Tears of a Bluebird

Chapter Two

I felt the taxi driver slam the breaks down, causing me to slide forward. But I stopped myself from bashing my head against the chair in front by blocking it out with my arms. Wherever we were going, we had arrived. Or, in fact, I will rephrase that now: wherever I was getting sent to, I had arrived.

It was only a minute after the taxi driver jumped out and took my suitcase from his boot, when my mother launched out from the car too, slamming the door behind her. Quivering, I followed her steps and tried to take a firm hold of my old, lily-livered suitcase.

When I fully closed the taxis black door, I turned around and looked ahead. We were parked outside a brownish, two-leveled house that had a chapel and a yard for its neighbour. The taxi was parked on a murky, cobbled road. The house in front of me, which had an immaculately polished, white door — two windows on the bottom, three on the top and a small circular one near the chimney — was near enough the only brown house. The other, constructed replica's trailing from the browns' left and right side were either a bland black or white colour. Everything was quite simple and somewhat bleak; as if I just stepped into a world which was untouched by colour. Maybe colour had felt what I was feeling, and ran away.

The flagged road which I was standing on was the cause of separation between the houses and the fells. The street looked so refined, but at the same time it appeared to be cramped. That was, putting aside, the little solitary cottage at the end, which was situated on a curve that led on to the open fells and woodlands. Behind the cottage; the view was most promising. For shadowing the cottage were rivulets and stretches off heather on the fells, with trees billowing beneath the distance of the hoary, achromatic sky.

"Move!'" mother hissed, breaking up my train of thoughts. I blinked, then moved forward.

I followed my mother instinctively up a small, coarsely groomed path, which was surrounded by a white-spiked fence and gate like the others. When my mother knocked on the white door with her satin black gloves, I looked up at a random window that was on the second floor. Eight eyes were peering down at me from behind thin, white drapes. Of a sudden my nerves began to arouse again, and my heart beat paced faster. A moment later, I heard the sound of keys clattering. Making sure mother was unaware, I looked at her for a few seconds. She was fashioned in her most refined looking clothes like always; her Sunday finery. She looked so out of place here compared to her mansion back home.

"Oh!" gasped a female voice. Mother grinned as the door pulled back further. "I've been waiting on you, Eliza! It's never like you to be late."

A lady, who was small, thin, and fairly attractive for being in her mid-forties, led the two of us into her home. I left my suitcase abandoned near the door. The front door led me straight into an convenient-sized living room, which connected to the kitchen and led on to the scullery. Beneath the archway there was a saying inscribed deep into the mahogany wood, saying: "For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."

I shivered.

"Sit down, Eliza — please!"

The black haired and grey eyed woman gestured her skeleton-like hands towards the sofa; I remember pointing out to myself how this woman before me was verging emaciation. She looked so ill; more colourless than even myself.

Hastily I followed at mother’s heels, as would a lap dog might, towards a long, grey sofa which was adjacent to a bland fireplace. Behind the sofa there was a foreign crafted table and chair resting against a lean, starved bookshelf. It looked like a place someone, most notably a child, would use for studying. When I sat down, again about two feet away from mother, I studied the room. Each mahogany shelf, which was almost everywhere and anywhere, all proudly withheld an elegant-looking ornament on them.