One

At the first piercing sound of Augustus’ cry Sally became instantly awake. She was still in his room, fully dressed in her old tracksuit. Her back ached from sleeping upright in a chair.

“There, there, sh sh, Mummy’s here” she cooed. Baby Augie smiled and dribbled as Sally picked him up. She rocked slowly in her arms until he fell back to sleep. How much longer would she be able to do this she wondered to herself? He was a brave little boy but Ewing’s sarcoma was painful and without the proper treatment Augie would not grow. He would never run in the park, nor swim in the sea. If only he could have the Laziger treatment, but the Health Service would not provide this on grounds of cost. She had pleaded, but they were implacable. The only place was New York, and it would cost, and cost big and they didn’t even have the air fare.

Sally tiptoed into bed. She desperately did not want to wake her husband Jack’s shift at the bar had ended at eleven and he needed to be up at six to get ready for his day job at Hazzard’s Engineering. And so she lay there, in the stillness of a May night unable to sleep, worrying about her son Augustus. She knew that if only they had the money he could live a normal life. But how could they get it. They’d done all they could, written to MPs, councillors, even the Prime Minister, but all had sent a perfectly polite reply that reading between the lines said go away. Then she had tried the charity route, there was no charity devoted to Ewing’s sarcoma so they had started one. Fund raising was slow. It was dog eat dog in the charity world.

They’d soon found charity cake stalls were a thing of the past. Extreme stunts were all that anyone noticed. Her husband Jack had screwed his courage to the sticking post and performed a parachute jump. His bravery had raised a thousand - just. Sally had entered the London marathon but sponsorship was as slow as her training. According to the schedule sent with her acknowledgment of application she should be on twenty miles a week by now.

She had hoped that publicity would be the key, and had expected an inrush of funds when the local newspaper took up her cause. The longed for flood was a trickle in a dry summer stream. It had led, however, to a plug on the regional news bulletin. Sally had thought they were making an hour long documentary given the amount of time they had spent filming. They had tracked her all day from waving Jack off to work, to the presentation of a cheque at his work for his brave parachute jump. It was finally aired last Thursday, a ten minute rush through her packed, mundane daily life culminating in her bent double in the park gasping for breath at the end of her marathon training.

“I’ll do anything” she had panted. Unfortunately she couldn’t think of anything more, and although it been a tidy fill up to her marathon sponsorship, meaning she couldn’t back out now, there was a gap as wide as the broad Atlantic they wanted to cross in funding.

“I’ll do anything” she thought as she drifted off to sleep. Words that were very soon to come back to haunt her.