The cupboard door fell open

Mabel Pollard was a well respected woman of good standing. Everyone in the town said so. She lived alone in her terraced house on Garden Street, where so many roses grew in summer and the children who dared to pick them, knew that Mabel would only smile and gently shoo them along. She attended church without fail, volunteered at the library, baked for every charity sale, and always had something polite to say.

People described her as ‘kind’ or ‘dependable’, which Mabel accepted as any single and contented woman of a certain age would. She had cultivated her reputation carefully ever since moving to the town as a teenager.

But in the privacy of her kitchen, with the curtains drawn, she sometimes pressed her nails into her palms until the skin nearly broke, or muttered sharp words under her breath.

She thought of these moments as her housekeeping of the soul - gathering up the shadow parts and pushing them into a cupboard, shut fast where no one could see.

One Wednesday morning, however, the cupboard door became loose.

It happened at the grocers shop. The young assistant, his thin hair lank with grease, eyes blank and somewhere else, packed her shopping in a single flimsy plastic bag. As the handles stretched and a split bulged, before she could stop herself, Mabel found words escaping her mouth.

“If you had any sense at all, you’d use two bags, you can see that just one isn’t going to do the job. You really can be completely stupid sometimes.”

The boy’s head jerked up. Mabel froze, appalled. But instead of arguing or ignoring Mabel completely, he gave a startled laugh.

“You’re right. I don’t think about anything half the time!”

He then pulled out two new plastic bags and repacked the groceries before handing them to her as though nothing had been said.

Mabel walked home stiffly, her heart hammering, praying that no one would follow her and ask about the outburst. The words echoed in her ears. They had not felt like hers, more like something that had been crouching in her chest for years, waiting.

As the cupboard door fell open, the slips continued.

“Your begonias are in a state this year! They look dead already!” She said to old Mrs Lowrey.

“That child really should not be sucking on a dummy at his age,” she spurted to a young woman with a toddler in the bus stop.

“You really should get better coffee, this tastes like dishwater,” she snapped at Trevor in the tearooms where she’d been drinking the same coffee for the last thirty years without complaint.

Each time she waited with dread for a brittle or cold response or some sort of punishment. But it never came.

Instead, people laughed, or nodded, or just leaned towards Mabel a little closer and smiled.

“Well, I suppose you’re right,” Mrs Lowrey said, blinking at the flowers in her front garden. The woman in the bus stop just moved nearer to Mabel in the queue and told her little boy to smile at the nice lady. Trevor in the tearooms sighed contentedly saying, “I’ve never liked that brand myself. You’re probably right, thanks for saying so,” and promptly refunded Mabel for her last cup.

It all made Mabel feel uneasy. As if her thoughts, which she’d always kept in check, ‘mind your thoughts, because thoughts become words, and words become actions,’ she worried for what might come next.

At night she lay awake, staring into the dark. She remembered being twelve and striking her younger brother Freddy across the face and neck so viciously with her riding crop. All because she’d caught him reading her diary.

She’d discovered him crouched over her book of thoughts and secrets one Saturday afternoon. How her arm had ached after the beating she gave him.

“Quite a nasty piece of work really aren’t you?” Freddy had said as he saw her enter her bedroom. “Who’d have thought that goody-two-shoes Mabel would write things like this?”

Then she had set about him like a mad thing. The act had been thrilling yet terrible, and afterwards she’d felt sick to her stomach. The shame had been unbearable. The family had moved away to another town where no one ever knew how Freddy got his scars.

Mabel had sworn never to do such a thing again and pushed that part of herself deep somewhere where it could never escape.

Yet now, when she found herself speaking her sharp and strange words, she felt the same dangerous satisfaction in her chest.

The town seemed to notice. Neighbours smiled differently at her, as though they knew something about her now. They said she was ‘refreshing’ and ‘plain-spoken’. She felt as though their eyes now lingered for longer and that it went quiet when she entered a shop, the library or the tearooms, before people would welcome her with an unnatural level of enthusiasm.

She began to wonder whether she was changing, or whether it was just everyone else. It wasn’t as if she had done anything. They were just a few words that slipped out when she wasn’t minding her shadow.

The charity cake stall in aid of the church roof brought things to a head. Mabel had made her famous lemon drizzle cake, cut into perfect squares, dusted with sugar. She stood behind the table, piled high with various homemade offerings, while Mrs Draper of the red lipstick and equally red hair, launched into her usual story of her daughter’s new promotion in the city.

“She’s a managing director now - and she’d only twenty-nine. Isn’t it wonderful?”

Normally, Mabel would have murmured politely. But this time the darker voice slipped free.

