Glass Half Full

 

by Louise Searl

punch

 

 

 Meriel was waiting for a telephone call from her grown up daughter. She had learned over the years since

Lesley left home  that the way to control the dread, always part of awaiting such calls, was to keep herself as busy as possible. She had therefore embarked on a full scale spring cleaning of the living room, to include  washing the net curtains, polishing the windows and dusting the books individually.

 

  Brian passed by the open door on his way out to play golf. He was not a new man. He had long since  decided that his role was to bring home the bacon and little else. He was not prepared to cope with the emotional realities of modern life as experienced by his grown up daughter. He left all that to Meriel.

‘I see Lesley has decided to ruin our weekend’ he remarked, nastily, and he was gone. A familiar twinge of distress briefly overwhelmed Meriel. There had been a time when she would have remonstrated with him for making such a hateful remark about Lesley. But now she accepted it as part and parcel of her marriage. After all, Brian was a good man, deep down. ‘Very deep,’ her best friend Barbara would and in fact did often say.  Just because he was not, as far as she knew, a bigamist, or a murderer, did that make him OK?

 

  Occasionally Meriel played with the idea of divorcing Brian. It was a special ‘get out of jail free’ card she allowed herself to daydream about when he had been particularly unkind. His  speciality was belittling her both in private and in public, as well as limiting  communication to remarks designed to hurt her.

As she dusted, polished and hoovered she tried to guess what Lesley would have in store to upset her about today. Last week it had been a falling-out with her flatmates, threatening the security of her accommodation. Other frequent themes  were crises with boy friends, ‘misunderstandings’  at work and, unsurprisingly, loneliness.

 

  Lesley was in fact a qualified accountant with a good job, but her personality, obviously inherited from her father, made her dealings with others  problematic. It had  always been the same. Her reports bore witness to this all through her schooldays. Comments such as ‘Lesley is an excellent student, but unfortunately her inability to get on with her class mates makes difficulties for her and upsets other students.’ were a hint of future problems. In fact the school had suggested that their daughter needed help to cope with her problems, but of course Brian had poo-poohed such an idea.

‘Lesley just needs to learn to be reasonable and get on with people’  he had declared, failing to recognise advice he himself needed to follow.

 

  Meriel was a victim of her own more forgiving and non-combative personality. Now in her sixties, she knew the time had passed when she could hope to influence either her husband or her daughter. Her  dye was cast, as Barbara had recently kindly pointed out. 

  As a break from her self-inflicted domestic chores, she sat down and  picked up a magazine she had just found among the books. Naturally she was drawn to the problem pages, always the most interesting and readable section. Who can resist reading about those with more intractable problems than one’s own?  Among the usual sad accounts of domestic and emotional trauma  she came upon a letter that might  actually have been written by her.

‘Dear Catherine, I am at my wits end. My husband of forty years is a selfish git. He  offers no support to our grown-up son who seems unable to cope with normal life. He lacks the ability  to empathise with others in any way whatsoever. I am sick and tired of making suggestions about counselling and other ways in which he might be helped, all of which my husband says are not necessary, therefore not supporting either me or our son. I have tried to persuade him to seek help via his doctor, to no avail. Our son is on the brink of losing his job because of his problems in dealing with people. On top of that he has taken up gambling and is on the slippery slope to bankruptcy. What shall I do?’  Catherine’s reply  was decisive.

‘I sympathise with the  very difficult situation you are in. There are two strands to your troubles, your husband and your son. Because you have been married for forty years does not mean that you cannot end your marriage. I know divorce is a huge step but please do consider it. Obviously your son is causing you a lot of heartache, and from your longer letter, and after consulting a psychiatrist I suggest your son needs to go to his GP and seek help for his mental health. It may well be that, as you have already realised, counselling would be of benefit to him, but that has to be his decision. You cannot force your son to take any action, he must want to do so himself. So try to stop  banging your head against a brick wall, you have done all you can. Learn  to step back, look after yourself and think seriously about your marriage.’

  Meriel read and re-read the letter. Then she made a resolution. She would  follow Catherine’s advice. Just because neither her husband nor her daughter were capable of change, it did not mean that she must play the victim card. It would not be easy, but nor was life at present. The telephone rang.

‘Hello Lesley, how are things?’ She listened to her daughter’s rants.

