Unfinished Business

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

“ Right, I’m off to see mum,” I shouted up the stairs.

         “Have you remembered the cotton this time?” my husband shouted back.

         “Yep, got it, but don’t hold your breath. She’ll never finish the sewing, never finishes anything, my mum,”

         Josh appeared at the top of the stairs, smiling. “Aw, don’t be hard on her love. There’s a first time for everything you know.”

         “In your dreams, you don’t know her like I do. See you later.”

         An hour later I was sitting in her room wondering where she was. Probably frantically trying to catch up with her unfinished duties before lunch. The room was sparse and cheerless but it had mum’s stamp on it.

         A pile of novels lay on the bedside table, along with a discarded, half eaten apple. A glance through the books confirmed my suspicions. Folded corners revealed they were all unfinished. She had reached page thirty-two of the first, rejected the second after twenty-four pages and had excelled herself with the third by managing sixty pages. No doubt it would be abandoned and she would be starting on the fourth one tomorrow.

         The table was adorned only by a jar of water, a set of watercolour paints and an ashtray containing several half smoked cigarettes. I wandered over and removed the brushes from the jar.

         “Shame on you Mum, that’s the quickest way to ruin your brushes,” I’d told her the previous week. But it wouldn’t matter in the long run. I knew her interest in painting would wane, just as it did with everything. I admired the misty landscape she had started and then propped it against the wall with her other unfinished masterpieces.

         Her latest project lay abandoned on the hard, wooden chair. I picked up the needlepoint; a scene depicting an idyllic thatched cottage with flowers around the door. Wow, she’d almost finished it. Maybe I should have brought the cotton last week after all. I switched the empty reel for the new one. Perhaps by my next visit she would have completed it, but I wouldn’t lay money on it.

         Even her bed looked unfinished. As if she’d only been in it for a short time then decided to leave it for some airy-fairy reason. The starched, greying sheets and rough woollen blankets looked only mildly disturbed.

         Her whole life had been a series of unfinished ventures. I remembered the disappointments of growing up with a mother full of good intentions but too distracted to complete anything. The birthday cake she promised for my seventh birthday party, the psychedelic curtains she vowed to make for my teenage bedroom. The sophisticated home made dress I never got to wear for my first date and the baby’s cardigan my son had grown out of by the time she got round to it.

         Even when she'd taken the bread knife to my violent father that Sunday afternoon she had only done half the job. Left him for dead, but in reality only leaving a seven-inch scar and a blood stain on the carpet. But at least it had reduced her sentence to attempted murder and she would only have to spend a few more years in this gloomy prison cell.

         “Mrs Hardy?” A soft voice drifted from the cell door. “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.” I turned to see the Prison Governor watching me with sympathetic eyes.

         “ We found your mother dead this morning. She took her life during the night, I’m so sorry.”

         Tears sprang to my eyes as I lay down the needlepoint I was still clutching. I could not prevent myself from voicing my thoughts.

         “Ironic isn’t it? That the first thing she ever manages to finish off successfully should be herself.”