Tag: grief

Categories
Flash fiction

A mule called Dave

The priest hadn’t looked them in the eye. He sips his drink alone at the wake, the wine staining his lips a maudlin puce. Afterwards, Beth doesn’t talk to him for two years. Or more. Not one word. On good days she makes a sound. A cough. An intake of breath. A tut. These days are so rare that he takes a note of them, pressing a pencil mark on the calendar he got from the local garage on the kitchen wall.  Mostly they live in their separate rooms in their separate beds in a dark trembling silence. A silence not broken until the circus comes to town. He’s handed a leaflet in the post office queue, queuing to pay the television licence for the TV they never watch, the radio they never listen to. He goes twice for the tarot card readings in the caravan behind the big tent. The third time he returns home with her twins. Later, when he tries to return the twins, the circus has gone. Only a mule remains, tethered to the sign that says no ball games here. He returns home with the mule and the twins. He names the mule Dave. The twins he never names, can never decide, so opts instead for One and Two. Does Beth name them? Eventually. Perhaps. He doesn’t know.  He can no longer hear. He’s lost the ability to make out words. You could ask Beth. That is, if you could find her. If anyone knew where to find her and him and a mule called Dave and the stolen twins. 

Categories
exercise poetry

Sentenced

Connecting birds, he thinks she said, saying it was all connections, not that he feels selected, not with that bruised feeling not the healing he hopes for, but that said, they have this something this voluminous vertiginous fissure of affliction that keeps them both distant and entwined, only she is distant and he, tall and abrasive for his age, connected to her by a ravelled thread a reckoning a blessing almost, he alone is entwined in the ribbons of her, tangled up in the fantasy of her as someone else entirely, nonetheless she isn’t rude doesn’t slap him down not in public at least, whereas in the bathroom (him naked her naked) the way her lip curls as a parcel bow scissored is no gift, he knows, no sirree, he knows as well as anyone else she blames herself as he blames himself, his lame attempt to take the shame, drape himself in it, a cloak of disgrace his just desserts, but then it isn’t him that’s dead but Sonny, Sonny the name that shall not be mentioned, even the shrine on the kitchen cabinet bears no plaque no card no image no black rimmed lettering, just a violet jittery candle with a flame that will not rest, of course back in the day grief tore couples apart, too, split them asunder, an axe through a log, a fish eviscerated, and so he reminisces (eyes half closed) about the old days the gold gays of obtuse rainbows of crocks of bold and he would (if he only could be arsed), compare them historically to those couples who stayed the course despite the odds, although this may not be true for the Mr and Mrs whose fox cub went under a steam train, or the Mr and Mrs whose dachshund went poof! in a cloud of ash, remember spontaneous combustion? he does she doesn’t, conversely she believes in fairies, the gossamer kind all lace and no snickers, and somehow her naive notion of elfin folk ignites their furious disagreements about communists (there isn’t much left not even righteous left between them now), by the same token they split the electricity bill forty sixty he paying sixty what with being taller and more abrasive for his age, correspondingly she rinses forty sixty of the dishes, her slavish desire for cleanliness fractured by her fury over his height his slights the way he picks his teeth with the cherub handled olive pick and Sonny not even cold in his grave.

Categories
blog diary memoir

Both Sides Now (2)

You leave your family wedding ring in my jewellery box. I find it when I find the courage to return to our flat. Not straight away. Why would I look in the jewellery box? I can barely choose clothes never mind trinkets. The ring is tucked deep into the green velvet slot with my other rings. I tell your father. Your father asks for it back.

I don’t protest.

I see you for the last time in the Indian restaurant. You are shade and blur and long woollen sleeves curling your fingers. Your knuckles are tight on the pen. You sign a cheque for the meal and leave. There has been an argument. About what? Kristine follows you out. Let me do it, she says. Later she says you walked directly into traffic, in front of a bus. She says she pulled you back onto the pavement. You head home. We finish our meal and go home to find you.

It is too late.

You smash the flat windows from the inside and call a glazier. Is that so that I don’t find you? That he will instead? We tell ourselves that. Over and over. But we don’t know. Perhaps you smash them in anger and call the glazier to clean up the mess and then. And then. And then you make a decision. Nobody knows but you.

