Family comes first

No way in hell did that just happen. River looked up at me with his beady eyes and puckered his lips. His ice lolly had melted. I sighed in the moment just before his cry and marvelled at the event which had just occurred. I had one pound left. One. Bristol was not the place to be on a hot day, everyone knew that. It was overcrowded and suffocating due to the smoke. We had spent all day in offices, banks, retailers and firms, attending hundreds of job interviews. We then had to go to the shoe shop in the town square to get river his boots for his first day of nursery next week. We had to buy his uniform and get the food shop, all before our train at two o’clock. River had to come with me of course because Finn was out all day auditioning. I had spent all of our money paying the bills and buying necessities for the cottage, that when my business in the city was over with, I had one pound left. I could see my son’s agitation and thought that it was only fair to get him something to cool him down, especially as he had been so hassle- free

today. Thus, I went into Tesco Metros and bought him an orange collipo. We walked out into the English sun (which was usually absent from our view), and continued towards a park which was conveniently located just outside the train station. My son is a quiet boy, and it seemed as though he never quite knew how to be a child at all. It were as though he was an old, sensible man who was scrutinising the youths around him rather than embracing them as one of his own. So when we sat down on a bench, he must have spent at least ten minutes watching these children yell and scream and laugh in his usual skepticism, as I sat there on my phone, texting Finn to tell him I had been to the interviews and collected all of the things I needed to collect and was on my way home. He texted back saying he was proud of me for the trouble I had took in going out to get River’s attire on such a sweltering day, and that he would speak to me when I got home. I smiled at my husband’s kindness. It was strange to think that he was my family. Him and River combined gave me my purpose in life. I didn’t know my parents at all. I got adopted when I was four years old to a farming family in a villiage just outside of Bristol. I spent hardly any time with my adoptive parents and never got very close to them. Mr Huxley was always out running the farm, and Mrs Huxely was always chasing after her own children- twins who were only two years older than me but all the more bothersome. Before I met Finn at university, I felt that there would never be a person who I could say I was related to; and of course be proud to say so. But at last all was well. Finn and I were wedded at twenty two and by the time we were twenty four, we had started our own family with our new baby boy River. The only problem we faced was lack of income, but then of course, that was everyone else’s problem at the moment aswell. The UK was in recession, and it was the working class who were getting the brunt of it.

I looked down to see River sitting with his watchful eye, totally oblivious to the absence of his ice lolly.

“Aw baby,” I said in partial annoyance. He looked up at me and cried.

“no no no it’s not your fault! Why don’t you go play with the other girls and boys over there whilst I clean up the mess yeah?”, I spoke as soothingly as I could. He studied my face for a while, but did not move an inch.

“You don’t want to go huh?”, I asked with a soft sigh.

“mummy here!”, he snarled. I looked at my watch and realised that the train was due in ten minutes anyway.

“Oh River! Look at the time hunny, let’s get going”. And with that I scooped him up and put him in his buggy. With a brisk pace, we began to move our way through the train station. The heat was unbearable by this point and I wanted more than anything a nice cool drink. When we got to the ticket barrier I stopped to look at which platform our train was leaving from. Platform...14. The fourteen o’ seven train leaving from Bristol to the Cotswolds in five minutes. I breathed a sigh of relief But my release was done so too early as I slowly read the words ”CANCELLED” appear on the screen in big red letters. My day was in complete disarray and I was once again let down by this interminable world that lay before me.

“Hi Sabrina. You probably don’t remember me but-“. A man with dark blonde hair who had come out of no where, tapped me on the shoulder and began to speak. I did not know him, yet I did. I seemed to know everything about this man the second I laid eyes on him. He had green eyes, like a cat’s, and spoke with a very boyish tone. The first thing that striked me though was not any of this, it was the fact that he spoke in the most elegant variation of the cockney accent. The accent itself is supposed to sound coarse and unappealing, but it sounded as though he had put a unique spin on it and made it his own.

“My name is Frankie and... I’m your brother. We have some things to talk about. Do you mind if we get out of here?”.