THE ANNOUNCEMENT Part 4

As Kim drove along the motorway she felt as if she was in a bad dream. Nothing felt real, and yet it was real. Too real. The thoughts of what was to be her life now made her baulk. Back at the house which she had just left, everything was the worst mess she had ever known. She was used to moving house and normally everything was organised and in order and always she had left things clean and decent for the next person moving in. But this time it was chaos. There was water all over the kitchen floor that had come from the fridge as it had defrosted. The tiles had started lifting in the kitchen near to the fridge. There was still food in the cupboards and she had not cleaned the kitchen sink or the draining board. There were pots all over the kitchen waiting to be packed. She had had to leave the large bag of dog food in the kitchen, having scooped some of it out to put into a plastic bag to keep the dogs going for a couple of days. The dogs had not eaten properly in the chaos and had left their dinners half eaten, and, unable to get to the kitchen sink to wash their dishes, she had packed the dishes with food still in them into plastic bags. Somehow or other she had managed to salvage what she needed for the night at her mother’s from the chaos, but her car was in a terrible mess and totally disorganised. Kim felt that she could not survive this, but she knew she had to. All that she could think of now was her dogs. Would they be ok? All she wanted to do was cuddle them, but she had to get on and get to her mother’s. And that was the one place she did not want to go. Her mother had abused her horrifically during her lifetime and Kim did not want to be trapped for the night in her mother’s house. She knew it would be terrible, and it was. She kept herself going by thinking that the next day she would be in her own house and she could start trying to get things ship shape again. There would be some semblance of order when Ron came to the new house from the hospital. She had no idea when that would be, but she longed to have him there right now. He should be at her side now, not stuck in some hospital bed with bandages on his leg and foot. She felt for him. He would be out of his mind with worry. But his job was to recover. Without knowing it, this was to be more of a turning point in their lives than they had anticipated as this was to be the point at which Ron was put into a wheelchair for life.

On the morning of the move, Kim had to go to the solicitors to pick up the keys for the new house. She could hardly wait. However, unbeknown to her, there had been a hold up. The monies had not been exchanged properly and she could not pick the keys up. She was on the phone to the solicitors most of the morning but nothing was happening. She drove to the new house as the removal men would be arriving soon, but they would not be able to get into the house. By midday everyone apart from Ron was at the house. Kim could only go into the drive of the house, and the removal men were sat in their van getting angrier and angrier. Kim was having to placate them. She found herself on the phone to the solicitors and the hospital all at the same time, and Ron was telling her that they were going to discharge him but that they insisted that there must be a wheelchair waiting for him at the new house. Kim now had another job. How could she purchase a wheelchair whilst she was on the phone to the solicitors and trying to get the removal underway. She was beginning to panic but Ron found a shop in the town that sold wheelchairs and told her to ring them up and ask them to deliver a new wheelchair to the house. Still, they were stuck outside the house, unable to get in, and when Kim rang the wheelchair shop the man was very helpful but said he needed to know how wide the doorways were in the house. Kim of course could not tell him. In the end he agreed to deliver to her the narrowest wheelchair that they had. So there was Kim standing in the driveway of the new house with a wheelchair and three fuming removal men sitting in a van. In time, however, the solicitors informed her that she could go to their offices and pick the keys up.

THE ANNOUNCEMENT Part 3