The Worn Carpet

George shuffled his weary gait down King Street.  He hadn’t intended to come here, but the Soup Kitchen on Dover Road was closed.  That is, Dover Road itself was closed.  There were barriers at the end and the police constable, fresh out of Hendon, had moved him on.

There had, in fact, been a gas leak, but George did not know this.  The young officer had not given him any details, or even recognised that the old man in the ill-fitting tweed coat and mismatched belt may have needed redirecting to the west side of the city where there was another shelter.

George had ambled off, numb to the feelings of sadness and loneliness that seeped through him.  It wasn’t just a warm meal and the possibility of a bed for the night that he would miss, but the fleeting feeling of camaraderie – a sense, for just a moment, that he wasn’t totally alone.

He was not numb to the cold.  November had started chilly, but the last few nights had been bitter, and George tried to clench his arthritic fists to get some blood flowing into the ends of his naked fingers.  Sometimes the scrunched newspaper that he used to stop his feet slipping in his shoes acted as a buffer for some of the cold in his toes.  But it had rained today.  When he had found the shoes the right one already had a hole in the sole and the left had long since worn through to keep it company.  The paper had soaked through and now caused his toes to freeze still further.  He didn’t want to take it out.  He couldn’t remember the last time he had taken off his shoes.

He stopped outside number twenty two.  What had brought him here?  He had barely thought of the place since those first agonising months on the outside.  When he had stepped through the low door in the dull light of that January morning, there had been no-one there to greet him, to take his clutch of sad belongings and put them in the boot of the car as Evan’s wife had done.  She had kissed him, held him to her.  Well, he was a nice lad, but even that miserable bastard Joe Keen had been met that morning.

No-one had met George.  One or two had visited him in the early days, but not her of course.  Not really surprising.

The street looked more respectable nowadays.  Even in the dark he could see that the paint was no longer peeling on the houses, that the tiny patch of gardens out front were well kept. Modern blinds replaced shabby curtains at many of the windows along the road. 

How long since he had been here?  Twenty five, thirty years?  He couldn’t even remember what year it was when he had been driven away in the back of the car.  He knew it was 2013 now.  Sometimes he read a paper at the shelter or if he found one in the park, discarded in a bin along with the sandwich wrappings and the half-drunk cups of expensive coffee of weekday lunchers.

Number twenty two did not look as if it had fared as well as some of its neighbours.  In the garden, propped lengthways against the overgrown hedge, was a Sold Sign.  Its time had come.  Already the skip in the road outside was filling up.  On the top, as he peered closer in, was a carpet.  It was hessian side up, but he turned over one corner of it, and there it was, that hideous blue and gold swirl they had both hated so much.

They had laughed about it together in the early days.  It had been a good quality carpet, but not to their taste, even in the garish seventies.  They would replace it when they had the money.  But they never did have the money; there was always something else to spend it on.

George was cold and suddenly so very tired.  It wouldn’t be the first time he had slept in a skip.  Aching and stiff he made several attempts to pull himself over the low side.  The carpet had been roughly rolled and slung on top, and was loose enough to allow him to edge himself between the folds, sleeping bag like.  Where to place his head took a little engineering, but George was not used to comfort.

Odd that the carpet had remained in the house all this time.   In itself it hadn’t been the source of his troubles.  That somewhere along the way,the rot had set in, the bickering had started, the contempt had become ingrained, was not because of the carpet.  But those expensive hideous swirls had somehow launched him into an oblivion from which he had never returned, not fully.

Even at the time, as it was happening, he didn’t really know why.  Even as his hard, angry fist fuelled by long suppressed rage made contact with her soft, yielding upper lip,  even as it cracked her glasses and shattered her cheekbone, he knew this was not the way to behave.  How long had that dark angry man been lurking in the shadows of his respectable façade? Since childhood?  He didn’t even care about the bloody coffee stain on the long hated carpet, but it had been sufficient to finally draw the monster out.  Yet for a long while before that evening, George had been aware of his existence without ever acknowledging him.

“You think I’m going to buy another fucking carpet, when you can’t even look after the one that you’ve got!” 

George closed his eyes, and the shame he carried with him, his only possession, suffused him.  He wondered fleetingly where she was now.  He wasn’t comfortable, and he certainly wasn’t warm, but he was too depleted to move.  He would be moved on in the morning and he would walk back down the street and he would never return.  With something akin to hope, as he sank into the last sleep of his existence, George wondered if the shelter would be re-opening tomorrow.

Sharon