I want to ask Kristine about this again but Kristine is dead. She survives you by twenty-nine years.

Such different deaths.

The glazier calls the police when no one answers the door. He boards up the windows from the outside. To secure the property, he says later. I don’t remember paying the bill.

I wear the ring until I have to hand it back. I don’t recall for how many days or weeks. Twisting and wheeling. Coruscation cold in the lean October sun.

I let myself into the stair. Kristine and Simon are behind me. We are puzzled by the broken windows. We think we’ve been burgled. Our flat is the first on the left on the ground floor. The windows open directly onto the pavement. It is around nine, ten in the evening. In the stairwell, there is a policeman guarding the door. The policeman asks me who I am. Then he tells me you are dead. Not you specifically. Not your name. Rather he says ‘the bloke in there’. And he tells me how you’ve died.

Just like that. With no ceremony. I am twenty years old. Nine days away from my twenty-first. You are dead. We were in a restaurant. You were signing a cheque. There is no other way of writing this. You are dead.

It is true what they say about knees giving way.

You wear the ring and you take it off and you put it in my jewellery box.

To be continued – maybe.

If you are struggling to cope or worried about someone with suicidal thoughts, please contact the Samaritans.

Categories
blog diary

30 December, 2021

Today I saw a seal. A black labrador’s head, I thought at first. And then it bobbed, and sank, and didn’t reappear. A man further down the beach was staring at the same spot, around fifteen metres out past the wooden groyne I was perched on. He saw the seal, too. Or he was just a man standing, staring at the rippling silver steel chill of the estuary. He gave up before I did. I couldn’t let that seal get away.

Now, I check the NatureScot website. I am sure it was a harbour seal, given the description of dog-like heads. Harbour seals are more commonly found on the west coast. Here on the east coast it’s a win to see one.

The last time I saw a seal as close to the shore in Edinburgh, I was standing in my kitchen up on the fourth floor of the tenement, watching the water with my binoculars. My friend Kristine was swimming, and the seal was directly behind her. She had no idea it was there. Kristine was swimming and smiling and I wanted to shout ‘behind you, behind you.’

Are you swimming with seals when you don’t know they’re there?

Kristine and I met at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary in the mid 1980s. We were nursing students. She was compassionate, bright, and dedicated. I was indifferent, nervous, and offended by the regiment-style hierarchy in the hospital. Kristine had transferred from Inverness to Edinburgh half way through her course. The pair of us stormed the community nursing module. She played Velvet Underground’s Heroin on a small cassette player. Or maybe it was Sunday Morning. Or Venus in Furs. Either way, the class was agog, aghast. Especially the Stornaways. The Stornaways were always agog, aghast.

I did an acetate presentation about the communities living in Wester Hailes. Handed grainy black and white photographs around the class. Broken lifts. Sopping carpets. Weary women. Children on trikes. Roads with no footpaths. Vast empty carparks. Wheelchairs with broken arms. A thriving community centre with lentil soup and art classes and thick Scottish buttered rolls. I’d developed the photographs myself.

I won a prize for the Westerhails project. It was the highlight of a below average three years for me. But really, Kristine should have won.

Later she said I was the only person in the class to welcome her. I struggle to imagine that was true. What was wrong with the rest of them?

Kristine was the only friend I had who owned a car. The only friend who lived in a flat that looked like a home. With dripping candles in brass candlesticks and fairy lights wrapped around mirrors and plump cream cotton cushions and dinner parties with three courses and matching cutlery and compassion that was biblical.

Kristine was there the night my partner took his own life. She kept me above water for months, years. She was there even when she wasn’t.

As I staggered through my grief, I failed my final nursing module and had to repeat it. I was sent to work on a ward for terminally ill children. Kristine finished her training and went on to get her pelican badge (awarded to students who completed a year as a staff nurse at the Royal Infimary). I didn’t look for a post in the Infirmary and wasn’t offered one. I was scunnered.