‘Lesley, I have heard all this before. I know you have a lot of problems coping with people. Please take my advice and go and try to get some help. If you need me to pay for counselling... Lesley, please don’t interrupt.  I’m going now as I’m busy. Do let me know what you decide. I cannot help you if you won’t help yourself. I love you,’ and she put the phone down. Never before had she been so abrupt with Lesley, but it was time to try a different approach. The next job was to find out all about divorce. She would  begin by asking Barbara. She’d had plenty of experience in that area.

 

  Meriel felt invigorated. There was a spring in her step. She put on her coat. She rang Barbara and asked if she could come round for a cup of  tea. She would be out when Brian came home. There would be no dinner waiting for him. He always found something unkind to say about her cooking. Let  him cook his own. From being half empty, her glass would soon be half full.

 

About the author

Louise Searl's career as a librarian included public libraries, the Commonwealth Institute and a secondary school. l Her last job was Children's Librarian in a London borough. For the past ten years she has run a Writing Group within a u3a . She also writes poems and occasional articles. 

 

 

Be Careful What You Wish For

      by Louise Searl

       bread wine

                       

Shanna, the Amur leopard, paced up and down obsessively. It was nearly feeding time and she knew the keeper would soon appear. It was getting dark, the visitors had all left hours ago. There had been some tasty looking children in the crowd today, but try as she might she could never reach them through the thick plate glass of the prison which was home.

She had been born in captivity, but her mother had told her stories about the lives of their forebears who had lived in the wild. She knew that there are few Amur leopards left in the forests and mountains of China and Russia, and her dearest wish was to be there herself. She wanted to run in the huge open spaces, to hunt for her own food and never, ever again see the faces of human visitors, desperate for a glimpse of her agility and the sound of her distinctive rasping bark.

Shanna was sick of her enclosure. She was sick of the sight of the three trees. She was sick of the sight and sound of the visitors. She was sick of the routine. She longed for release from captivity. She longed for excitement and danger. She longed to be free as the wind, for her life to be her own.

One day she was woken and found herself being herded into a box on wheels. Before she knew what was happening she was travelling along a bumpy road. The zoo had been left behind. Through the bars of the wagon she could see fields, trees, hills and sometimes people and their houses. Eventually into view came huge machines with wings like birds, nestling on the ground. The wagon slowed down, she was let into a small enclosure and sedated. She slept all through the flight, and the next thing she was aware of was being released into a large patch of ground, enclosed in wire. It was a bit like the zoo she had left, but there were no gaping crowds. Then she realised that there was no keeper coming in every night with food. Instead, every evening she was let out into a wild area where there were other animals she could eat if she could catch them. She was happy in that half-way house between captivity and freedom. She soon became a good hunter and caught enough prey to assuage her hunger. She found the water holes, where she could both drink and stalk unwary deer. She adapted quickly to her new surroundings.

The keepers had been watching her. They noticed how quickly she learned to hunt. She was part of a programme whereby animals raised in captivity are gradually returned to their natural habitats to breed. They saw that she was ready to survive in the wild. They were about to grant her dearest wish.

Once more she was sedated and put aboard an aircraft which would take her far far away to Russia. She wondered what was happening now. Was she on her way back to the zoo? She hardly dared to believe she might be on her way to her homeland. But when she awoke after the long flight, she knew she had reached home. She looked around her. She sniffed the air, she knew this was where she belonged. At last she was free.

She set off to explore this wonderful paradise. She found a group of deer grazing and soon singled one out, a little apart from the rest. Later, she settled in a leafy hollow, aware that her coat, thickening up now for the winter, would act as camouflage. She knew that she must rely on her own wits and survival instinct. She was in her own country, she was home at last.

Leopard skin coats fetch a good price overseas. The skin of the Amur leopard is particularly prized. Shanna was being watched. Every day she slept in sheltered spots. Every night she set out to catch her food. She delighted in the space around her and in the many smells and sounds of the bush. Sometimes she picked up the scent of humans, still familiar to her from her years in the zoo. Sometimes she noticed trails in the grass which had been made by man. Her instinct was to avoid such areas.

The season changed. It became colder and food was harder to find. Sometimes when she was very hungry and had no success in hunting she remembered how her keeper used to bring her daily ration of fresh meat every evening. But then she'd also remember how she was confined in a small space, and how she was gaped at by human beings every day. Here she was free.

Spring was on the way. Shanna met a male leopard and they mated. She bore four beautiful cubs. She was a good mother, spending hours feeding her babies and later hunting tirelessly for fresh meat to take back to where they awaited her return. One particular day she followed a track in the undergrowth which smelt of humans. Suddenly a set of metal teeth closed round her legs. Searing pain swept through her body. She was trapped. The more she struggled the tighter became the grip on her legs. As she lay there for hours, bleeding, panting and twitching with pain, she thought of her hungry and vulnerable cubs awaiting her return, and she realised that she although she would never have turned down the chance of freedom, there was a price to pay. And then she died.

