Fireworks to Thailand

by J. R. Bonham

  “Yes, I know. Uncle John told me. What am I supposed to do about it?” Louise asked.

  “I think we should go and see her, don’t you?” Steven this time.

  “Why should we? She’s never done anything for us, has she?”

  “Mum, I want you to make it up with her,” Jake announced. “I think that you and Uncle Steven should go and see her and let bygones be bygones. Then Charlie and Daisy and I can go and see her too, afterwards. Meet our grandmother for the first time.”

  “D’you think she’s worth a fortune now?” Dean enquired. “Her husband has probably left it all to her, and she’ll be wanting to know who to leave it all to when she goes! So that’s a damn good excuse for making it up with her! Well, it’s a start!”

  Chapter 60

  “I’m bringing Steven and Louise to see you,” John told Jan a few days later. “They have decided to make it up with you at long last. I’m going to fetch them tomorrow and we’ll come straight over to you. We will be with you mid-afternoon.”

  “Oh!” Jan was so surprised and lost for words. She didn’t know that John had been plotting behind her back. “Did you organise all this?”

  “I did, my dear, I did.” John was so pleased with himself.

  “Well, you’re very clever. Thank you very much. You be careful on the roads, there have been loads of floods around here lately and the leaves are coming down so it’ll be slippery. I know it will be OK for you, you’re such a good driver. See you tomorrow.”

  Jan sat down and cried. She couldn’t control the emotional feelings she was having.

  “I can’t believe it, after all this time. Have they really forgiven me at last?’

  Then she started getting excited. She decided she would make some cakes. Cakes she knew that both her children liked. ‘Children! They’re adults now!’ she thought to herself. ‘I hardly know them and they hardly know me. I expect we have all changed quite a bit.’

  John’s car drew up at Jan’s house and they all got out. Jan was looking out of the window at them. She had seen them only two years previously at Clare’s funeral. Somehow they looked different now. A bit more friendly perhaps? Steven looked very well, but she wasn’t sure if she imagined that.

  “Hello,” she said with trepidation as she flung the door open for them. John waited by the car so Louise and Steven could go in first. Louise was a little cool and brushed past her mother into the hall. Steven bent to give his mother a peck on the cheek. Jan wanted to hug both of them but thought it better to wait until later for that.

  “It’s lovely to see you, Lulu and Steven,” Jan began.

  “Don’t call me that!” Louise started.

  “Oh! OK,” Jan smiled at Louise, trying to be as friendly as she could. She didn’t really know how she felt about her two children who had shunned her for such a long time. She didn’t really know them now. Maybe they would have nothing in common anymore.

  Jan hugged John when he came into the house. He went straight into the sitting room to be out of the way while Jan spoke to her children.

  “I’ve baked your favourite cakes,” Jan told them. “But first I thought we could go out for a walk to be on neutral ground to talk. Walk and talk. Away from anyone else. I know of a lovely place we could go to. We’ll go for a walk in the woods just down the road. It’s really lovely there with the leaves turning such a beautiful colour. It’s not far away. Surrey is the most wooded county in England, did you know that?”

  “No, I didn’t know that,” Steven said, interested. “I could do with a fag, so we’ll go for that walk you suggested.”

  “Oh, not another cigarette, Steven!” Louise shouted at her brother. “I thought you’d given them up, that’s what you told Sheryl. I suppose you’re still on the drugs too, are you?” Louise’s outburst surprised Jan but she chose to ignore it.

  “Never mind about that, come on,” she tried to cajole them.

  They walked down the road and into the woods. It was one of Jan’s favourite walking spots and she wanted to show them. There was a large lake in the middle of the woods; a good place to stop and talk as there were benches there. Many an hour she had spent there in the quiet, contemplating life. Never in her wildest dreams did she think she would ever be sharing it with the two people she treasured the most.

  Although there had been floods lately, it didn’t affect walks in the woods because there were concrete pathways. Someone had placed them there a very long time ago and they were beginning to show their age with cracks and unevenness.

  Jan took them the long way around because it was such a beautiful walk. She had planned to talk to them, set everything straight with them and then go back and have a lovely cup of tea with them and including John. She was hoping too, to be able to arrange to meet her grandchildren at some stage but first things first. She must make sure she had a reasonable to good relationship with her children first and foremost.

  John turned the television on, put his feet up and promptly went to sleep. His job was done and he was feeling mighty smug with himself.

  “It’s a beautiful spot, isn’t it?” said Jan enthusiastically. “When we get there, I know you’ll love it as much as I do. We’ll get to the lake very soon, it’s just around the next corner.”

  Steven was lagging behind because he didn’t want his smoke to get in the way of his sister for fear of her nagging him again. Louise walked alongside her mother in almost silence. She answered questions with one-word answers, but she wasn’t very forthcoming. The wind was getting up and Jan hoped that it wouldn’t rain before they had finished their walk.

  Louise was a few steps ahead of her mother because Jan had turned back to see where Steven had got to. She noticed him perched on a stone with his back to her, looking around at the golden trees.

