outside and felt the full orange heat of the August sun. Then he leant against the crematorium and threw up.

It didn't last long. He hadn't eaten anything that morning. He straightened up and pulled the knot of his tie down and undid his shirt. He didn't want to go back inside. Mum wouldn't have wanted this. She never believed in anything, especially not a God whose followers were always assuring her she could be cured if only she prayed hard enough, believed hard enough. 

When she had spoken about dying she said she wanted a big do, everyone there. But Josh reckoned the church service and hymns were his Grandmother's idea. She didn't know what Sara had wanted and she would have never asked Josh.  Even if she had she'd have taken no notice, ‘No Josh, darling, I'm afraid we're not having one of those ghastly humanitarian funerals in a field or a wood or something!’

Mum wanted to be on a hillside, outside; she'd always said that – was she joking? She wanted her ashes scattered, she'd joked about it, Josh standing high up and the wind turning and Josh would tell her to stop and she’d be laughing.

Josh leant away from the sun.

She had said wanted her ashes scattered somewhere she hadn’t been for ages because wheelchairs were banned, Tintagel in Cornwall, or up in the whispering gallery at St Paul's. Josh had never been there, but she'd told him about when she had. With David, with his Dad, not long after she'd met him. He was on one side her on the other, whispering to each other around the huge stone dome.

Josh moved away from the crematorium wall and out of site of the entrance. He didn't want Amy running out in concerned girlfriend mode. He didn't really want to speak to her at all anymore. And he couldn't see Stan running out after him offering to kiss him better, not here, not after Dad had warned her off.

He shut his eyes and he could smell her skin. She was the only thing that made him feel any better, and she hadn't been answering her phone all week.  He'd only seen her for a split second before the service, her eyes willing him to look away. Josh told himself he must have imagined it. No, that was the only good thing about anything at the moment, Josh told himself. Just the memory of lying in bed with Stan.

He'd been awake most of the night, scared to move in case she woke up. It had been the first time he'd ever slept with anyone. Not sex, he’d had sex, not just with Amy, there'd been Georgia Andrews and Laura  Fenner a couple of times. But this was different.

It had been uncomfortable as hell, his tiny single bed, one arm pinned underneath her, one of her legs locked tight between his.  Seeing Stan's sleeping face, her breathing, living body right up against his all night. Josh smiled. She'd talk to him back at the house, wouldn't she? He pushed the doubt away and started walking out of the gates of the crematorium.

It was a good hour's walk back to the coast, but he needed it.  By the time he'd get home his head would be straight, he would have figured out exactly what he was going to say to Stan. What about Amy? He'd have to say something to her too. Josh kicked a stone out into the road, maybe it wouldn't be so bad, perhaps he could play the my mother's just died I'm so screwed up card, she could blame it all on that, dry her tears and start again with Simon Harris, who walked around after her with his tongue hanging out.

Josh felt the air almost sucked out of him. A car passed millimetres from his body. The horn sounded and Josh saw the car and himself just managing to step back out of it's way all at the same time.  Josh was aware of the street around him freezing and the other pedestrians like some audience all turning and watching and waiting for the collision that didn't happen. His heart was hammering inside his chest. The driver leant out and swore and Josh ignored him. He breathed in and out slowly and started walking again. He mustn't get lost in his head like that. Out here on the street it was just another summer day. Little kids in flip flops, a girl with a pushchair who smiled up at him the way girls had always done and Josh knew everything was all right out here. No one else's mother was dead. Everything was just fine. He put his hands deep into his pockets and kept going.
 
By the time he reached the White House the sun had climbed higher in the sky. The verge outside the house was thick with cars and Josh slowed again. In the rutted mud outside the house he could make out the tracks of her wheelchair. Last week coming home from the doctors with Stan, he'd helped her and it was there, preserved in the clay.

In the garden over the hedge someone laughed. Josh straightened up, he didn't want to puke or cry or lose control again.  He pulled his tie off completely and wound it into a spiral and tucked it into his jacket pocket. He breathed in deeply, keep a lid on everything, he told himself and pushed through the metal gate into the summer garden.

