Little explanation here. I had to use some given words twice and in different contexts. The words were: wave, exhaust, cream, surround, cement & pearl. This was for Portsmouth Uni, but I didn’t go there as the big smoke was too much of a lure. So here it is!

“Wave to the cars, Graham.” His mother said to him. “Don’t breathe in the exhaust fumes Graham, they’ll kill you.” “Don’t add so much cream, Graham.” He always grew distant in his hearing when she spoke in that tone, slowly fading her out and replacing her moaning with a song in his head. Usually the last thing he heard on the radio would surround his senses. He never understood that. How the song would cement itself in his head. Her mouth would move and the words would be silent. The pearl jewellery would jangle from her earlobes as her jaw moved more and more furiously as she realised he wasn’t listening. He would be sent to his room and there he would think of all the things he could do when he was older. Get a car, move out of the house and travel away. Just to escape the whining. Eventually he did of course. She would phone after he moved out and he could just imagine her face over the phone as he continued to ignore her, staring at the non-intrusive cream wallpaper he had decorated with. Feeling fulfilled with all the expensive things that money could buy. Surround sound system, widescreen television, lava lamp. He always wanted a lava lamp, but his mother would never let him have one. Now he had one in the cement covered inner-city building where he had decided to make his home. His mother would never come to visit of course. She hated trains. She was always disturbed by the wave upon wave of faceless people milling around aimlessly without any great purpose. Graham would try to make her visit but she would exhaust all the options until he gave in and went to see her. Then he would sit there whilst she whittled on about this and that. Who did what and why they did it. What was on the television that night. Nothing changed and he longed to be away from her again. It’s almost fitting, he thought to himself, that in the end he would be alone with her. Just the two of them with no one else. He drowned out all the sounds again. Except this time there were no songs. Nothing at all except silence. Horror of what he had taken for granted all this time. “Pearl Smith.” He said out loud. “Mother of one, lover of all.” He chose the words without any thought but seeing them in stone hit it home that she was the best thing that happened to him. With a little bit of shame and apprehension, he turned away from the gravestone and walked away and waved at the cars parked by the church. Just like she told him to.