The Scribbler Iain Maitland (good books to read txt) 📖

six cottages on the edge of this land. We don’t just do Christmas trees. Not much of a living in that. The cottages have always been tenanted, but we’ve two come up lately, the old boys in each both died … and they need doing up. We’re going up tomorrow, the two of us, to see what we have to do. We’ll need some help in a week or two. Clearing out. Painting, decorating, handyman stuff maybe … cutting wood, drilling … if you’re interested?

The man with the hat nodded, yes, yes, he could do that, he would be interested, certainly.

Daytime would be best, yes, yes, I won’t tell any of the other workers.

Well, see you on Monday and then, once the trees have all been done, I’ll wait for your call. I can come any weekday. No, I won’t tell anyone, yes, the other workers would be jealous.

“Our little secret!” concluded the man with the hat. He smiled, almost a sudden sigh of relief, as if all his troubles were over.

The smart brother stood up and shook hands. “I’ll call you … soon.”

The man with the hat went to the slow brother to shake his hand. But he had already turned away, picked up his axe and was heading for the farmhouse.

* * *

The elderly woman sat on an old kitchen chair, a blanket wrapped round her, at the bottom of the staircase.

“It’s so cold tonight. I cannot feel my fingers. I shall be pleased to get to bed. To wrap up warm at last.”

The smart brother stood, three or four steps up, holding the back of the chair.

The slow brother, crouched by the elderly woman’s feet, gripped the front two chair legs.

“Be careful, Sonky,” the old woman snapped, “you’ll have me over.”

The slow brother, struggling to raise the chair from below, did not answer as, ever so slowly, he lifted the chair. He smiled at his mother as he held the chair steady.

“Your breath smells. Have you cleaned your teeth?”

He shook his head. Went to say something, to explain, to apologise.

“Don’t just stand there, take me upstairs.”

The smart brother took one step back, the slow brother one step forward. The elderly woman held tight to the sides of the chair, issuing instructions one after the other.

“Careful.”

“Move away from the wall, Sonky.”

“Don’t drop me.”

Halfway up, the two brothers stopped, as they did every night, to get their breath. The smart brother had once suggested that they should move her bedroom downstairs. She’d not hear of it. What do you think I am, she’d said, a cripple? A stair lift, then? But no. That was an unnecessary expense they could ill afford. And they did not really want anyone inside their home.

And so, night after night and day after day, they’d take her up the stairs each evening and bring her down again the next morning. This old, cantankerous woman, who showed little love for her two sons.

The smart son, not so long ago, aware of her increasing frailties and growing belligerence, had looked at care homes in the area. A blessed relief for all of them. But the costs, he had not realised, were way beyond them. And his last visit had been, he searched for the right word, traumatic. Dangerous. He had come close to being uncovered.

“What are you waiting for? Move!”

“Hold me steady.”

“Stop. Stop here. I need the bathroom.”

The smart brother rested the chair at the top of the stairs. “I can do it myself. I can do it,” the old woman said, lifting herself slowly up. “Help me. Help me up. Take my arm, Chopsy.”

Between the two of them, the two brothers, they helped the old woman struggle across the landing and into the bathroom, untouched for decades, the 1960s, maybe earlier. She walked slowly, painfully, over to the toilet with the overhead cistern.

“Well?” she asked, looking back at the two brothers in the doorway. “Not you, Sonky. You’ll have me over.”

The smart brother walked across, lifted the toilet lid and rested the seat down. He reached for the toilet roll hanging from a nail in the wall and, tearing off two or three sheets and folding them over, he wiped marks from the toilet seat.

“Yes, yes,” she said impatiently as she stood there, her back to the toilet.

The smart brother leaned forward to unbutton her skirt. It dropped to her feet and he took her arm as she stepped over it and back. He picked it up and put it carefully on the windowsill.

He then bent over and reached for her slip and underwear.

She spoke, looking across at the slow brother, “What are you doing?”

The slow brother pulled the bathroom door to, waiting for her to finish. To do what she needed to do. Dabbing at herself and passing sheets of toilet paper to the smart brother to clean her up if need be.

And then came the long and painful shuffle as they helped her along the landing to her room. The sagging double bed. The faded pink candlewick blankets. The piles of old magazines. The knick-knacks from long-gone funfairs of years ago.

And the bibles and religious pamphlets, from so many different religions and sects, that she had collected over the years and had read from every night until recently.

Now, the smart brother sat on the edge of her bed and read to her, from a thick, old pamphlet, a page or so at a time, as she fussed and fiddled with her sheets and blankets and the bits and pieces on her bedside cabinet. Tissues. Aspirin. Ear plugs. A glass of water.

“Listen to your father who gave you life, and do not despise your mother when she is old …”

The slow brother sat, in the high-backed chair over by the window, listening to the smart brother’s quiet and measured tones, the words little more than a blur. He had heard the same passages read time and time again. Mother’s favourites. She had underlined the sentences and paragraphs she liked most. She nodded and occasionally