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FFM Day 8 — Photograph

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What a shit house, he thought as his eyes raked over the dilapidated and peeling paintwork, not that this was anything new, it’d been dilapidated and peeling since his mother’d first bought the house. It looked, the anyone outside as if it held many dark and tantalising secrets, as if it was just waiting for someone Ben enough to look inside and reveal the treasure. But there hadn’t been any, the house wanted to pretend it had the depths of a large, placid lake, but it was just a lie.

Maybe it was fitting that such a house had birthed an angler like him. Though it had also birthed a soldier, honest, fit and hardworking.

Jake sighed and walked up to the house, ready for another round of arguments and hatred between himself and his only sibling. And when they’d finally had enough, they walk away from each other back into their own lives. Perhaps they’d never see each other again bar one or two unexpected events. Jake would walk away, down this street for the last time before he returned to his now home town, met his best mate and occasional accomplice for some amber nectar and forget everything about this day and their endless hatred. Laura would walk away as well, back to rag on greenhorns and REMFs.

He did hate his sister, didn’t he? Maybe he was just angry that she was so good at everything he failed in. And sad, too, that she held nothing but distain for the skills he did have. The house was cool and looked untouched, though the pair of worn-in running trainers by the door told him that she’d beaten him to it; Laura was probably up in the loft, already sorting their mother’s effects. After she’d become too elderly to live by herself and moved into a nursing home, they’d cleaned up everything with the intention to sell the place, but before they had come to an agreement, his sister had been called away on several tours of duty. Jake had thought once or twice about selling the place himself, but it didn't seem quite right to sell it and keep the money, or just hand over a cheque. Besides, Laura would probably investigate the whole thing and find that he’d cheated someone out money then split — which he would have done — and rat him out to the fuzz. Or maybe she would have beaten the crap out of him first, she could have done it, too, Jake wasn’t a small guy but she was the tri-service women’s taekwondo champion. But, before he realised it years had passed and still the house sat alone; then their mother died and they decided that they had to do something.

“Jake? Finally, thought you were going to jack on me and leave me to clear all this up,” She spoke with a formality, despite her slang, and the immediacy of the poorly veiled insult had his defences up,

“What and leave you to heave all of the valuable stuff?” He shot back as he climbed fully through the hatch and stood, with his arms folded in a space between all of the boxes,

“That’s all you ever think about, isn’t it? And don’t talk like that, you sound like a mong.” She offered cooly as she lifted one box aside to begin digging in another, Jake, deciding against arguing further for the moment, turned and lifted a box off the stack himself. As he lifted it by it’s edges, though, the unsecured bottom fell through, spilling the boxes contents all over the worn floorboard, “Bell-end,” Laura shot, though otherwise ignoring the mess he’d made.

Jack glanced of the miscellaneous items, one was a tarnished pocket watch that had long been broken, traces of acid from the long dead battery nibbled at the edges of the face. A cheap, plastic hourglass had also tumbled out, Jake remembered that he’d won this hourglass… well, found it in a box of cereal, anyway. The last item of any interest had always been something dear to his mother — an old, small fossil and an exceptionally clear one, at that, it was a partial wing of some creature or other embedded in the rock, though that was only part of it, on the other side of it, was an impression where something — a piece of wood — had been near this fossil. It was so clear that, as a child, Jake had taken great pleasure in counting the visible tree rings in the impression. His mother had always encouraged him to make up stories as to how this had come to be. Maybe that’s where his fascination with gamoning people had come from.

Jake sighed heavily, as if to blow his next sentence away on the breeze instead of speaking it, his eye was drawn by a fallen over frame that he reached to pick up, in it he found a professionally taken portrait of their mother. It must have been one of the last taken of her, her face was wrinkled and sagging, though her eyes were still crisp and sharp, if rather sad. It looked to Jake as if she could still hear their argument and was disapproving as ever of their reluctance to reconcile. Or maybe she didn’t even need to hear their argument, it was still about the same old crap that it always had been. He set the photograph up on the edge of one of the cardboard boxes, facing the siblings. Laura looked over to see what he was doing to be greeted by the image of their aged mother, she stared at it for a few long moments before her eyes flicked to her brother’s; she looked, for a fraction of a moment, as if she was about to say something, her expression was unusually soft. But the moment faded and she turned back around to busy herself with the boxes,

“Come on, we need to get this done.”