The Final Window

Michael wakes as the early morning light illuminates the room. The corners are very dark but the cogs and spindle that remains of the once working windmill sit silently in the middle of the circular room. The room is cold but relatively dry as this windmill still has a complete roof and apart from gaps in the bricks on the higher floors where the wind whips around upstairs, the building is almost complete.

Michael had walked miles along the marsh country road with out a thought for shelter. His local town was becoming too dangerous particularly with the modern fashion of drunken youngsters beating up street people and filming it on their mobile phones. Michael couldn’t understand their obvious lack of humanity or how amused they appeared by the attacks. It was the most terrible modern voyeurism to which he was just bate.

Michael had been seized by a group of young men and women around the back of his favourite takeaway. The women bating the men to hit harder and in the most painful places and laughing as he fell and moaned at their assault. This was his regular call on a Saturday night as some of the staff would bring out any left over food and a couple of large cups of coffee at the end of the night. These young people seemed to be a different breed from the drunken revellers. Maybe it was because they were working rather than socialising but at least they could see him as a person not just an object to be ignored or abused. The young manager came out to recycle some cardboard and shouted loudly dispersing the baying crowd and probably saving his life. He got the green and white company first aid box and cleaned Michael’s eye and lip before offering some food and a coffee. The hot drink stung as his gulped it down and the greasy food sat in the pit of his stomach churning with his nerves still shattered by the attack.

The young manager thought that perhaps Michael hadn’t better visit them anymore as he would lose his job if they started to get lots of trouble late at night. He voice both apologetic and fearful.

Michael stared at the earnest young man and decided to leave the streets that he knew, the warm corners and the kind benefactors and find a nice place in the country to end his days. He walked north out of the town and headed towards the coast. It was a long day’s walk, one he had done before many years ago and never expected to do again. In the town he was mostly invisible. In the country everyone saw you. In the country there is just not enough people to hide between, too many noisy neighbours and interested bystanders.

He walked all night the first night; it was cold but the sky was clear and the stars beautiful. Michael tried to remember the names of the stars and the constellations. But no details returned. Michael found less and less details returned from his youth. He could just about remember the name and face of his mother but all that remained of his father was an angry face and a thick brown leather belt. His sister left home when he was very young and his sickly younger brother died suddenly causing his mother to cry relentlessly and the family to move home for the final time. His mother was never available to him after that and his father stopped screaming and shouting before leaving he left.

Michael never saw him again. Maybe he was still alive. It would not be impossible. Michael was just 52 so his father would be only in his early 70’s. Michael always wondered if he was in some nice little warden controlled bungalow; with a bossy rounded lady who visited daily to toast his toast, cut his sandwiches and grill his sausages. Michael imagined a kindly lady wearing a bright nylon apron pulled tight across her ample breasts. He imagined his father staring unspeaking at her shape and grunting monosyllabic in reply to her questions. His father determined to show he didn’t care if she called every day or not but really counting the minutes until her arrival.

His mother tried at first to provide them with the basics; meals of fish fingers and chips, packet soups that made pints and pints of thin tasteless broth with unidentifiable hardened lumps that burnt the top of the mouth and soaked up the staling bread to fill his stomach. But in time she could no longer manage these basic tasks and never seemed to have money beyond forty fags and Gordon’s gin. Sometimes she cried in apology to him; cried that she was a bad mother; cried for her lost boy. Other times she'd scream obscenities, blaming him for her lost husband, her lost daughter, her lost son and mostly her lost life.

Michael moved his right leg slightly to try and ease the searing pain in his foot. It burnt inwardly and up towards his swollen knee. One of the girls has kicked this knee with her bright red pointed heels and tottered away laughing hysterically. It hadn’t hurt at the time but as he walked the pain grew. It was too cold to roll up his trousers and examine the injury so Michael just hoped it would subside. Instead his foot began to throb and this final pain forced his need to find shelter for the night.

The windmill had obviously had some restoration but was an uncompleted project. It felt like no one had been there for a while and the door took little force to open. The sails were long gone and the roof a perfect little dome shape that had drawn him towards it in the gloomy dusk.

On the floor in the middle of the room sat a large pile of animal feed sacks. It took Michael little energy to pile these neatly into a bed. There roughness caught on his dry skinned hands but once piled together they created a supportive mattress. Michael unrolled his dirty but familiar sleeping bag. This had been donated by a local charity and had become his most cherished possession. Before his beloved sleeping bag he managed with newspapers and cardboard. It meant constantly searching for bedding during the day and desperately trying to hide them for after dark use.

Michael blinked as the sun shone quickly into through the window. He brought his arm out from within the sleeping bags and wiped his face. This knocked his brown knitted hat from his head onto the rough wooden floor of the mill. With just a small movement of his head Michael stared at the hat on the floor before returning his hand inside the bag. The back of his head and his hair now felt the roughness of the sacks and for a while he wanted to itch. But he concentrated hard to make the impulse go away.

Michael shivered for a moment before closing his eyes and drifting into a dreamless sleep only woken again by the light from the midday sun glaring onto his face. He thought that perhaps by now he should want to pee but he had no such desire. He tried to remember his last drink and realised it was probably the scorching hot coffee he had gulped just after his attack. The sick feeling in his gut returned with the memory.

Michael felt his eye sting against the brightness and blinked to alleviate their dryness. It did not work and instead he forced them shut tightly, scrunching up his face in the process. It felt good. The eye closed darkness giving him comfort.

The pain in his right leg and foot nagged relentlessly and his fingers and toes throbbed in accompaniment. Michael wanted to return to his dreams and memories but they were resistant to him now. He no longer felt the need to open his eyes or move his body, preferring instead the dark and stillness of his current position.

For just a moment he wished he laid on his side, legs curled up and foetal like, yet was unable to move from the stretched out straight, laid on back position that now froze him. He just wanted to make one last move, one last gesture to the world. The thought was strong but the message to move his arms was weak. He shouted in his head to move; he urged his limbs to move; he ordered them.

And inch by inch his right and left arms crept up his inert body. His finger tips felt the roughness of the sacks; the parallel lines of his chunky cords and the dampness of his heavy overcoat. Each move was in slow motion; his fingertips dragging along the alien materials to touch momentarily before crossing over on his chest. And for a moment he felt the beating of his heart. Michael felt the gentle pulse that seemed disconnected to him.

With his arms folded neatly across his chest and gently cupping his bony shoulders Michael listening to the beating. Thump, thump, thump. The regular but slowing rhythm giving him comfort.

Michael thought about sleep; he craved to drift away; to sleep in this safe haven, away from people; in a place built by workers; by people from another time who earned an honest living, supporting each other within family and community to feed themselves from the land. He thought about them grinding wheat inside this building, creating a constant cloud around them, breathed in and swept up and together. He tasted the dust and floor on his lips, licking away the dryness with the tip of his tongue.

Michael heard the sounds of the wheels as they turned the grinding cogs. He heard the wheat crushed into submission. He felt the floor shudder with each rotation of the mechanism and the screaming of the machinery as it forced into work. Each turn pains his bones; each turn warming his soul; each turns slows his heart; each turn raising his spirits.

M☻g