Novel 1 - The Family 'Ethical Dilemna' Story

I have two novels in mind, both complete opposites and actually this perpetuates them being written when I get the old writer's block with one of them it helps to write something completely different for a while before coming back!

Somewhere in an insignificant northern town a boy lies bruised and beaten in the long-grass. His consciousness so intermittent he no longer knows if he is dreaming the dark clouds and crows overhead, if he is alive and more to the point if he cares that his life should end at the age of eleven years. A woman dressed in mourning blacks, hauls herself up to a hill. The mud about the well trod path swallows her delicate heels slowing her to a quarter of the speed she usually tackled the long walk home. Tired and frustrated she decides to walk through the overgrowth, and who is to say had she been wearing her usual flats, the boy would never have seen. As it was she came upon him believing him to be a pile of clothes abandoned from nearby houses and only looked twice upon seeing the flicker of a hand, batting away a fruit fly making a rather pre-emptive dive. The wind, stole her ‘hellos’ as she edged close to the body and it was a mixture of relief and anxiousness in seeing it was a small boy. She knelt over him, forgetting anything but her plight and motherly instincts and tried to speak. The boy saw her face in a blurred image of a disrupted television signal, first she was a clear faced angle, then a dark witch, then just snow as the rain snook into his eyes. Once again he lost consciousness. These were days long before mobile phones and it was a good ten-minute further to the houses, of which the woman’s premises was on the very edge. There was no chance an ambulance could reach any nearer than that and it is not clear how the woman – though I would suspect it was with some subhuman strength of womanhood such as described in those exotic stories where mothers lift cars or fight alligators to save their children – managed to carry the boy up hill, in wet conditions to her home.
For a few years in her youth Maud had been an assistant to the elderly and although was by no means a nurse, knew enough about the human body to determine the boy’s body wasn’t fatally damaged. What worried her the most was the threat of pneumonia for she had no idea how long the boy had been out in the cold. Upon entering the house, she flung off the nuisance shoes and placed him gently into the battered armchair beside the fire. It still had some embers from its morning burn and she frantically tore pages from the local newspapers, scrunched into balls and built them on the embers until, with the help of a firelighter, the fireplace was ablaze. It would be a quick burn however and she used the time methodically, removing the boys clothes starting with his socks and shoes. She noticed with a wince several bruises and lacerations to his skin, but ploughed on like wartime medic keeping her eyes fixed on the towel as she padded him dry, then edging the elastic gently from her pyjamas, rolling them up where they stretched far beyond his feet and hands. She placed a dry gown over his shoulders and while the kettle boiled for a hot water bottle to place at his feet, build sticks into wigwams in the now-subdued fireplace, waiting for them to dance in flame then lift tiny shovels full of coal on top.
Her tasks complete she settled into the settee and practically fell asleep herself were it not for the hoot of the kettle. She allowed herself an earl grey and sat with a Hob Nob staring at the clock. It was half-past six. The boy was sleeping peacefully.
She told herself it was too late to call an ambulance, as if they closed at five like the grocers shop, but the truth was that Maud was in every way exhausted. She would take the boy to the police in the morning and with this thought carried the bundle of bloodied, torn and muddied clothes to the washing machine shaking her head at the state of them but could barely take to boy to the station coiffed in women’s nightware. By seven o clock she could no longer use the boy as a barrier to her emotions and gave in to the grief she was unable to express at the morning’s funeral. Her tears drown her to sleep.

To be continued ...