The Missing Watch

Eleanor sighed as she heaved another full box into the boot of her car, nestling it between the others. The dust from her mum’s old house had spent the last few hours working its way everywhere - into her itchy, red eyes, up her nose making her sneeze, into her hair and becoming ingrained into her flower patterned blouse. She’d spent all day sorting, clearing and searching, but was still nowhere near finding it. Her back ached and she was struggling to keep her eyes open, but still managing to resist the temptation of the pack of battered cigarettes she’d found stuffed into a bedside drawer.

She was struggling now, where could it be? The obvious places had drawn blanks, her mum’s jewellery stand contained a couple of broken chains that she clearly couldn’t be bothered to throw away, a green-tinged copper ring that Eleanor had told her was cheap junk, and fluff. Lots of fluff. But not the watch she’d been promised by her dad weeks before he died.

Obviously they’d had their differences all throughout her life, her grades were never good enough, her friends were no good for her, she stayed out too late, her hair was too short, long, the wrong colour and her clothes were too unbecoming for her mother’s tastes. Why couldn’t she be more like David, why weren’t her friends as nice as David’s, why couldn’t she get her grades up like Sandra? Eleanor laughed to herself, thinking about the arguments they’d had when she was a teenager, and how they had escalated as she got older, and how…explosive they’d become after her dad suddenly died.

Then, of course, there was the drinking. Oh, the drinking. That was the main bone of contention between the two, that made even their arguments about Eleanor’s belly button piercing seem tame. It was always…not great…but after her dad things escalated exponentially. If he’d known that was the last time she’d see him, he’d have just given her the damn watch there and then, he understood what his wife like, how she was getting, but none of them had known. How can you ever expect to see someone alive one minute, and hear they’ve been killed in a car crash just a few hours later? He was still a young man, really, but he’d seemed so old to Eleanor at the time.

After the funeral it didn’t seem the right time to ask about the watch, with her mum too drunk to stand and Eleanor had had to change her out of wet trousers and put her to bed.

Instead, she vowed she’d never put herself, her husband or, worse, her own kids in the position of seeing her mum like that again, so she decided she’d leave it to chance, to fate, as to whether she’d ever get the watch that they all knew was hers by rights.

Another chest of drawers full of old, useless paperwork, bric-a-brac, snapped hair ties and some suspicious looking mildew. It was a shame, it had been a beautiful bit of furniture when she was a child, now the solid oak top was ruined. A decent workman could probably salvage it, she reckoned, but that wine glass ring would be a nightmare to remove. If her dad could see it now, she thought.

The recycling bin outside was getting full of 15-year-old bank statements and take-away menus. How could one woman accumulate so much rubbish? You’d never know there were three siblings, David had his graduation photos on the mantelpiece, as well as a few photos of his kids at various ages. Sandra and James’ wedding photos were on the walls, still, and so were photos of the three of them together. You could chart her mum’s decline through these, as well as the descent of Sandra’s marriage, until there were just photos of their mum and Sandra on various beaches, her mum looking more pallid and thin as the years went on.

She couldn’t fault Sandra for the effort she’d put in, even as their relationship had gone from symbiotic to parasitic. God, Sandra had tried, hadn’t she? She’d tried so hard. In their own ways, they all had, but when someone is Hell bent on destruction, what can anyone else do?

But Sandra’s consistent efforts at rehabilitating their mum weren’t the only reason she was on the walls and Eleanor was not. As the youngest, Eleanor had always had a lot to live up to. Both of her siblings were everything Eleanor either could or would not live up to. David was charming and funny, just like their dad, and just like their dad he could wrap their mum around his little finger, so that even when she was in one of her slurring, wobbling rages he could almost always calm her down. That magic way he had had with her became less and less effective though as the drink took a firmer, deeper grasp.

Sandra was top of every class she was ever in. Academia was easy for her, and Eleanor’s rebellious streak had gotten her more time in detention than the other two combined.

