Its Christmas!! Sitting on the flowered nylon sofa cover, wearing nylon clothes, just waiting to be zapped as soon as you move. Mum and I sit static, 'Smile for the camera!' Tabitha our Siamese cat obeys, staring into the lens with wide eyes. I am sporting the fashionable Purdey bob, having just been a bridesmaid for the one and only time. I wasn’t too fat to be one this time. Amazingly it appears that it is the first time my mother hadn’t warned me ‘knees together!’
The seasonal scene is set with the Christmas cards strung up with string, covering the beige wall. Giving the impression of a happy family. If that wall could talk. It would tell you of my toy piano smashing against it because I was trying to play Wizard ‘I wish it could be Christmas’. It would tell you about the jar of Nivea being thrown at my dad but missing him, which stuck against the wall for a week. No one looked at it, mentioned it, no one talked. It is also the wall my mum wrote ‘Trevor is a Bastard’ on, to make him decorate for their forthcoming Wedding Blessing.
Yes, if that wall could talk.
The room was just four walls and a gas fire, used to revive my hamster who had pretended to die. The battles fought and lost within them were many. Dad smoking in his chair, ‘please don’t smoke’, mum with her cupboard full of drugs for pain, for sleep, for drugging me when the mood took her. The sofa where my dog Sherry tried to whelp her puppies, but instead she bled all over my Snoopy that I had been given for being brave having my ears pierced.
So many stories to come from one picture.
Yes, if those walls could talk.
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