Giving Up

My sister turns her key in the lock and pushes. The door moves a handbreadth.

Mum croaks from the living room. “Hang on—I’m coming.”

She grunts as she bends to move the draught excluder guarding the door, and we are assailed by the familiar onslaught of lavender air freshener.

In the kitchen, we unpack the shopping we’ve brought her, and Pam goes to open the cupboard under the sink.

“Not there—I’ve had a shift around.” Mum coughs. “Leave the laundry tablets. I’ll put ’em away later. You make us a cuppa.”

Pam abandons the laundry tablets on the worktop and dips into the shopping bag again. “I don’t like the sound of that cough,” she scolds.

I fill the kettle.

The floral caddy behind the kettle is empty of tea bags so I refill it from the box in the cupboard over the sink. As I return the pack, I spot the engraved cigarette lighter Dad gave Mum on their silver wedding anniversary, tucked between the sugar and the stock cubes. Maybe she’s afraid Pam will tell her to throw it away.

We almost lost Mum to bronchitis last winter. Her breathing was so bad she couldn’t smoke for weeks. Pam insisted it was time Mum gave it up as she would already be over the nicotine withdrawal period. Weakened by illness and fed up with Pam’s nagging, she’d yielded.

Not that Pam knows what withdrawal is like. Neither of us got into the smoking habit. Mum and Dad had both smoked since their teens; tobacco carried Mum through wartime fire-watching in East London. Even after Dad’s death from lung cancer in his sixties, Mum’s previous attempts to give it up failed. Miserably.

Pam takes a twin-pack of tissues into the abandoned dining room where Mum stores spare packs of stuff. She reappears brandishing a 200-pack of duty-free cigarettes. “What’s this, then?”

“Oh… Stuart stopped by on his way home from the airport. He never remembers I’ve given up.” Our brother lives up north. We don’t see much of him.

Pam fumes. “Is he trying to kill you off?”

“Probably.” Mum is always disappointed that his visits are so brief. “Maybe he’s in a hurry for his share of my house when I’m gone.”

She always makes the spare room ready in case he stays over, but he never does.

“Well, I’m throwing these away,” declares Pam.

Mum rallies. “No, leave them in there. I’m giving them to Jean.”

I’ve never seen her neighbour with a cigarette, but I say nothing and Pam stomps back to the front room, tutting.

While the kettle boils, I make space for shoeshine among a drawer stuffed with old polish tins and a can of lighter fuel. The mugs on the draining board would benefit from a rinse; Mum doesn’t always wear her glasses when she’s washing up.

In the sink, a filter-tipped dog-end is wedged in the drain filter.

I push it through and turn on the tap.