  Just at that moment Jan heard an almighty crack. Like a crack of thunder. When she turned around she saw Louise on the ground, half on the path and half on the mud with a huge branch almost covering her. Jan rushed over to her.

  Blood was gushing out of the side of Louise’s neck. Pumping. Pumping.

  “God, NO!” Jan cried, putting her hands up to her mouth. “What on earth happened?” she asked Louise. Jan was aware that this was very serious but felt quite useless.

  Jan shouted and beckoned to Steven to come quickly. But he was about 100 feet away sitting on a rock smoking, looking the other way. He didn’t hear at first because the wind was making Jan’s words disappear. She screamed again, louder this time, and he came running over. But it was just like slow motion. ‘Why can’t he hurry up!’

  “What’s the matter?” she could just about hear Steven saying as he was running.

  “Can’t you see?” she screamed at him. “Ring 999!”

  Steven ran over to where they were, realising then that something was terribly wrong. He had been under the influence of his ‘wacky backy’ as Louise used to call it, but this was a wake-up call that brought him to his senses. He got his mobile phone out of his pocket and was looking at it as if it was some alien creature.

  “Hurry up!” shouted Jan, while trying to stem the flow of blood with a tissue, which was all she had on her.

  “I can’t get a signal!” he told her.

  “Please try harder,” she shouted at him again.

  “I can’t do anything about getting a signal if there isn’t one!” He was starting to get annoyed. It wasn’t his fault. “I can’t just produce a signal out of thin air. It must be the trees. Sometimes you don’t get a signal where there are a lot of trees.”

  Jan actually knew that he was right and she knew that mobile reception had never been good in their area. Unfortunately neither of them were aware that the emergency services can be called upon without reception.

  “You’ll have to go out of the woods until you get a signal,” she told him, and with that, he ran in the direction in which they ha
d come.

  Jan looked at Louise who was getting paler and paler. Jan held her hand and said, “Stay with me. You’ll be OK. Steven’s gone for help.”

  She cradled her daughter’s injured head in her lap, but she knew by the injuries she had sustained that her life was ebbing away before Jan’s eyes.

  Louise never said anything again. The tree branch had pierced her carotid artery and it was only a matter of time. No one could have done anything in that short time.

  Help never came. Jan was broken. How could she get her daughter back, only to have her taken away so cruelly?

  Steven had got to the road and managed to get a signal on his mobile and he dialled 999. They asked him where he was.

  “My sister is hurt, in a wood. A tree came down on her, come quick.”

  “We need directions, where is she?”

  “I don’t know!” Steven said desperately.

  He couldn’t tell them, so they couldn’t help. He ran back to his mother and sister to see if there was anything he could do and explained about the phone call.

  “It’s too late,” Jan cried. “Please stay with her while I run and get John. He’ll know what to do.”

  Alas, John didn’t have any ideas.

  “Are you sure she’s… dead?” he cried.

  “I am sure. She’s gone. It didn’t take very long. I… I just couldn’t stem the flow of blood. It was just awful.” Her clothes were drenched in Louise’s blood.

  The only thing he could do was to call an undertaker to take care of things while Jan went back to the wood to wait for them. They arrived after some time. With not good directions to a woodland, it wasn’t easy for them.

  John arranged for the body to be taken back to Devon.

  Jan was banned from attending the funeral. After all, from the family’s point of view, it was all her fault. It would never have happened if it hadn’t have been for her.

  Jan was in even more despair. Her daughter was dead and it was her fault. ‘My grandchildren will never want to meet me now. I just don’t want to live myself. I feel so alone. I remember Steven saying to me once that I would be a lonely old woman. Oh hell. My life is hell. I want to get rid of all this pain. I want to end it all. Where are the painkillers? Are there enough?’

  She looked in the medicine cupboard and found a mountain of painkillers that used to belong to Mike. ‘These will do!’ she thought to herself as she dragged out several packets.

  Then she looked in the drinks cabinet where she kept the gin, whisky and brandy alongside the sherry and port. She took out every single bottle that was in there and lined them up on the kitchen table with the pills.

  ‘So, do I take the pills first, or the drink or a mixture? Oh hell, I don’t know, I’ve never done anything like this before. I’d better write some goodbye letters or emails to some of my best friends. 66 years old, and it’s come to this.’

  She went into her office where the computer was.

  She sat at the computer and stared at the blank screen for a good half hour. ‘What on earth am I going to write?’

  She thought about her life and was generally mulling things over in her head.

  Then she had a brainwave and started to type:

  CHAPTER ONE.

  “Pregnant! Oh No!”…

  About the Author

  Fireworks to Thailand is the debut novel of J.R. Bonham. She was privately educated in the West of England and now lives near the Surrey/Sussex borders with her husband. She enjoys writing as well as travelling the world. She has played some sports including tennis, badminton, table tennis and petanque to a fair to good standard and likes reading, walking, cycling, swimming, playing Bridge, theatre trips, concerts etc. She is now retired and does some volunteer work as well as gardening and entertaining.