Please Release Me by Rhoda Baxter

a fingernail, the light pinging noise seemed to fill the room. ‘After he died, I tried to get back into it, but by then my Mum was ill.’ She looked down at her hands. ‘It was different with her. She … wanted to die. I wanted her to stay alive because otherwise there would be just me. It’s bad enough being lonely. I didn’t want to be alone as well.’ She stopped talking and sniffed.
    He could see that her eyes had filled up with tears. Looking around, he spotted a box of tissues and got up to hand them to her.
    She wiped her eyes with ferocity, leaving a red mark on her cheek. Peter fought the urge to step across and hug her. He sat back down, allowing himself to sink into the sofa again. He had to think of Sally. Sally always cried tidily. Sniffs, dabs, tears. None of this noisy nose blowing, make-up running stuff.
    ‘Sorry about that. It’s the combination of throwing stuff out and talking about depressing things.’ Grace crumpled up the tissue, took aim at the bin … and missed. She stood up, took a moment to steady herself and strode to the bin to put the tissue in. ‘All better now, see,’ she said. ‘More tea?’
    ‘Yes please.’ He was grateful for the break in the conversation. Grace seemed surer on her feet now. So another cuppa and he would go. He leaned back against the squashy sofa. It was surprisingly warm and comfortable. It didn’t squeak when he moved either, which was a bonus. He felt some tension drain out of him, as though someone had lifted a weight from his shoulders. Unburdened. Is this what people meant when they said that? He was supposed to lighten his worries by talking to therapists, but none of them had made him comfortable enough for him to ask them the questions that worried him most. In one afternoon, Grace had got under his defences with seemingly no effort. He leaned his head back against the cushions and confessed to himself that perhaps it had something to do with the fact that he wanted her to get under his defences.
    It was odd to be attracted to someone again. In a way it was nice to know that he could still feel something other than tired and miserable. But it was dangerous to indulge. He was a married man. His wife was in a coma. What if she stayed in her coma? Would he have to be celibate forever?
    Grace watched the steam rising as the kettle boiled. She was still feeling weak, but she could hide it better now. All she had to do was persuade Peter it was fine and he would leave. It had been embarrassing enough when she collapsed like that at the abseil, but what happened at the front door was just silly. She should have braced herself against the door, so that he could drive off. She would only have had to hold up for a few more seconds. She sighed and threw teabags into fresh mugs. The mugs were a random assortment of branded freebies that she’d found at the back of a cupboard. Forgotten relics from her days at university. Looking at them reminded her of being younger.
    The kitchen looked different now that she’d started giving stuff away. She’d left a few photos up, but most of the cookbooks were gone, along with the teapots that used to live on the windowsill and her father’s paperback collection. It was a wrench, but cathartic too. She had found a few things that she knew she could never part with. A drawing of an aeroplane wing that her father had sketched on the back of a shopping list, she remembered his voice, patiently explaining about air speeds and lift. A photo of her mother laughing that she’d taken when she was twelve, which had a thumb shadowing the corner, so that it never made it into an album. These she knew she would keep. Maybe even frame them. It was as though she was purging the house of the unhappy memories of her parents in their old age and rediscovering them as they had been when she was a child.
    If she were superstitious, she would have said it was her parents trying to tell her to move on. She smiled. Moving on was