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The Last Family in England competition

Here's the winning entry of The Last Family in England short story competition. The author is Dawn Wingfield.

Walter

It has been raining again, and my small corner of London is painted a slick grey. I swoop low, over the despairing mass of the hospital, over streets and wretched gardens, until I find the three-storey house. Over the roof and there it is, my windowsill. Crumbless. I land anyway. The room beyond the window is a small greasy hole, containing a bed, cooker, fridge and table. The boy who lived here before liked to put poppadoms and cornflakes out for me. He would talk, his voice a low and pleasant hum, and the food was scented with his humanity. He is gone now, lost somewhere in the smoky maze of the city.

I think the room is empty until I see a small movement. A woman with bony arms and despair in her eyes sits up in bed and gropes around, finding cigarettes. She looks around the room, at the squat filthy cooker and the damp walls.

Then she sees me, and her eyes narrow. “Christ,” she says.

I fly away.

There are many places for a pigeon to dine in London. There are parks and rubbish bins and innumerable restaurants where kindly waiting staff discard fragrant, flaky morsels of bread. What I find myself missing is the company of a single person, fingers crumbling my bread, a low and confiding voice, a smile from a smooth and beakless face. Perhaps that is why I return to my windowsill. This time it is different. She is sitting on the bed, eating something from a pot.

“You again?” She looks up. “Did you used to mooch off the previous tenant or something?”

I cock my head. She is a pale grey, neglected looking creature, her arms abloom with green and purple bruises and marks.

“Bloody hell.”

I wait.

She pulls a slice of bread from a packet on the table and approaches the window. As she begins to ease it up, I flap off to another sill and watch her tearing the slice to bits.

“There you go,” she says and returns to her pot of food on the bed.

I fly back to eat the fragments of slightly stale white bread.

“I’m Sarah,” she introduces herself. “I’ll call you Walter, shall I?” She smiles, as if this is brilliantly original. I finish the bread and take my leave.

I begin visiting Sarah in the early summer evenings because I discover that during the days she is gone. Not for good, I realize quickly; she leaves food on the windowsill. White bread, chunks of pastry, cold chips that smell of her smoky fingers.

She scrubs the table and tries to wash the grease from the walls. Her hair is suddenly shorter and shinier, and the bruises begin to fade from her arms. One day she hurls her cigarettes the length of the tiny room. “I’m giving up, Walter – I mean it,” she tells me, then crawls after the packet, rescues a cigarette and stuffs it into her mouth, searching for a light. “Okay – cutting down.”

I look at her, then peck up a bit of malt loaf.

“I really envy you your life, Walter,” she says sadly. “Flying around London, bumming chips off people. Must be lovely.”

Later in the year, a radio appears on top of the fridge. Tunes jangle forth, and Sarah smiles. “I’m really doing it, Walter. This time I’m finally getting my shit together.”

The food is different now. There are bits of nutty-flavoured bread, handfuls of muesli.

“We’re cutting back on the stodge,” Sarah informs me.

Summer begins to slide into autumn. Perhaps Sarah doesn’t like he change of season, because this is when she begins to cry. She makes the sound I hear outside the hospital sometimes, and it makes me want to soar, to lose myself in the emptiness of the sky. Her offerings become quite paltry; we’re back to white bread and chips now, and once even a chunk of chocolate. I notice the strange blooms on Sarah’s arms again. Sometimes I land on my windowsill and she is lying still on the bed, while filth creeps over the room again.

“Oh, Walter,” she says, if she notices me at all.

One day she is simply gone. I know she’s gone forever because the table is clear of its crumbs and packets, and the radio isn’t on top of the fridge. I sit on my windowsill, thinking of the smell of her fingers. Then I take off, soaring upwards into the pure white emptiness of the sky.