Shaping up for the Result

You can therefore, understand my trepidation as I waited in the room (after generously being given a brief reprieve; during that condemned man’s meal). I had already waited some hours since the incident occurred and now as the evening had grown dark and no word about my brother’s condition, or that my parents had not returned from the hospital, the stress was steadily increasing on me and it was becoming exhausting. It was wearing me down. The mental pressure was telling on my body. My head hurt from the nervous energy that had swamped my system and my body. And then my other two brothers came into the room and got ready for bed. They were of course still under orders not to talk to me. My older sister then came into the room and said I needed to come and sit in the kitchen, until she heard from our parents.

I went out and sat on a chair at the now cleared table. The light in the kitchen was a bright overhead fluorescent tube (There’s a great story about that…. but I’ll tell that in a later blog, rather than again going off track at this time). It lit the room and darkened the outside even more. In the darkness outside, there were lights across the back road and up on the hill at the Hall’s farm house. You could see the roof of the garage lit by the lone street light outside our back fence. The silhouetted bare branches of the apple tree in the back yard (under which I sometimes sat to read),  was stark in the light. Reaching up into the sky. Not as high as the back window (if you recall the flight of steps that led from the lower rear yard to the back door), but visible from where I sat. Our kitchen table was a common long Formica topped table, which was useful in preparing and serving dinner (and toffee apples see blog May 12^th 2012), as it never retained the heat. The room was already cooling from the heat of cooking dinner and I was told to sit up in the chair and not to ‘lean’ on the table. I was really starting to feel tired and sat up straight initially, before slowly sagging a lot at the shoulders and leaning forward.

Finally after what seemed an very long time, the telephone down the hall, rang. My oldest sister answered it, and I could hear her muted questions and a few surprised responses. “ How many?’ “That’s terrible”. I had no idea what she was talking about. I remember hearing her ask ‘And, what about Gregory?” Some instruction must have been received, but there was a long pause and then another question that was probably more crucial. The question? “So, are you both coming home now?” She was answered. I sat tense and fearful. She hung up the phone and went into the lounge to talk to my other sister first. I waited. If as has been suggested, stress can result in an ulcer,… I think I could feel it forming already.

(continued tomorrow)