Coming Home by Eimear Fitzmaurice My mind was like a sponge absorbing every minute and insignificant detail. Fear crept up my arms like ants with tiny electric feet and lonesomeness tugged at me like a toothachey child at his mother’s hem. A cluster of tourists just disgorged from a tour bus swarmed into a nearby bar. A shrewd glance at my watch revealed that it was only 3.10 p.m I smiled plaintively and imagined Mother’s levitating with temper and saying in a supercilious querulous voice “Lord, have mercy! What is the world coming to at all!” I looked askance at our now decrepit home, a hose redolent of earlier memories. A couple of pampered cats dragged their bare bums disgustingly along the worktop and the two spaniels were going bald with boredom over the beige carpets. Sorrow constricted my throat like diphtheria. Mother, who was a bizarre cliché of the ideal 1950’s housewife, would have been irate at this disconcerting scene. I trudged upstairs in Sally’s room. The determined, assiduous, delinquent Sally who refused to comply with Mother’s wishes and with the convent’s – to quit school and follow the etiquette which was expected of women. However, once an opening produced itself to her, she did not balk. A lump rose in my throat like a mound of uncooked dough. The memory of the day she left stands out like a wildflower meadow in a landscape of muddy ploughed fields. Sally and Mother were sparking off each other like the raw edges of knives. Mother lit on her until her shrieks rent the house. Sally pleaded benignly, by Mother’s ear were stuffed with decades of emotional cotton wool. Sally left that very night. I was in a paroxysm of pain I’d hurled my wildest dreams against the rock of her stillness. For me she was an irrevocable loss. The last I’d heard of Sally was through a newspaper headline “Promotions, perks rain upon her like pollen on asthmatics”. Yet for Mother who would forever adhere to the rules, even this success had not been worthy of dispensation. Funny how times can blur the worst of memories. I wrested my attention back into the room. Memories tumbled out like the cascade of balls in a lottery machine and with the same randomness. I cast one last tearful glance at the house, which had shielded my childhood and looked out on my adult world. Like a bee entering a hive, I hustled to get onto the bus, having to face weather which was a permanent reminder of death. Alas, some things never change.