Sorrow rising tightens her chest.
Tears seem to be seeking an outlet but find none and Melanie gets up from breakfast to sweep the floor.
Of course, at her age, there can be no escape from grief or having to witness cruelty.
Even in her small community the terrible sometimes bursts in and endless horrors lie further away.
But this morning it was only a minor upset after Melanie’s sister Janice rang and woke her.
Someone claiming to be the bank contacted Janice around 7am to say her account had fraudulent activity and they needed to clarify which were her transactions.
A sleepy Janice realised just in time, not opening her app as instructed, but understandably was left shaken.
She rang Melanie.
Fair enough yet Melanie found herself tense at being intruded on – not yet up she was hardly ready for others.
Morning patterns had become quiet padding for the day since her husband’s death and, before coffee, there seemed no barrier against anyone venting.
Janice went on and on, outraged that she was targeted while her husband, Bill, was away for work.
Did the scammers know she was on her own?
Almost certainly and that too was threatening.
Melanie struggled to access her usual kindness and to get in some words when Janice’s high pitch had come at her long enough.
Melanie preferred rather less personal agitation and some discussion of scams.
After all, surely Janice had not forgotten how Melanie, in a period of disorientation, fell for one a few years before.
It was through a question over probate only it was a month after her husband died.
And almost everyone they knew had experience of an attempt, such was the grim side of their internet activity.
When they were young mothers out and busy with toddlers they all seemed to have had their bags snatched once or several times.
Envy and theft weren’t new and Janice was not singled out as she seemed to believe.
Eventually the call ended.
Despite inclination, Melanie hadn’t cut Janice short but resented being left feeling mean-spirited, that she’d wished to shake her sister.
She might just be able to shower that away.
Weeks went by, Bill was back and Janice rang her sister less.
Melanie invited them for dinner – she found herself cooking to have company these days.
Perhaps it didn’t occur to Janice to invite Melanie for meals, they’d played their parts for so many years and Melanie was acknowledged the better cook.
“Melanie likes cooking,” Janice would still say glibly, though her older sister was not at all sure it was true – not any longer.
As a girl, yes, Melanie began to enjoy feeling capable in the kitchen.
That started with an urgency to help their mother.
At a hard time, when it was obvious everything might collapse, a seven year old Melanie stepped in.
She was needed, of that she was certain.
Long after their mother found a way to live with her sadness and keep upright, Janice continued to expect Melanie’s care.
Melanie handed back to their mother making breakfast and some lunch but stayed in place as her little sister’s protector.
Melanie is 73 the morning she notes how far she is running out of patience.
When did that begin?
She cannot see her own folly but knows it is there somewhere.
The man she and Janice referred to as Donny, never calling him a stepfather, once tried talking to her.
Melanie was not ready to listen, it was hardly his business, he was just their mother’s Donny. He wasn’t theirs.
Nevertheless something of his attempt must have lodged if it was not completely forgotten fifty year later.
Melanie hears herself disloyally tell one friend that Janice keeps hold of entitlement to sympathy and has a fixed protest that life should not be like this.
“Well it is!” Melanie wants to say but cannot find a tone that isn’t irritated.
Life is harder for most of Melanie’s friends than it is for Janice, but none of them would go on and on about difficulties.
There was an evening call where Janice expected her sister’s concern and willingness to listen to a very lengthy account of a GP appointment.
This doctor had calmly accepted many of Janice’s minor complaints and worries before but this day said a firm “no” to further tests over a couple of skin marks.
They weren’t real moles but Janice wanted to be sure they would never turn malignant.
Melanie couldn’t resist asking how often Janice had already attended the skin clinic and been given the all clear.
What Melanie didn’t ask was whether Janice ever wondered if health uncertainties, which everyone faced as they aged, might be a problem for her after her husband who’d appeared well enough died abruptly from a heart attack.
But following that call Melanie decided this new mobile phone left her too open to expectations of attention which increasingly seemed to be in short supply.
Uncomfortable with her own reactions to calls, Melanie began putting the phone in another room.