I left nursing and went travelling. Moved to New Zealand. Went to university. Became a policy wonk at the Ministry for the Environment. Kristine wrote me neat letters with black ink on thin blue aerogrammes. One mentioned cancer. A melanoma behind her eye. I wasn’t to panic, she wrote. She’d had it removed in a specialist unit in Liverpool. Everything was fine. She kept studying. Kept training. Kept pushing herself. Community nursing. Midwifery. CPD. So much CPD.

I returned to the UK with £50 and started again. Kristine married Kenny. They settled in Pitlochry. Their home was warm and welcoming and full of friends and musicians and cases of wine and languid cheese and home-baking and bits and bobs I’d picked up round the world for her. Tibetan prayer flags. A bottle of Sikkim whisky. A brass singing bowl.

One night she texted. Do you want to see Leonard Cohen at Edinburgh Castle? I went online, she wrote, to buy a couple of tickets and thought I may as well buy eight. My treat, she said. I did and we went.

Hallelujah.

She did her Masters degree while she was working full time. She was tired. Exhausted even. She talked about leaving nursing. Aromatherapy, she said. And massage. I want to do something positive, she said. Something to make people feel good. But there were always reasons to delay the change in career.

We didn’t see each other often but when we did we hung out in book shops and bought each other treats and shouted about inequalities and how fucked up the world was. We drank bitter coffee and she chewed her thumb and she failed to give up smoking. I begged, bribed and threatened. To no avail. She went on to become the specialist palliative service manager at Cornhill Macmillan Centre in Perth. I was so proud to call her my friend.

The night she phoned me to tell me the cancer was back she was so off-hand that I thought she was talking about someone else. I had to call her back to check.

I couldn’t stop crying.

I pulled myself together and tried to give her the best of myself. Sent her soft expensive scarfs to wear during the long hours of her treatment. Stylish at all times, I wrote in the cards with the packages. I sent books that were easy to read. Poetry. And postcards from wherever I was in foreign parts. Of course the reality was that she was supporting all of us through her illness. I couldn’t imagine life without her.

She took me to Gleneagles for a spa. The staff there wouldn’t allow her to have a spa treatment because of her cancer. She didn’t argue. She just waited for me. We drank fizz and we talked about her life and her death and she was so damn pragmatic.

I visited her a few weeks before she died. Went up on the train from Edinburgh. It was a bright clear day in Pitlochry and we ate lunch outside. Salad with leaves from their garden. A glass vase of late spring flowers sat in the centre of the table. There was soup and home-made bread. She was wearing thin grey cotton shorts and a white short-sleeved blouse. She adored the sun. She was pale and puffy and smiley. We drank chilled white wine. She apologised for the cigarette, blowing her smoke away from the food. Now, she said, down to business. She had organised her memorial service (there’d be no funeral) and she gave me all my instructions. Would I speak on behalf of her friends? She’d give me the email addresses of everyone, but she didn’t want to know what they’d write. Yes, I said, of course.

Kristine died at home as she wanted on 1 July, 2014. She was fifty one. She managed every detail of her death, and every detail of the celebration of her life a week later at the Atholl Palace Hotel. I read out the tributes from her friends, and the John O’Donohue poem ‘For Friendship’ that she’d chosen.

And I read out Raymond Carver’s ‘Late Fragment’:

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth

I mostly held it together for my beloved friend.

The last text on my phone from Kristine was on 20 June, 2014. It says: Swim 🙂 – think out ‘tidal’ paths!?! Kxo

Are you swimming with seals when you don’t know they’re there?

Categories
fiction serial

The Cloud. Episode 39

1966, Sydney.

Philip’s death shunted his parents’ ages forward a decade or more. Bernadette’s fingers gnarled into the twisted uselessness of broken twigs. Her once straight back diminished to a stricken stoop. She seemed perplexed when asked a question. Bewildered by mundane tasks. She’d start and stop. Or finish then start over again. She’d leave the broom, brush end up and colonised by spiders, parked up against the mantle piece in the living room for days. Or abandon a bucket of dirty water in the middle of the kitchen until Edward would kick it over and step wet grime through the house. She’d sit in the tin bath, knees up, arms wrapped around her legs in cold shallow water until Eric, prompted by Edward, would remember to rescue her before her skin wrinkled to a shrivel.

