The Slave - by Charles Roberts

 

The slave

Charles Roberts

It was what you might call a childhood romance.  Tom and April met on the first day of junior school and became inseparable from that day forward.  They carried on to the comprehensive school and in fact became head boy and head girl.  They made a pact that they wouldn’t marry until they were both twenty one, I know that sounds strange, but they thought that they would be more adult by the time they reached that age.  On leaving school they found that unemployment was high in town, jobs were few and far between, even for people with their qualifications.  Tom took the only job he could find, and that was as a road sweeper with the local council.  April managed to get a job as a secretary, also with the council.  It wasn’t the sort of work either of them wanted, but it was work and they thought that being in work could lead to other, better jobs.

They rented a flat above the Spar shop in the precinct, thinking that once they got better jobs they could buy a house of their own.  When they both turned twenty one they married in the local church.  April had the white wedding of her dreams, even though the dress had cost her three months wages.  They didn’t have much in the way of money, but every Friday Tom would stop off at the town’s florists and pick up the flowers they were throwing out and take them home for April, somehow, she could make them last until the following week and she loved to receive them.

Two years after their wedding April gave birth to a little girl Gwendolyn Christine, or Wendy for short, she was named after both their grandmothers.  She had to leave her job when the baby was born and stayed at home until Wendy was old enough to start school.  The council couldn’t take her back in her old job so she took the only position possible and that was as a cashier in the Spar shop down stairs.  She wasn’t earning as much as she had when she was a secretary, but it helped to pay the bills and she had a staff discount on anything she bought in the shop.  Life was good, it wasn’t the perfect life they had dreamed of when they were still at school, but it was good, and they both were determined that Wendy would have a better life than them; so to that end they started saving to send Wendy to college and then university.  They couldn’t save much every week, but what they could, they did.

Wendy excelled in school and when she reached eighteen, she had more qualifications than Tom and April put together.  She went on to university, where she not only passed her Ph.D., but also met the man of her dreams and once they’d finished their education, they married.  Tom and April were over the moon with Wendy’s achievements, and with her new husband, the only thing they were sad about was that Wendy and her husband lived far away so they couldn’t visit very often.

The trouble, no, problem started about two years after Wendy’s wedding, Tom came home from work and found April sat watching the TV.  That’s all right he though she’s probably had a hard day and is unwinding, but he went into the kitchen and found that the breakfast pots hadn’t been washed and there wasn’t any diner cooking.  He didn’t say anything, he simply washed the pots and cooked a meal, when he took her food into the lounge for her, she didn’t say anything.  This didn’t happen every day, just the odd day, Tom thought that she had been working hard in the shop, he knew that they were short handed down there.  Then one Friday he brought her the flowers home, as he had every week since they married, and she took them and threw them in the bin shouting at him not to bring bug infested rejects home to her.  Everything started to go downhill from that day.

He’d get home from work and the have to wash the breakfast pots, then cook the evening meal every day.  Then he found that she hadn’t done any washing, so he had to set about washing the clothes, and drying them.  She threw them in his face because he hadn’t ironed them.  He found all this so puzzling; he called in the Spar shop on his way home one day and as soon as he walked in the shop one of the girls asked how April was because they hadn’t seen her in months.  On the anniversary of their marriage he cooked a special meal, he took it into the lounge where she was watching one of the soap operas, she took one look at the food and threw the plate at him.

Shortly after this, while he was preparing a meal she came into the kitchen, picked up a large kitchen knife, he told her to be careful because it was sharp, and she threw it at him, it stuck quivering in the kitchen cabinet door about three inches from his head, then she threw a pan of boiling potatoes at him and stormed out of the room shouting that she was sick and tired of the muck he served.  Two months later he was called into the office and told that he was no longer required, that he would receive two thirds of his wages as a pension, that the council were replacing the manual road sweepers with mechanised ones.  A mechanical road sweeper could do the job of six men in the same time.  Tom didn’t know what to do.

At home he had become a slave to an increasingly hostile and violent April, who he still loved with all his heart, but dreaded being at home with, and now he had lost his job to a tin box on wheels which sucked up all the street litter.  Still he wouldn’t have to go to work with a cut lip or black eye and try to explain them away, that he’d fallen down the steps, or tripped over the cat, they didn’t have.  The worst time was when Wendy showed up unexpectedly, he had a black eye where April had hit him with the frying pan, he’d been too slow in ducking, and a large plaster on the back of his left hand where she had caught him with the kitchen knife, which had become her favourite weapon; he’d tried to hide all the knives, but somehow, she always sniffed them out.

It was hard explaining things to Wendy, but what else could he do especially when April threw a plate full of food at him just because it had peas on it and she didn’t like peas this week.  Tom didn’t know what was happening in April’s head, why was she behaving like this.  He still loved her with every fibre of his body, and he somehow knew that she still loved him, but this violence and hostility towards him was beyond his comprehension.  Many nights he cried himself to sleep because he knew that the April, he lived with now wasn’t the April he married and had loved since they were five years old.

He was putting the washing away one day, April was in the lounge watching something on the TV, when he opened the wrong drawer of her bedside cabinet to put her undies in, and he saw the packets of tablets.  He knew that she would fly off the handle if he said anything to her, so he made a note of the tablet’s names.  The next time he was out shopping he went to the library and looked the tablets up.  He was shocked by what he found out, so then he went to the doctors and asked why April was being prescribed these pills.  He explained that he now knew what the medication was for and then went on to tell the doctor what was happening at home and why he needed to know what exactly was wrong with his wife.  The doctor was reluctant to tell him, until Tom informed him that April’s mother had died of a brain tumour and the symptoms were very similar to April’s.  And the ages of the two women, when April’s mother started with the tumour and when April’s violence started, were about the same.  Then Tom told him what it was like to live with April, about the hostility and violence showing him the scars on his hands and arms where April had caught him with a knife, or stabbed him with a fork.  The burn marks on his chest where she had hit him with a hot pan two days previously.  The time when she had gone into his bedroom in the middle of the night and tried to stab him with her favourite kitchen knife.

The doctor explained that April had a brain tumour which was inoperable and would, in time only get worse, the pills were to try and slow its progress.  In fact, the doctor found it hard to believe that April hadn’t told him about the cancer.  As Tom rode the bus home, he came to the decision to confront April with what he had seen and found out from the doctor, if she was having one of her normal days.  He knew that it could, probably would, make her angry and he could get a kitchen knife thrown at him, or stuck in him, but this had to be brought out into the open.  She was suffering, but Tom knew that she shouldn’t suffer alone, he still loved her with all his heart