'Josh! She was a wonderful woman, your mother. So brave!'

Josh said nothing. 'I always said that, didn't I love,' The woman, Mrs Anstey, from the village, looked to her husband for approval, 'I told your Dad as well – lovely man, I can see where you get your good looks from, he's a proper Denzel Washington isn't he? I said to my Ian, I said, Sara's that brave, and you were always such a good boy, a real credit to her. Couldn't have asked for more. Not many boys your age would've been so helpful, is it?'

Josh couldn't meet her gaze and moved towards the house.

'Josh,' Mrs Disney took his arm, she was about a foot shorter than him and she pulled him close. 'You're a good lad for your mother, always were. I know she was so proud of you. It's not right a young woman going like that, but you know… she was in a lot of pain at the end.' Mrs Disney paused and Josh knew what she was going to say. 'I expect it was a blessing in disguise,' she patted his forearm and Josh resisted the urge to pull it away. He swallowed hard.

He made for the kitchen door, he didn't want to be ambushed by any more old women trying to make him feel better and only making him feel worse.  He looked round, he couldn't see Stan anywhere. Maybe she was indoors.

'Josh! We were so worried, I didn't see you after the service and I rang your mobile but it was switched off and Gemma said you probably needed to be on your own. Oh, Josh! Poor you.' Amy stood on tip toes and kissed his cheek, like he was a child. She was very close and he could smell her perfume, something that promised flowers and the chemically reconstructed sex glands of small deer. Her dress was thin and her body was pressed up against his. Behind his sunglasses he closed his eyes.

'Look, Amy.' When he opened them again she was smiling at him. He wanted to kick her away but he gritted his teeth.  He saw some of his mates from school looking uncomfortable in their suits and Josh almost smiled.
'Amy, I’ve just gotta sort something out, yeah,' 
Amy pressed closer. In the sun her hair shone so bright it dazzled.
'You look so sexy in that suit.' She said it low, smiled up at him and ran her hand down his back under his jacket.

Josh shrugged her off and walked into the kitchen. Compared with the light outside it was pitch dark and he took off his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes.  He leant against the fridge for a minute pleased he hadn't swore at her in his mother's garden. He couldn't remember ever wanting Amy at all. She had just happened. He was the best-looking boy in Year 11 she was the best-looking girl. Everyone said so. They had been together for nearly a year, she was on the pill for Christ sake it was perfect.

Not. Amy had gone from the hottest girl in Year 11 to the girl he'd most like to feed into a wood chipper head first.

There.  He slammed his fist into the fridge. There it was again, the real Josh Beckford the one those people out there didn't know. The Josh who would make his mother wait in the other room when she called, 'Jo-osh! Josh!' Her thin voice struggling to be audible, her body trapped in her chair. He'd sit there on the playstation and finish the level sometimes. Turn the volume up and kill everything.

'Josh! What on earth are you doing?' Stan had a tray of sandwiches in one hand. She stood in the kitchen doorway with the sunlight behind her. Her hair was white blonde, cut short, almost like a boy's and she wore a plain black dress held up by two tiny straps. Her shoulders were bare and golden.

'Stan.' He heard the catch in his voice. He drew his arm back and looked sheepishly at the dent in the fridge door. His knuckles were stinging too.
'Sorry.' He wanted to look at her but he couldn't.

Stan put the sandwiches down on the kitchen table but she didn't come too close. It was as if he had some invisible quarantine buffer zone that extended for one metre all the way round. He saw her look towards the garden.
'You're scared of Dad?'

Stan leant against the table and folded her arms. 
'I don't want to go back to Bratislava. Yet.'

