Archive of Lost Things

Story: [All Our Yesterdays] (original work) Prompt: #FFF [370] [Stepping into Yesterday] @flashfictionfridayofficial Word count: 710

All Our Yesterdays

It is the music that does it, just a few notes and she's back, stepping into her yesterdays.

She sways back and forth in the threadbare armchair, eyes closed, head bobbling in counterpoint as though her neck is housing a broken spring instead of sturdy bone. Her mouth puckers around off key notes as she tries to hum along, seventy years of living cracking her voice and making it waver.

She sits in her faintly cat scented room with its mismatched cushions, tapping her hands against the arm rest and steps through a door into the old bingo hall, done with streamers like it always was when there was a dance on.

The music that night far less perfect than this download the wee nurse had put on the iPad clutched in veiny hands with their swollen knuckles. It had been learned by the local boys and played on whatever they could rustle up. Davey Wild had been the best of them, he'd fancied himself the next Top of the Pops sensation, and his guitar had had three strings.

He'd died last year, she'd heard. Heart failure.

Now she is wearing a knitted off white jumper, marred with dribbled tea and cat hair and puffy at the wrists where she's tucked tissues into her sleeves.

She'd been no better dressed that night: a red dress that she didn't have enough up top to fill out and which sagged unattractively so she kept having to hoick it up. Her cousin had given it to her and mam'd wanted to donate it but she'd hidden it under the dollies she was still young enough to have in a box in her cupboard.

The song had been popular then, not a classic nor a "Golden Oldie" as her Sally laughingly calls it. It had been a hit. Cool. Meggie had had it on a cassette where it cut off the last six bars with a footie announcement from where she'd taped it off the radio. But when she closes her eyes, it's always Sheena McCallister that she hears singing it, voice wailing over the high notes and fishnet tights her dad definitely didn't know she owned making the stark white of her thighs even more shocking under the lights.

The bingo hall had still smelled of the pies they served for the old ladies at lunch time and the cheap lager they were serving now; cigarrettes and the musty heat of Davey Wild's disco machines; too much cheap perfume shoplisted from Woolies and hairspray making the girl's hair stiff and static. The song smells the same and tastes of cheap warm booze and chips and laughing until she was nearly sick.

On that night, she'd spun and whirled, and she knows her daughter thinks she loves this song because she's imagining being in Roger's arms, knows they think it is the soundtrack to some great romantic moment.

She hadn't known Roger on the night this song takes her to. Hadn't even known Norman.

She'd been young when this was in the charts, barely her Sally's age. She'd climbed out the back window even to be there. Mam thought she was safely sulking in her bedroom after being scolded for failing to pick Meggie up from school.

She'd been caught of course - far less stealthy as she fell over the bins on the way back into the flat. Even if she hadn't, mam had been waiting with a scowl and a slipper to give her the hiding that, sixty-five years later, she can admit she deserved, for stumbling in too young to do any of the things she'd been doing with beer on her breath and borrowed eyeshadow darkening her lids and clotting in the corners of her eyes with her inexpert application.

But the song, the song. She had been strong and powerful and beautiful and young. When it's playing, the song tells her she still is, tells her that she's more than the collection of pains in hands and knees.

The track stops, there's a moment of silence. No click like there would have been on a cassette, no rattle like there would have been on a proper record. Just silence. Then the next song starts.