Hospital Corners, by Abena Owusu

An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.

Kofi’s train left at ten past nine, and by twenty past Ruth Mensah was back in the house, still wearing her best hat, standing in the doorway of his room.

He had tidied it. That was the worst of it. For eighteen years she had nagged him about the socks under the bed and the football boots on the landing, and on the last night, without being asked, he had made the bed with hospital corners and stacked his old school books in a neat pile by the door, labelled in capitals: FOR JUMBLE. She looked at the label for a long time. It was the handwriting she had taught him at the kitchen table, guiding his fist around the letters, and now it was telling her to give his childhood away.

The house had a new sound. She noticed it as she went downstairs: a kind of hum, as if the walls themselves had taken a breath and were holding it. She turned on the wireless to drown it and then turned it off again, because a man was talking cheerfully about the weather in Scotland, and she could not bear anybody to be cheerful just yet.

In the kitchen there were two eggs in the bowl. She had bought six on Thursday, and Kofi always ate three for his breakfast on a Saturday, and she found herself counting backwards to work out how many she would need next week, and then understanding that she would need hardly any, and that this would be the shape of things now: small loaves, half pints, two chops.

Her husband came in from the garden with mud on his knees. ‘He’ll ring tonight,’ Samuel said. ‘You’ll see.’

‘Of course he will.’

She said it briskly and began to wipe the table, which was clean. She wiped it twice. She was proud of him, she reminded herself; she was so proud of him that at the station she had been unable to speak, and had straightened his collar instead, and he had let her, which he had not done since he was eleven. That was what she would remember, she decided. Not the tidy room. The collar, and his patience, and the way he had bent his head.

How does the writer show Ruth Mensah’s thoughts and feelings after her son leaves home?

You should consider:

• what the writer says about Ruth
• the writer’s use of language to show her thoughts and feelings

You must refer to the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.