Eric’s thick dark hair moulted into a thin white cap. He became a man with only two moods – melancholy or fury. The moods flipped as probabilistically as a spun coin. Heads for melancholy. Tails for fury. Or heads for fury. Tails for melancholy. Janet came to predict her father’s mood by the feel of the old house as it pre-empted Eric’s emotional status. It sighed and settled in sorrow. Or it was taut and crackling in anger. Even in his absence, in the long hours that Eric was out at work, the house kept the dark sentiments going.

Edward went to school, came back, and went to school. He was alone, then in a pair, and finally promoted to the most popular group of boys in the school. His leather satchel developed an uneasy rash of stickers. His skin oxidised, his hair bleached and he extended upwards beyond his father. He patted his mother’s arm, nodded to his father, and cleaned his rugby boots on the back step. He was never in the same room as Janet. He ate his meals in the back garden, or stood, tapping his foot at the kitchen door, until Janet got up to leave. On Saturdays he disappeared with a rolled up towel, a packed lunch, and his bus money, returning late in the evening with salt-slicked hair and grazes on his shins. Sharp lines separated brown skin from pale, denoting the length of both his shorts and his sleeves. One evening he turned up with a black coral necklace scooped around his neck. No one said a word.

Janet enrolled at the University of Sydney in the school of law. She would start in the following February. Neither of her parents noticed the accolade that this should have brought upon the family. Nor did they notice Janet’s sudden switch in interest from English literature to the legal profession. In the meantime Janet searched through the classified ads for an admin job in a criminal law office. Two months after her arrival in Sydney, she would pull on a smart blue skirt, tie her hair back into a sharp tight pony-tail, and start her new role for Mr Shepherd LL.B.

The new arrivals had, like all new arrivals, attracted attention in Macaulay Road. Did the neighbours know about the Waters’ bereavement? If so, they kept schtoom. And if so, they behaved magnanimously. (Or they held a dark fascination for the horror the family was suffering and they wanted to get in closer to have a dig around in the misery.) Grief is not a social butterfly. It isn’t invited to dinner parties or trips to the zoo, or a family day out to Manly Beach. And if, on occasion, grief is invited to these events, it declines through reticence or silence.

So the neighbours in Macaulay Road, despite their unswerving and collective efforts, didn’t manage to get over the Waters’ doorstep for months. Instead they left entreaties just inside the garden gate. A passion fruit pavlova in a Tupperware box. A small rubber plant in a large hand-painted terracotta pot. Pretty white crocheted doilies with dinky weights on the corners to keep the flies off food. Handwritten cards in smudged ink with telephone numbers and invitations to barbecues. Janet would rescue these offerings and dump them on the kitchen table. A day or two later her father would caress the objects with both hands before standing up and dropping them silently into the bin.

The Inspector was the only person to visit the family in its first season of mourning. His visits were initially regular, and greeted with angry questions from Eric and pleas for further investigation from Bernadette. Did the Inspector obfuscate? Perhaps. He mentioned the coroner. The lack of a body. The complexities of the law of the sea. Maybe there’d be an inquest. Maybe not. He was working on it. He’d wipe his brow down with a cotton handkerchief and Janet would bring him a glass of cold water. Sometimes she let her hand brush over his. And sometimes his pinky would move just enough for Janet to pinken in the cool glum of the kitchen and hold out hope that something more than the rub of a finger would be forthcoming.

To be continued.

Categories
memoir poetry

Broxburn Born and Bred

My name is Gordito and a woman buys me from a farmer for a fiver. To save him the effort of drowning she says. Then she puts me on Gumtree for forty quid.

My name is Gordito and I am tapped poked stroked. I am up and then I am down and then I am spun and then it is dark.

My name is Gordito and I am boxed up in Broxburn.  I am the cargo in city car club. That makes me right on. Rescued from the Bronx with my pox in a box.

My name is Gordito and I have developmental issues. I overshoot the litter tray. I jump and miss. The ball. The fly. The moth. I vomit hairballs onto the only white mat. I am two weeks behind and I never catch up. Ever.

