Sunday nights.

Blush_01

I hated the return from our irregular Sunday pilgrimages to my mother's family, half an island away. Their children were either much older or younger than me. Some even had children of their own, and I was a bossy, over-enthusiastic child. In games I was the last to cross the finish line and the first to pick up on a breech of regulations. Games of Scrabble and Lego were my personal favourite, but they excluded the littlest cousins and the teenagers usually took their friends and Scrabble to one of my grandmother's many empty bedrooms. Their fun was not for little children like me.

The eventual journey home was always dark, long and involved obligatory roadside bathroom breaks at the nearest gate. 24 hour service stations existed very rarely on the long road home. The Texaco near the hospital and prison in Portlaoise is the only place I can remember us ever stopping at. Those of us lucky enough to be still awake in the slumbering pile of sleeping children and sprawling coats would get a treat - maybe juice or chocolate - with the understanding that the others were never to know. How miserably we failed to stay awake until that point is a testament to something, perhaps the "fun" we ourselves had been forced to make alone during the day, accompanying the many, many cups of tea imbibed by our parents and guardians.

At home, the bright fluorescent lights of our kitchen would burn like lit flames in my darkened eyes. Bed came quickly on those nights. Underneath the blankets, it took time for me to warm up. The car was always so hot - muggy and almost-stale - and sleep had come easily there. Here, I snuck my feet and hands up into the confines of my cotton pyjamas, away from the winter sheets.

My nightlight flickered. I gasped at the sheer thrill of it. It flickered again. I held my breath as thunder crashed in my ears, from sky and heart. I divided my thoughts, inhaling quickly and then breathing out. My nose shuffled under the duvet, creating a welcome pocket of moist air whose dampness irritated my upper lip. A single twitch could release this bubble of warmth and dilute it with the icy cold of my room. I shivered carefully, watching the flashes of my faint lamp and the brilliant sky outside. Claps of thunder thrilled me, as I huddled, swaddled in duvet cover and blinking light.

In the kitchen, I could hear Maxi and her late night/early morning concoction of eclectic "old-people" music, always aired by RTÉ on our homeward bound journeys. I can't remember exactly what she played, but my father coughed and mumbled with my mother at increasingly infrequent intervals. If I had been brave enough, I would have climbed out of bed, only to find them dozing in chairs beside the faintly warm range. When the bright glimmer of light under my bedroom door finally died, I knew that they too had abandoned wakefulness for the luxury of a few hours sleep.

Suddenly, the thought struck me - I lay in a dead man's bed. Only two short months ago, my grandfather had burrowed his nose under a pile of sheets and blankets on a night as cold as this one. My father's wonderful father, with pockets filled with Lemon's Orchard Jellies; his odd habit of hiding from my "blow-in" mother in one of the sheds near our house in tolerable weather; his strange traditions and queer sayings, like "bye and bye" - he had once laid here in the darkness, listening to thunderstorms like the one echoing over my head. He too had tried to gather some warmth for himself from the crisp sheets and his own layers of woven fibres. But he had given up here. Eight-year-olds were not permitted to do such things.

shiv

Wonderful, thoughtful stuff

I especially enjoyed the word 'imbibed' and the description of you gasping at the thrill of the flickering night-light. You have a talent for pulling someone into the scene you are writing, and your phrasing is brilliant yet simple.

Well done! More, I want, more!