Her dad had just smiled at her when she got home after a bad day, that man just couldn’t stay mad at his little Ellie. Mum the disciplinarian and dad the gentle, understanding one. The pair were less good cop, bad cop, and more good cop, psychopath cop. Her mum’s outrageous overreactions, she reasoned, were why her dad had such a soft spot for her, why he had promised her the watch he was never seen without.

But where was it? She’d already ransacked David’s old room, wondering if her mum had put it in there in the vain hope he’d some day come back to see her, even if it was just to claim the keepsake. It wasn’t worth much, not really, not monetarily, David could afford now to buy twenty of them if he so wished. A hundred in fact, probably.

The living room seemed an unlikely place for her mum to have kept it, but she had looked there too, amongst all the half empty glasses, empty bottles, magazines and cigarette butts, but no luck. Her mum’s bedside tables were just as fruitless, the bedroom furniture yielded no results. Just more mess and dirty knickers.

Whilst David’s room had been left alone, Sandra’s was a mess. David’s room had been basically untouched for about thirty years except for a slight crumple in the bed clothes where her mum had, she presumed, come to sit. A shrine to her perfect son. Sandra’s was a testament instead to her mother’s rage at even the smallest slight.

When Sandra had decided enough was enough, even for her, her mum had not taken it well. Eleanor knew some of what had transpired from the surprise voicemail she’d been left at 2am. Her mum slurring and screaming down the phone, her useless daughters abandoning her, and why couldn’t they just see things her way? Eleanor had deleted it half way through.

Eleanor grabbed another bin bag and started to throw things in. Sandra had declined the invitation to come and start clearing the house with her.

“Just get a clearing firm in.” she’d said, “You know what mum was like, just be rubbish everywhere, nothing worth saving in that house anymore.” Eleanor was inclined to agree - so far there was nothing worth saving. Nothing except for the watch - if she could find it. She’d heard the sound of a man’s voice in the background when she was on the phone, and, maybe, the sound of children too? She couldn’t be sure. Maybe one day they’d reconnect and she could find out.

Eleanor lifted a pile of newspapers into the bin bag and stopped. She reached down, what was that? She flopped heavily onto the messy bed, tears starting to form in the corners of her eyes. She fought hard to stop them, and this time it wasn’t the dust.

In a shoe box under the bed, she’d unearthed a collection of childhood memorabilia. Painted pasta necklaces, hand prints, school books and report cards. Years’ worth of things, and as her own tears tried to join the long dried tear stains from her mum, Eleanor realised something - none of these were her works. Not a one.

No, her mum had kept all these things from her siblings, but nothing from her youngest daughter. Tears pricked harder at the corners of her eyes, but she wiped them away instead. A lump sat in her chest, fighting to get out, but she swallowed it down, turning it into a fiery, hot anger instead. Those two were remembered, shrined in the house, but she wasn’t? What did they do that was so special? Hadn’t she gone on to achieve in spite of everything? She’d had to do it all on her own, whereas they’d at least had some support! Because they’d tolerated her mum’s nonsense better than she had, longer than she’d been able, they were included in the family, and she, who had fought so hard for everything, including her mum’s affection - up to a point - was excluded and cut out. Of everything. And where were those two now? At home, ignoring what she was here doing, what they should all be doing together! It wasn’t fair, but it had never once, ever, been fair either.

Was she really such an awful daughter? Was she that terrible of a person that she wasn’t worth even a colourful crayon scrawling? That bad a sister? She must be, her brother, sister and mown mum seemed to think so, the few people in the whole world who were supposed to love you unconditionally hated her. There must be something terribly wrong.

She threw the she box at the wall, watching the memories explode and fly all over the floor, before grabbing the packet of cigarettes she’d put in the bin and heading outside.

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It took several days and many, many trips to the tip for her to empty the old place, to gut it, to make it feel like a house again and less like a hovel. Eventually, she resigned herself to the fact she was never going to find the watch. There was nowhere else left to look. All the furniture was gone, the cupboards empty apart from the dust. She suspected this would be the case, a fruitless search of an old woman’s house, someone she stopped being able to know many years ago.