She might text Janice back saying “Sorry I was busy. Catch up soon.”
Janice did not like the change and told Melanie cutting yourself off as you aged was kind of bad for you – it greatly increased the chance of dementia.
Their usual shared Christmas passed without ill will.
Melanie was relieved she had a sister and her son had two cousins and hoped this gratitude, which she resolved to remember daily, would last well into the new year.
It didn’t.
But it was June before anything shifted.
A cousin from Australia arrived to stay.
Melanie liked the spirited May as a girl and was pleased to see her after decades.
Janice came for dinner and May was forthright.
“You two together are the same as you were as kids. Do you remember that day, Melanie, when we were going to some disco and Janice cried because she was too young and you decided to stay behind? I was furious and called you pathetic. Donny told me off – ‘if Melanie believes it’s up to her to make things better for Janice it’s not for you to be rude.’
“You were often given credit for being a kind big sister. But then you two had it tough.”
It was that night Melanie recalled something of what Donny once attempted to tell her,
Years before they knew Donny their brother Ewan drowned and Melanie took on trying to help her broken mother.
Ewan had been the middle child of the three and Melanie just seven.
Their father was at home less and less and unavailable even if he was there.
He had taken Ewan fishing as a fifth birthday present and didn’t immediately notice the boy was missing from the boat.
Janice, aged three, who had been the adored baby and their father’s darling, found all the attention sucked from her to drop into the huge hole left by Ewan.
Undoubtedly that big story shaped their lives in more ways than they could comprehend, but one thing became obvious – little Janice grew demanding and Melanie started looking after her.
The parents’ marriage was on a fast decline.
Their father became a serious drinker and one night did not come home from the pub.
Someone else had taken him in and kept him.
His stuff went to her house soon after.
The two girls did not visit him there but spent some time with him in the park most weekends, until the home was sold and their mother moved them back to near her parents, where she re-met her first boyfriend from when she was sixteen.
She told her daughters how as a girl she’d been besotted and kept no shape of her own.
Whatever music Don liked she joined his enthusiasm, though soon after she thought some of it dreadful.
Any sense of her own fledgling taste dissolved – lots of women did that she warned – which was a good reason not to marry until you’d found your feet and the work you wanted.
The nearly teenage Melanie was unimpressed.
Neither of the girls found much to object to when they had to live with Don.
Melanie mostly got on with it and liked Donny more than she would admit while Janice often made a fuss.
Their mother was stern – “you don’t have to love him, though I do, but you must show him some respect and come to me with any grievance, don’t take it out on Don.”
This time round their mother didn’t seem to be in an all absorbing passion.
She kept the name the girls had from their father for fifteen years and made plenty of time for them on their own,
There was no insistence it was a new happy family, though after the girls both left home it was obvious how contented Don became and the sadness that had once swamped their mother and scarred Melanie ebbed out of sight.
Don spoke openly of Ewan, they kept photos of all three children on the mantelpiece and were a couple enjoying each other, getting old together, then dying months apart.
It was the night while May was staying that Melanie woke and recalled what Donny had been on about.
He’d asked her if she ever got fed up with being kind to her sister.
She was affronted and wanted to say he had no right to put such a question just because he and his brothers argued.
Instead she stayed silent and sullen, pulling back.
Lying in her bed Melanie found she could picture herself and Don, there in the green kitchen, and was sure she had been wearing her blue dress with its white flowers.
He almost never interfered as if a parent, so this exchange stood out.
He told her she’d been applauded for good behaviour but it was as if she really believed Janice could and should be protected from the tragedy of Ewan’s death.
How dare he speak of her small brother whom he’d never met.
Worse he spoke of himself, of it taking a failed first marriage to find there was no escaping old sadness. His dad had been killed at wok while he was a boy.
“And kid,” he said, “being kind can’t wipe out what happened to you any more than it’s really sparing Janice.”
As Melanie got slowly out of bed it felt lucky that the massive wave of sorrow would not defeat her and that May, who’d liked Don and was quick to claim him as favourite uncle, would be there at breakfast.