My name is Gordito and everything is black and white. I see colours but I can’t name them. The worms did that. Squirrelled into my brain and ate up too many words. Words for wine or a sweater or the cushion I’m allowed to scratch.

My name is Gordito and I want for nothing. My whiskers are white and my paws are black and I try, every evening, to catch the tip of my tail. Sometimes I look in a mirror and I see nothing. Nothing I understand at all.

My name is Gordito and I am very soft. Soft in the belly and soft in the head. Humans bury their face in the warmth of my underhang. Sometimes they cry. I like that. A lot.

My name is Gordito and I lie lengthways along the radiator. Always the one way. Never the other. Always in winter. Never in summer. I’m not stupid you know.

My name is Gordito and I have cancer. It grows on my back like a great round stone. It makes me run like a fool. I can still jump up, though. That’s the test.

My name is Gordito and if you look into my eyes all you will see is love. Nothing else. I am pure. And I am stupid. And I am here only for you.

My name is Gordito and the children pat my ashes into the deep square hole for the sapling. The children are serious. Now they know about death. This is my proudest achievement.

Categories
fiction serial

The Cloud. Episode 37

1966, Sydney

It’s not easy to sleep on your first night in an old house in a new country on the wrong side of the world on the back of the death of your brother.

When your living brother, snoring softly up the hallway, knows you’re a murderer.

When your parents, still whispering and snuffling on the pining wooden chairs in the kitchen, wouldn’t use the actual word murder but you’re sure they’re sure you had something to do with it.

When the cicadas outside are thrumming your brother’s name.

When the large spider on the naked white wall is scuttling out his initials P.O.W.

When the night scent of the garden flowers is bristling the bitter sweet of funeral laurels through the fly screen.

When there should have been five in the new old house and now there are four.

When one small brown leather suitcase remains conspicuously unopened and unpacked just outside your door.

When some bird has cocked up the dawn chorus and has ramped up a solo so euphoric, so ecstatic, that it could bring a whole congregation to its knees.

When it’s your first night on dry land in six weeks and your bed, with its pre-slumped mattress, pitches and shakes and fouls your stomach until you’re retching into your pillow.

When you ache for the night to keep on going but the moon is already sweeping into its dying arc and cold white light is readying itself to turn warm golden rose.

When the sweat is weeping down your back and across your buttocks and you’re so so thirsty but you don’t know if the water out of the tap is safe to drink.

When you plot escape plan after escape plan, each more outlandish than the last, until you remember you have no money.

When you want the water out of the tap to be mephitic and pestilential, and you see yourself standing in the dark in a long white nightdress, gulping down glassful after glassful.  

When you draft the first family breakfast scene in your head and you try every which way to change the chronicle but there’s no way that you can stop your father throwing you out into the street before you’ve even had your toast.

When the mantel clock, brought by your mother on a whim in her hand luggage, is so upset by the epic nature of its journey, that it chimes four then three then two then one.

When every creak is the footstep of a passing ghoul.

When your sheets, too white and starched stiff, crab and scuttle with every toss and turn.

When the whine and buzz of a mosquito becomes a sharp angry welt on the side of your neck. And then again between your breasts. And then again on your cheek.

The night was long, and when Janet finally came to in the dim grim of the morning, Philip was still dead and nothing had changed. Nothing had changed at all.

To be continued.

Categories
fiction serial

The Cloud. Episode 29

1966. On board the SS Himalaya

It was a mid-afternoon in late October when the ship baulked and kicked and snorted its way into the dock in Sydney Harbour. A great throng of swans were gathered along the pier to meet it, their long white necks swaying in the hot sun. Some of the swans were waving paper streamers or balloons. Others were cheering. Many held pieces of cardboard taped to sticks with names written out in clumsy red or black felt-tip pen. Janet, leaning against the railings with the cat in her arms, blinked and looked again. How stupid. They weren’t swans at all, but the elegant white-gloved arms of women waving a welcome to the passengers.

