She Used to Walk Along the Railway Tracks

I grew up with my mother in housing next to the railway tracks. A one bedroom set-up, with stained walls and smudged windows. The stains mum hated. She said the long smears from watery leaks reminded her of a crying girl wearing mascara. The windows she didn’t mind. It didn’t matter that they were smudged when all there was to look at was dirty, rusted tracks home to passing trains wearing graffiti. Trains which shook the walls of our building every ten minutes, resulting in mum screaming FUCK as she was unable to steadily light her cigarette.

I was five years old, attempting to spell out letters for homework in an exercise book I’d found in the garbage bin at school when the front door flung open wildly. My thin, frizzy haired mother stood in the centre, a rare smile lighting up her sallow skin. In her arms, she held a red plastic bucket and I screamed in delight as she darted into the room to pour out the tubes of paint on the dirty carpet. There had to be at least twenty tubes of blues, greens, yellows, reds. And there were brushes too. Mum picked one up happily and stroked my cheek with the end. It felt like the gentle kiss of a soft, fluffy bunny.

“But Mummy, where will we paint with these paints?!”

Mum clutched my tiny shoulders, turning me towards the dirtiest most stained wall in the room.

A second hand paint kit mum found in the trash outside our building changed our lives so drastically. Mum was the first to paint a stroke across the once cream wall. One long neat yellow line. A start which would soon morph into a beautifully painted beach. I didn’t think my mum with her sometimes harsh parenting methods, raspy voice and stoic appearance could be the house of such an artistic and gentle heart.

Finally, mum had reason to get out of bed and send me to school. She had reason to cook me meals and even tell me stories about a sister I’d never met and a brother she said was somewhere in jail. But she didn’t mention daddy. Nothing would ever make her mention daddy. I just believed I never had a dad. Until there was a whisper of sex at school one day, and it suddenly dawned on me that my fantasy of a non-existent father was impossible. One day I ventured into dangerous territory.

“Mummy, where's daddy?”

“You don’t have one”

“But then where did I come from?”

“Me you little brat. I’m the one who pushed you out alright!”.

Three long drags of a cigarette which signalled to me that it was a secret that would be a secret forever.

Soon the back dreary wall of our flat was a mosaic of colour, drawings and even some extracts of poetry from mummy which I didn’t understand. My happiest memories were when I’d come home from school. She’d take my hand gently with hers (a very rare display of physical affection) and help me grasp a brush. She’d help me paint a picture. Although my talent was far from her almost professional work. Life-like portraits of people I’d never seen or pictures of places I’d never been too, mixed together with childish drawings of dogs and trees.

Sometimes I’d even practice my homework on the wall. Drawing a picture before spelling its name.

One afternoon, I arrived back from school.

Mummy was not home.

It was strange. She hated leaving our building unless out of necessity.

I grasped a brush, ignoring the sense of uneasiness in my stomach.

I find a small free space and squeeze out too much red paint from one of the tubes.

I wince at the thought of mum seeing the bits of red which had managed to escape onto the carpet. Not that it mattered. The carpet was full of cigarette holes. But she would make it matter.

I begin the drawing I had in my mind. Huge petals of velvet red and a long green stalk which travelled all the way down to the carpet, giving the impression it was growing up from the dirty floor. I could smell the sweet scent of the flower and imagine a gentle butterfly fluttering in from the open window to land upon it. Feeling the pride beam inside me, I write in big black letters the word “ROSE”.

Mum didn’t come home that day.

Or the next. Or the next.

It wasn’t until the fourth day, when I was bawling my eyes thinking she’d left me for good and clutching my agonisingly hungry stomach when the front door flung open.

She stood in the centre, looking thinner and more pale than ever. Her mascara smudged down her cheeks like the stains on one of the unpainted walls. She wore clothes I’d never seen her wear before. She could have been a character in one of her portraits.

She walked straight past me. Like she didn’t even see me curled in a ball on the stained carpet. She went straight to the tiny bathroom and slammed the door. It shook the house more than the trains ever had.

