Golden Hour by William Nicholson Read Free Book Online

of any great interest, but how else is she to pass the time? She is the prisoner of her aging body. She can still walk with the help of a stick, but not far. Her hands can no longer undo buttons, or use a pen. She is permanently tired. Television bewilders her, the pictures jump about so much, and she can’t hear what they’re saying. Reading is now beyond her. Somehow she loses track of what she’s read after just a few lines. It’s become hard to hold a thought in her head for more than a few seconds. Not that her head is empty. Quite the opposite. As she sits in the garden for hour after hour, watching the pigeons, or the guinea pigs, or just the leaves on the trees shimmering inthe breeze, her mental world is tormented by nagging voices, as if she is the host to a discontented mob.
    Where is
she
now? She’ll be shuffling about in the kitchen, moving everything round so I won’t know where anything is. She knows I don’t like it, which is why she does it. There should be two guinea pigs, where’s the other one gone? She’s killed it, she’s fed it poison, it’s the sort of thing she’d do. Ah, there it is. Am I supposed to sit out here in the garden till I die? She’d like that, she wants me to die, then she can have my house. That’s her plan, and has been all along. Well, I’m not dead yet.
    Bridget Walsh, Mrs. Dickinson’s carer, comes out of the house into the twilit garden.
    â€œBetter be getting in, Mrs. D,” she says in her flat tones. “Getting quite nippy out here.”
    â€œI won’t,” says Mrs. Dickinson. “You can go away.”
    â€œNo, I can’t,” says Bridget. “I have to see you safe in bed.”
    â€œI’m not going to bed,” says Mrs. Dickinson.
    She’s tired and she longs to be in bed, but stronger than her need for sleep is her will to resist her carer.
    â€œI’ll give you a few more minutes, then,” says Bridget.
    She climbs over the little fence into the guinea pigs’ run and starts shooing them into their hutch.
    â€œDon’t do that!” says Mrs. Dickinson.
    â€œYou know they have to be shut up,” says Bridget, chasing the guinea pigs inside and closing the hutch door.
    â€œI said don’t—I said don’t—”
    Mrs. Dickinson is overwhelmed with rage and frustration. She wants to rise up out of her chair and strike Bridget’s pale puffy face, but she lacks the strength. How dare she disobey an order! Who does she think she is?
    My jailer, that’s who she is. My prison guard. Oh, she knows just what she’s doing. Those piggy eyes don’t fool me. Shethinks she can break my spirit. She thinks she can turn me into a puppet who does her bidding. She’s got another think coming. I’m not dead yet.
    â€œI’ll go and make a hot-water bottle for your bed,” says Bridget. “Then I’ll come back out and help you inside.”
    â€œGo away,” says Mrs. Dickinson.
    Bridget goes into the house.
    It’s getting hard to see in the garden now, and the air is cold. Mrs. Dickinson longs to be in bed with her hot-water bottle, but she refuses to give in to her jailer. This is a battle of wills that she knows she can’t afford to lose. Once she starts doing what Bridget tells her to do it’ll all be over.
    Shivering now, she looks at the shapes of the chestnut trees against the darkening sky. There are two, standing like sentinels at the bottom of her garden. Every year they grow taller and reach out further. The rest of the garden—well, what can you say? A boy comes once a week for what he pretends is three hours, Elizabeth pays him for three hours, but he does nothing. So naturally the garden is dying, uncared for, reduced to bald lawn. All her plants, so lovingly chosen and tended over the years, all gone. The path to the back gate choked with weeds. No one goes that way any more. And to think