Mr Dibbs Fixes Bikes

21

He felt alone. More alone than he had felt in years. An oppressive loneliness that even the lad and his mother couldn't hope to push away. He had no-one of his time. Not now Arthur had gone. The last of them. Age carrying them away, leaving only Alfie to linger on. No-one to confide in, or reminisce with. No-one who had experienced the world as he had experienced it. No companions. No friends. No loved ones. Especially no loved ones.

The sideboard, opposite the mantlepiece, held only the one photograph. The Duchess, in all her glory. Even there, she hadn't smiled, though she did so often when the sadness hadn't pierced her with its evil claws. Never a one for photographs, she could switch in an instant from belly laughs to stone-faced sincerity if she even sensed a camera nearby. Alfie had always tried to capture at least one smile and had failed at every opportunity.

Photograph albums, tucked away in the wardrobe upstairs, had page upon page that proved her reticence to smile for the camera and she had never revealed why. Charlie smiled. Charlie could smile at anything, but his smiles never reached his mother's face in photographs. Such a loss. Such a beautiful smile that no-one would ever see again. That Alfie would never see again. Not either of their smiles.

The medal had gone. In the darkness, he had not noticed. Fingers played across the surface of the sideboard as he searched for it, but found nothing. In a panic, he switched on the light, blinking as it momentarily blinded him, not caring whether the vandals had returned and saw the bloom of light inside. He couldn't see his son's medal!

Drawers pulled out, hands sifting through the detritus of nicknacks collected over decades. Things without purpose or use. Broken things. Objects that once had meaning, forgotten and laid aside until time had removed them from memory. Boxes and bags, loose change decades out of date, sewing materials and scissors long since blunted and useless. Cupboards in the sideboard showed even more tat collected and abandoned.

Still no medal. Knees creaked as he lowered himself to the thinning carpet, pressing his cheek against the spartan weave to look beneath the sideboard. He swept his hand into the gap under the heavy sideboard, wiping one way, then the other, fingers returning covered with dust and stray hairs and, for a moment, his mind wandered back to a time when the Duchess would not have abided such slovenly practices. The medal had not fallen under there.

He pushed the settee forward, finding yet more dust, but not the medal. Of all the things he could lose, he had to lose that. That and the handkerchief. Another thing gone. Both of supreme importance and significance. He was nothing but an old fool. An old fool losing his mind as well as his friends. Sat upon the floor, he tugged the useless glasses from his face and rubbed his eyes. Wet. Silent tears falling for lost things and fading, precious memories.

It seemed possible he had moved them both somewhere else, to safeguard them, and had forgotten. Age did that. He remembered his grandfather falling victim to such pernicious changes. Slowing down, forgetting things, until, eventually, Alfie's grandmother could no longer care for him at home, ending his days in a care-home, away from family until the day he died, alone.

Alfie gripped the back of the settee, lifting himself to his feet. He was not going to allow it. He would not go quietly and befuddled, as his grandfather had. He would not. Somehow, he had moved both items. He couldn't remember doing it, but it was the only reason he could think of for them both going missing. If his mind was, indeed, failing him, it stood to reason it would show itself in odd ways.

Perhaps he had taken both the handkerchief and the medal into the little shed? He clutched at straws, he knew it, but he couldn't simply not look for them. They were here, somewhere, and he would find them if it were the last thing he did. With the subterfuge ruined, any vandals shooed away by the light pouring from his front windows, Alfie headed to the kitchen, grabbing the keys from the rack and headed outside.

Everything looked as he had left it and that felt odd, in itself. A failing mind would not recall the places where he had sat his mug, after rinsing it beneath the tap, nor where he had set the required tools beside the wheel in a frame, ready to straighten it to the best of his abilities. A failing mind would not notice, too, that certain spare parts were missing. Spare parts and pieces of wood that he had no use for, true, but gone all the same. Something did not make sense.

Before he could make a more thorough inventory, he heard the sound of glass breaking and he knew, immediately, that the light cascading from his living room window had not deterred the vandals, but given them a target. He rushed as fast as his aching knees could carry him to the front garden to find himself proven right. Not only his window, but that of Frederick and his mother's home, too. Both windows lay shattered.

Soon, both Frederick and his mother joined Alfie outside and Alfie had an awful thought. The window was one thing. It could get replaced. The two other objects that had caught his attention could not. He hated himself for thinking it, but he did not think he was losing his faculties. He had not lost the medal and the handkerchief, they had gone. And the only people who had visited his home were Frederick and his mother.

Looking at them now, half-asleep, horrified at the damage to their window, Alfie didn't want to believe it, but he could think of no other reason for his losses. Either Frederick or his mother had taken them, and he dearly wished he was wrong.