It was disappointing, but having cleared the house out had been good for her. A release of sorts, a small closure.

She looked round the house one last time, she wouldn’t be back here again. She’d drop the key off at the estate agent before she jumped on the motorway. Empty and refreshed, the house was in need of some love, but so was everything else their mum had touched.

The last job she had to do was make sure the gas and water were switched off. She pulled open the boiler cupboard, the screws needed tightening on it, but that was a job for someone else. She fumbled at the back of the boiler and turned the gas off. Last job now was the water. Where was the stop tap? She screwed up her eyes as she thought, struggling to remember. She was sure she’d seen it when she was clearing out the house, but where was it?

She started to open different cupboards, but no joy. Maybe it was in the cellar? No, nothing. Couldn’t be the living room, could it? Again, no - there was nowhere to hide it in there.

She turned the house upside down again, where was this damn tap? Who hides something this vital? Frustrated, she kicked some floor to ceiling panelling, which fell easily off the wall, narrowly missing her shoulder as it clattered onto the floor. Behind was the stop tap, a couple of empty bottles and, covered in dust and grime, an envelope.

She turned the tap off, before picking up the dusty envelope. It was heavy, much heavier than it should have been. Her heart started beating faster, what was in here?

Her fingers were trembling as she opened it. The envelope paper was old, soft and delicate between her fingers and she accidentally ripped it, cursing at her clumsiness.

Inside was a letter and…the watch. She held up the watch, tenderly, like it too was made of the same fragile paper. Carefully she wound it, not daring to believe it might actually still work, not after who-knows how long it had spent locked and hidden away. But it did, the hands inside the grimy casing started to move again, springing into life, moving as fluidly as ever they had. She hugged it tightly to her chest, wondering how on earth it had gotten back there, before turning her attention to the letter.

She uncurled it, recognising her mum’s handwriting immediately.

Dear Eleanor,

I didn’t know how to send this letter to you, so I am giving it to David to give to you instead.

I know I haven’t been the best mother to you or the others. No. I know I’ve been terrible at times, but please know, through it all, I have loved you. With all my heart Ellie I love you and I am sorry.

I hope your dad’s watch brings you some comfort, I just wish I could have given it to you in person.

I hope this letter reaches you quickly so we can start rebuilding a relationship together. I’ve missed you.

I understand if you don’t get back to me, but I hope you do.

All my love,

Mum xxx

The tears flowed now, decades worth of pain began to trickle out of her eyes, leak out of her nose and, despite herself, a high-pitched wail escaped her. It was a silent scream at first, and then it wasn’t. There was no stopping it, no containing it like she had for years, no shrugging her shoulders and pretending everything was fine. Not this time. Her misery was loud and messy and visceral, overwhelming her and leaving in large, breathless sobs.

Pain was escaping her now, pain that was so deeply rooted it became an integral party of who she was. Pain that had shaped her very being, from how she interacted with the world, her instant defence mechanisms and her difficulty in letting people get close to her. Pain that had shaped the type of mother she’d become, vowing to do better for her kids than she’d had done to her. Pain that at long last had found an outlet, wormed its way past her internal defences before exploding violently, cathartically out of her.

She sobbed until her sides hurt and her throat was raspy, until it bled out. She dried her eyes, wiped her nose.

And it felt like freedom.

The watch felt heavy but good on her wrist, a comforting weight holding her down. It needed some links taking out, not perfect but things didn’t need to be. David and Sandra weren’t the bogeymen she’d created them to be in her head, she concluded. No, they didn’t see eye to eye, but the great rifts had, she realised, been manufactured by their mum, not each other. Her mum’s way of trying to stay relevant in their lives. If only she’d sent the letter all those years ago, instead of losing it, that was a better way to stay relevant. Her heart was finally in the right place, just a shame it was too late. But it wasn’t too late for her, Sandra and David to reconcile. It was a long drive home, she thought, maybe she’d give them a call.