“She’ll be divorced and out of work before she’s thirty-five,” Mabel said matter of factly. “And if she’s anything like her mother, she’d do better to take a more muted approach to her hair and make-up!”

A silence fell over the church hall. The scratching of a mouse behind the rows of seats and the tick of the old clock on the wall seemed louder. Mrs Draper stared, her mouth open.

Then she began to laugh. A full, shrill laugh that went on too long for comfort, verging on hysterical shrieking.

“Oh, Mabel,” she said, gripping the edge of the table so that the cloth began to slide. “You always know just what to say. Heaven help me, you’re probably right.”

The other cake stall women laughed too, though the sound had an odd, brittle edge to it. Sort of uncanny, as if something terrible were about to happen and no one knew what it was, but they thought that Mabel might.

Mabel looked down at the lemon drizzle cake. “Cake anyone?” she proffered with a smile that felt wrong on her face as if it belonged to someone else and she was just borrowing it for the day. Something had shifted. She could feel it. Things were beginning to fall from the shelves of that opened cupboard.

From then on, Mabel no longer tried to bolt the cupboard shut. She allowed herself little liberties. She told the librarian the new novels were ‘cheap trash’ and that she could write better herself. She told the mailman that he smelled of mouldy onions and that was probably why the milk was souring so quickly. When her cousin telephoned her to say his wife was ill she told him that she wasn’t surprised and that being married to him would make anyone feel queasy.

Yet people did not turn their backs to Mabel or make her an outcast. In fact quite the opposite happened. They drew closer to her. They smiled at her with strange, relieved smiles. Some even deliberately set out to spend time with her.

“I like you better this way,” whispered her friend Nora one afternoon as they shared a pot of tea at Trevor’s tearooms. “It’s like somehow you’re more real now.”

Real. The word unsettled her more than any disagreement or accusation of being rude would have. If this was real, what had her life been up to this point between now and the terrible incident with the riding crop?

Mabel turned her teacup round in its saucer. “Perhaps if I could read these leaves I’d have some sort of inkling of what’s going on.” She smiled at her friend. Then fearing that she might say something dreadful or even worse, do something terrible, she grabbed her handbag, made excuses and left.

The darker parts did not always rest easy. Sometimes they pressed against her throat too strongly, urging harsher words. Once, when the insurance broker ignored her, she felt the urge to shriek his incompetence into his face. She gripped the counter until her knuckles ached.

‘My shadow must be kept in the right places,’ she thought. At the moment she felt that it hovered in the corners, just about under control. But only just, and if it was ever let loose, it could smother everything.

Still, she wondered, was there harm in hiding it away forever? Hadn’t her lifelong kindness and compliance been its own sort of cruelty, a deprivation of sorts? Didn’t she owe it to herself to just be her?

The town’s folk seemed to welcome the new Mabel with a relish of their own. At the monthly library meeting, when everyone argued over whether to allow a new section for more ‘adult’ reading material, it was Mabel who rose to her feet in exasperation.

“You’d be fools to not allow it! Stop pretending to be so prim and proper. Everyone does it you know. I’ve seen you with your smutty magazines Mr Frost. And you Betty Sharp, with your goings on with that married man from the council! So really, some adult reading, a bit of sex, would be welcome… don't you think?.”

The room went quiet. When the vote was called, the new adult section was overwhelmingly agreed. Later, she heard someone murmur, “Thank God for Mabel.”

She nearly laughed aloud. Thank God, for this? For the shadow that whispered thorny words in her ear? But their faces were earnest, almost reverent.

She began to suspect that what people wanted was not her kindness at all, but the very thing she had spent her life suppressing.

One cold autumn evening, with the first frost whitening the streets, Mabel sat alone in her living room. The lamplight cast long shadows up the walls and across the ceiling.

She thought of herself as a girl, her arm aching from the beating she’d given her brother. All because he’d read her most intimate and shocking thoughts and seen into the part of her that was meant to be secret.

She remembered the decades of nodding, smiling, swallowing words. And she thought of herself now, watching friends and neighbours move closer, eager for her thoughts.

She understood then what the cupboard had held all these years. Not only confined anger at the world, but clarity. The truth of who she really was with all the layers of conformity stripped bare.

‘And perhaps,’ she thought, ‘it’s not all that bad to have a little bit of darkness for yourself.’

She turned her face toward the window, where her reflection hovered faintly in the glass, darker than the night beyond. She smiled at it, with a sense of knowing and belonging that she’d not felt since her youth.

“I can see you,” she whispered. “But don’t worry. I’ll keep you close.”

And as she got up from her chair to close the curtains, from the deepening shadows, the reflection smiled back.