The last morning

Text 1: Lemon Spray and Toast, by Beth Carrow

An original short story extract.

On the last morning, the house was too tidy. Her mother had been up since six, cleaning things that were already clean, and the kitchen smelt of bleach and toast and the lemon spray she used when she was nervous. Ellie’s bags stood in the hall in a row, like passengers waiting for a train, and the dog lay across the doorway with his chin on the biggest one, as though he could hold it down.

Her bedroom had stopped being hers in the night. The posters were off the walls, leaving pale rectangles where the sun had never reached. The shelves were bare. Without her things in it the room looked smaller and somehow surprised, like a face without its glasses on.

She sat on the stripped mattress and looked out of the window at the view she had looked at every day for eighteen years: the Morrisons’ roof, the telegraph pole, the corner of the park. It was the most boring view in England. She had complained about it for years. Now she tried to learn it by heart, the way you might try to memorise a phone number before your battery died.

“Ellie! Your dad’s got the car out!”

Downstairs her father was being very cheerful, which was worse than anything. He carried the bags out two at a time and made jokes about the weight of them, about whether she was planning to bring the kitchen sink, and he did not look at her once. Her little brother stood in the hall in his school uniform and suddenly burst into tears and had to be hugged.

Then it was time. There was nothing left to carry.

Her mother stood on the step in her dressing gown with her arms folded tightly across her chest, as if she were cold, though it was September and the sun was out. She said all the things she had been saying for a week: ring when you get there, eat proper food, don’t leave your drink anywhere. Ellie said she would. Then her mother stopped talking and simply held her, hard, for a long time, and smelt of lemon spray and toast, and Ellie closed her eyes.

In the car she did not look back until the very end of the road. When she did, her mother was still on the step, very small, one hand raised. The dog was sitting beside her. Neither of them had moved.

Explore how Beth Carrow uses language and structure to present Ellie’s feelings on the morning she leaves home.

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