KEY TO THE DOOR BY FIONA CUMMINGS

The key to the door

By Fiona Cummings

 

I was given a key to a door I had never been through.

The house I was living in received a letter telling me to collect the key and gave me an address to look at the property.

 

I felt sick. I was terrified. This was all too fast too much. The office I collected the key from even felt hostile to me.

 

I was told they were doing me an enormous favour. To be grateful. I was so young. I was incredibly vulnerable. I was in shock. My life was full of pain, sadness and without my knowledge at that time, I was depressed.

 

From the womb till then, I was someone who shouldn’t have been there.

 

Where is there? On this earth, that is where.

 

A cold calculating hard hearted so called woman got pregnant with me and after trying to abort more than once, and failing, she threw me away like dirty, torn laundry. Even if she knew of the scars she impacted upon me, it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference.

 

I was seventeen and ready to give up on life. Obviously I was strong in the womb but so many kicks punches and little did I know, more to come in my future, but a cruel life behind and a head.

 

I was saved by my adopted parents who were my heroes. Two people I loved when they were alive and now worship that they sadly are gone. How I long for my Mum to cook for me her special dinners, my Dad to sing to me as he held my hand. How I miss them. But my life has changed so much since I received that key.

 

So, the key, where would it open? Well, as I opened the crooked gate, which led me up a broken path way to a dirty painted cream high step where by the paint was peeling off as was the seventies yellow paint on the door. Seventies paint as that was the last time it had been painted, and by this point, it was the late eighties.

 

The key was even rusty. The key whole was black with age. What would I find through this door?

 

Deep and forever pain. Wood rot damp and almost poverty. This is where I was to live.

 

The area was OK. The people were really nice and my neighbours at one side were wonderful.

 

But the house. More so, what it meant to me, what it represented for the next however many years.

 

My heart sunk as realisation hit me. This was my destiny.

 

So, my kitchen was a horrid old cast iron sink painted by hand frog green. No kitchen units or work tops. An old dirty pantry. Not one you can walk into but one with enormous shelves so deep that you had to climb on a chair to get to the back but if you put your food too far back, it would fall off the open space at the back of the cupboard. It was there where a filthy window was where the damp got in and black gunge filled the frame and nothing, no, nothing could get rid of that mess.

 

My bedroom had tiny what looked like lockers in it for robes. There was an old fire place without a fire so the birds used to throw their bread leaves and twigs on my bedroom floor down the chimney.

 

The house had no heating apart from a gas fire which I loved. The bath? Oh my word. Don’t start me on that. You cut yourself every time you got in. And if you had a bath, there was no hot water left. So, why did I cut myself? Because the bath was so old it was sprayed and like the paint on the front door, that was flaking too! The toilet looked like something from the fifties. Oh I hated it.

 

The garden was nice though, it was a funny shape. Full hedges all around apart from the section next to the so called back door, though it was more of a side door.

 

A gap had been left there deliberately so that the person who lived in my house before me could chat to our neighbours over the fence. Typically English.

 

Outside of the side door was the worst, well, lamp, light? Not sure what to call it. It was an enormous ball on a rusty black arm. The light had a sign under it…… Now then, stop it? By the way, the light wasn’t red either…. The sign was because the lady who lived in the house before me was a nurse. In the old days way before I moved in, nurses used to treat people from their homes, she just didn’t bother taking the sign down.

 

So this was to be my prison almost for seven years at least, but when you are a kid, seven years is a lo’o’ong time. And when you don’t know that it will be seven years before you will move in life again, it’s even longer. The forever rainbow with the pot of gold at the end. But, when will my rainbow be able to guide me to the gold? Well, that was to come some years later, a lot in between before then.

 

 

Copyright Fiona Cummings 2015