'No.'
'Does your hand hurt?'
'A bit.' He shook it. 'I'm sorry.'
Stan shrugged. 'It was your fridge. It's your house, now. I guess.'
'No, I'm sorry about my dad. David bloody Beckford. I mean, Takako is what, 31, and he’s 45.'
'No, Josh.  I am sorry. What happened between us shouldn't have happened. That was my fault. I let it happen. I could have stopped it.' She pushed her short fringe further up her forehead.
'What? What d'you mean? You made a mistake?' Josh could feel the pain in his hand again.
'Yes. No! Of course not,' Stanislava sighed. 'I am older than you Josh, I should have kept myself under control. It should not have happened. I am sorry. I really like you Josh, but…'
'Yeah, yeah. You really like me… seemed like you couldn't get enough of me.'
'Josh not so loud! This is a funeral. Sara's funeral.'
Josh felt his eyes stinging. 'Don't you treat me like a kid, Stan. Not you.'
'Josh, I know this is a difficult time. Emotional things are all at the surface. I honestly never meant to hurt you.'
Josh folded his arms across his chest.
'No, Stan, it didn't hurt a bit. I loved it. I think you loved it too didn’t you? Or did you just feel so sorry for me that you'd do anything?'
Stan blinked. She was furious, he could see that. 'Josh how can you say that?' They stared at each other and for a few seconds Josh thought maybe he could make her kiss him, make her take back everything she had just said.  Outside in the garden someone's baby started wailing.
'Stan, I'm sorry, I didn't mean that, I'm sorry, I just…'
'Look, I am not talking about this now, all right?'  The moment had passed. Stan picked up the tray of sandwiches and turned to go.

Josh wanted to knock them out of her hands, tear up the whole foul lousy house that smelt of his Mum, a woman who didn’t exist anymore.  He turned back to the fridge and smashed his hand into it again and again and again. It rocked and clinked and rocked and clinked and when he finally turned round Stan had gone and Amy was there. She already looked terrified. Maybe she’d get the message and just go.

'Oh Josh!' Her hand was over her mouth.
'What?' He said it sharp and hard. Josh thought she was lucky there was the whole of the kitchen table in between them.
'Oh Josh, come here.' She held her arms out for him. He watched her for a second and couldn't see what had kept him with her for 10 minutes let alone 10 months.
'Piss off Amy.'
'What?'
'You heard me Amy, piss off we're finished, I did want to break it to you gently but you wouldn't leave me alone.'
On the other side of the kitchen table Amy was crumpling. She was almost folding in on herself as if he had hit her in slow motion. Josh rubbed his eye and watched.  It was like treading on an ant. The tears sprang from her eyes and her lipsticked mouth contorted and wobbled. She leant against the table.
'You don't mean that babe. It's a difficult time, I know.'
'Oh I mean it. I should have done this before the exams but you kept on and on about the leavers dance.' His voice was sarcastic.
Amy sobbed. 'But you and me…'
'S'over, I should have done this weeks ago but I couldn't, OK?'
'We were going to Cornwall with Gemma and Carl!'
'Simon Harris will go with you or Ben or Mike or any of them.'
Amy sniffed. She pulled herself upright.
'But I want you Josh!' She paused, wiped her eyes with the back of her hand the way girls do when they don't want to smudge their mascara, and when she thought she was composed looked Josh straight in the face.  'I love you.'
'You don't want me. Anyone would do for you if he was good looking enough. You just want a boyfriend. And you don't love me, you just love yourself. And I love Stan, Stanislava. And she doesn't love me so it's fair it's equal. And I'm going to live with Dad in London so that's it anyway. It's over, how many ways do I have to say it.'
Josh moved away from the fridge and the beat up door swung open.

Amy was sobbing, she turned away and suddenly behind her was her best mate Gemma. Gemma was scowling, she put a protective arm around Amy.
'You bastard. You heartless bastard Josh.' She said.
Amy clung to her and they went back into the garden.
'He doesn't mean it Gem.' Amy sniffed.

Josh followed the girls outside.
'Oh I meant it, every word. Did you get all that did you Gemma? Got all the facts? Josh and Amy split shock as love rat Josh beds beautiful carer? Amy Henson most boring fuck on Kent coast!' Josh didn’t realise he was shouting. He suddenly felt completely naked. Everyone was looking at him.

© Catherine Johnson

Read more ... The End - Analysis