About the author

Louise Searl lives in Essex

The Gorgan

                                           by Louise Searl

                                           nectar and coke

The shrill sound of the bell indicated the start of the school day at St.Saviour's School. Miss Cobra, Deputy Head, was on duty, checking uniforms and ensuring that no trainers were masquerading as school shoes.

‘Johnnie, where's your tie?’ 

‘Dunno, Miss’.

‘Report to me at playtime. If it hasn't turned up by then you will be doing a detention after school.’

‘Cheryll, remove all that make-up.This is a school, not a film studio.’

Miss Cobra was not known for mincing her words. However, her quest to spot evidence of Johnnie’s, Cheryl’s and several other pupils' uniform malfunction that morning caused her not to spot a pupil wearing a hoodie slip behind her and make her way along the corridor to her classroom.

Members of Class 5B were waiting for registration, in their usual undisciplined manner. If anything the noise level increased when their form teacher, Mr Adder, hurried into the room, clutching several folders and looking harassed. A newly qualified teacher, he was beginning to regret his choice of career. In his anxiety to take the register quickly Mr Adder ignored the fact several members of his class were still wearing their coats, strictly not allowed. One of them was even wearing a hoodie.

‘Five B, Five B please be quiet. I need to take the register. No, Ali. you may not go to the toilet. You've only been in school five minutes. Now, please settle down all of you.’

Meanwhile in the school office the telephone was ringing constantly. Some of the calls were from parents explaining that their child was unwell and would not be coming to school. A couple were from children pretending to be their own parents, also explaining that their child was unwell and would not be coming to school. Mrs Viper, the secretary, had devised a cunning plan to catch the phoney phone-callers, and was busy ringing the place of work of one of the alleged parents, to check the story.

Class Five B, registration having at last been accomplished, made its straggly way to the first lesson of the day, science. Miss Cobra went to her office to draw up a long list of uniform deniers she would see at break. They would need to come up with an impressive reason for not being suitably attired and equipped, to escape an hour's after school detention, or even a two hour detention in the case of serial offenders. St.Saviour's School prided itself on its strict discipline policy and its insistence on adherence to the school's rules and regulations. The school's ‘Outstanding’ Ofsted rating had recently been downgraded to ‘Good’ and the slippery slope towards ‘Requires Improvement’ beckoned. Of course the quality of teaching was of prime importance, and newly qualified teachers such as Mr Adder, who were failing to live up to the promise they had displayed at interview. was another problem pending for the school's senior management team.

In the school office the telephone calls were becoming less frequent. The next call was from the local paper. Mrs Viper braced herself for bad news. In her experience calls from that quarter were usually based on reports featuring the misdemeanours of St.Saviour's pupils. This one was different. 

‘I wonder if you can confirm that a pupil at your school was married over the weekend?’

Mrs Viper was not the head's right hand woman for nothing.

‘No comment’ she replied swiftly.

‘It's strange that she should get married on Saturday and be back in school on Monday.'’

‘It would be if it was true,' replied the secretary.

‘Don't you want to know who it is?’

‘I'm sure you're going to tell me’.

‘The girl's name is Medusa Gorgon and she married a bloke called Poseidon.’

Far away, the goddess Athena had heard the news two days previously. Her beautiful hand maiden Medusa, the only mortal Gorgon, had broken her vow of chastity. Athena had acted swiftly.

In the science lab Medusa Gorgon was at last being told to remove her hooded coat. As she took it off the children nearest to her starting screaming. In a few seconds the whole class erupted in chaos, and Mr Anaconda, the science teacher, had run for his life, The children could not believe their eyes. In place of her beautiful blond hair Medusa's head was alive with snakes, hissing and flashing their forked tongues in and out. Some of them dropped to the ground, writhing in every direction as the children rushed out of the lab. Medusa, the child bride, shook her head, but as some snakes fell off more and more appeared, frantically swaying around her head. 

News of what had happened spread like wildfire throughout the school and most teachers told their classes to leave school immediately and go home, and did the same themselves. However Miss Cobra was made of sterner stuff. With Ofsted still uppermost in her mind, she stayed in school, standing in the doorway nearest to the labs. Medusa, on her way back into the main building, her hair writhing freely, stared at Miss Viper, who stared back. The Deputy Head turned to stone.