Mummy didn’t come out at all for the rest of the day.

However, at 10pm, I crawled out from under my thin sheet in the bedroom as I heard the creak of the bathroom door. A sound which signalled it was maybe safe for me to be near her.

I poked my head around the corner. Mum sat cross legged staring at the art on the wall. My painting was visible in the bright moonlight shining through the half opened window. I could hear her quietly crying.

Cautiously, like a mistreated dog, I tiptoed towards her. She didn’t yell at me or push me away like she usually did. But she continued to cry, before pulling me close to her, my body stiff like a board and unsure how to act in such a situation.

My eyes followed her eye-line to find that she was staring at my rose. MY ROSE. I beamed with pride. Secretly confused. It was hardly a masterpiece. Not worthy of tears.

“Oh Elly. Little Elly. Elly. Little Elly”.

That was all mum whispered to me for the rest of the night. A string of words burnt into my brain forever. One of those things that now pops up into my head when I’m walking along a beach, or hear a song playing in the supermarket aisle. I think those words have stayed because it was the most affectionate way she’d ever talked to me. Or maybe because those words marked the day when my life began to change.

Mum took her talent to canvas after that night.

People saw it. Loved it. Bought it.

And she made money. More money. Lots of money.

She sent me to a new school. A rich school. And then she bought a house. A mansion. It had to be the size of our whole train track building put together. With a large garden surrounded by tall hedges. It was silent and peaceful without any trains.

She hung a swing from an old oak tree in the bottom of the garden. She’d sit on it and wait for me each afternoon to come home from school. Smoking a cigarette and swinging slowly back and forth, with as little movement as possible from her legs, as if a ghost were pushing her. She would have a faint smile when she was on the swing. Sometimes I would hide behind the bush at our front gate just to see her looking content before I greeted her with my presence. I wondered if the ghost was my dad.

Mum passed away at the age of 56. It should have been from lung cancer. She was on the way to hospital to get the news from the doctor but it was a car accident which wanted her.

I got the house. All her money. And a note, which I found at the bottom of one of her drawers. There was nothing written upon it. But there was a drawing. A simple picture of led pencil depicting old railway tracks.

To understand my ending I had to return to the beginning.

…

I walk along the footpath next to the old tracks. The rusted wire fence prevents the mixing of people and graffiti trains. A skinny dog watches me from under an abandoned car, wary and frightened. The street was reasonably empty. Save for a middle aged woman smoking against the wall.

She looked like mum.

The building was impossible to miss. An ugly brick thing towering above the railway line, casting a gloomy shadow across the majority of the street. I shakily made my way towards it, my legs climbing the broken brick steps towards the front entry door. I pushed open the double doors. What had our number been? Before I’d even finished asking myself the question the answer flashed before me.

Twelve.

My ears are filled with male shouting and loud womanly sobbing as I make my way up towards our old room. The place was so familiar, despite the years which had passed by. Our room was on the third floor. I stood before the open door, the number hanging loosely from the splintered wood.

I walk inside.

Our old room is clearly abandoned. There is no furniture and it is littered with rubbish and graffiti. The windows are smashed and there are obvious signs that people with nowhere to stay regularly spent the night here.

As if my feet were being led by five year old excitement, I head towards our painted wall, before stopping abruptly.

It was gone. All of it.

Painted over with an ugly grey colour which sliced through my heart before being pumped around my whole body and causing my body to slowly deflate.

It must have been done after mum and I had left the building.

Shakily, I pick up a piece of broken glass. Gripping it tightly between my fingers. I begin to slowly scrape off the paint. I knew the spot. Even after all these years.

I scrape and scrape and scrape until I’ve revealed it. Yes. The rose. Just as beautiful as I remembered, although slightly faded.

I stare at it.

My tears fall as my hand softly traces the words of my five year old self. A five year old who’d saved her mother without even knowing. Pushed her to pick herself up and carry on. Saved her through a drawing and a childish error.

I had spelt the word “ROSE” as “RISE”. And my mother had. For both of us.