The ship’s tannoy coughed into life. Welcome to Sydney, folks. Welcome to your new lives. There were further instructions about disembarking. About immigration. About how to collect luggage. But Janet didn’t absorb the detail. She was looking at two men on the pier who didn’t fit in with the gay cheerfulness of the crowds. Janet was sure they were policemen – black uniforms, black hats, aloof somehow, standing solid, their legs slightly apart. Were they here for her? Did they know? Had whoever been with Philip that night dobbed her in after all?

The cat, clearly irritated by the new tightness of Janet’s grip, wriggled free, jumped down and walked through the crowds of passengers towards the dining saloon. Janet struggled through the milling people, trying to follow it. ‘Hetty, Hetty,’ she called. But the cat’s ramrod tail disappeared through the legs of an elderly woman who was doubled over, stuffing a half-eaten packet of biscuits into a basket.

‘You can’t take it anyway. It’s not yours.’ Edward’s voice was at her shoulder. ‘Dad says you’ve to come down to the cabin. Now. We’re waiting’.  Janet looked at the old woman again. She was upright now, the wicker basket slung across her arm. There was no sign of the cat.

‘I don’t want to,’ Janet said. ‘I don’t want to live here.’ Edward looked at his elder sister. His expression wasn’t kind. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Dad said it would take hours if we don’t go now.’

Janet wanted to ask him to look at the men in black. To ask what he thought of them. She needed someone else’s opinion. Bessie would have known. Would have figured out their posture. What they were up to. Bessie had always been able to read people. Especially men. But Bessie was back in Edinburgh. Just started at art college. And Janet was certain she’d never see her best friend again.

‘I can’t,’ she said to Edward. ‘I want to go home.’ Edward’s mouth crumpled. His cheeks reddened. ‘Stop messing about,’ he said. He grabbed her arm and pulled her towards him. Janet shook him off. The slap was sudden, flat and ferocious. Janet staggered backwards, bumping into a man with a toddler in his arms. The toddler howled. Her cheek stung and tears bled from her right eye. ‘Dad should have done that to you,’ said Edward, his fists clenched by his side. ‘But he didn’t have the guts.’

Two hours later, the family, four instead of five, walked down the covered gangplank. Janet’s father was at the front. Janet took up the rear. They were intercepted by two police officers just as Janet’s feet landed on Australia.

To be continued.

Categories
fiction serial

The Cloud. Episode 27

1966. On board the SS Himalaya

The angst that hung around Janet’s family on the rest of the journey was akin to a plague. The day after the remembrance service, the Chief Steward had offered them a larger cabin, a suite, where, he said ‘they could be together, be more private.’ Janet knew it was nothing to do with that, that they were being sequestered away, banished from the other passengers to prevent contamination.

The new cabin had a double bed for her parents, a living area with a small built in sofa and two chairs, and two bunks set back in a private alcove by the bathroom door. The bunks were for her and her brother Edward. They moved in late in the afternoon, parents first, then Janet, with Edward an hour or so behind. Edward came into the cabin red-faced, carrying his own, and Philip’s, luggage. He shoved Philip’s things into the narrow wardrobe, threw his camera equipment in on top of it and slammed the door.

‘You were the last person to see him alive,’ Edward hissed at Janet as he climbed up onto the top bunk. ‘You must have had something to do with it.’ Janet rolled onto her stomach on the lower bunk and put her pillow over her head. Why had Philip had to sit up on the railing? It was his own bloody fault. She sobbed into the hard starch of the white cotton sheet. The pain in her chest was visceral, septic. It bullied her breathing into short sharp gasps. It peeled through layer after layer of her thoughts until only the cold, hard truth lay open and bare, exposed, a naked cadaver on a shining steel tray.

Grief skewered the family into the semblance of a routine. Janet’s father could do little but pace and weep and pace. His face changed shape, thinning and lengthening until he took on the look of an elderly rickety horse. He did manage to take charge of the basics. Opened the door for their room service. Tipped the waiter. Put the dirty plates outside their cabin door to be collected. Every evening he’d put on his jacket and leave the cabin at nine o’clock. He’d come back ninety minutes later smelling of smoke and diesel and whisky and something that might have been boiled potato. Janet, watching him go into the tiny bathroom from under her blanket, would see that his fingers were oily black and grease-stained. No one ever asked him where he’d been or why.

Janet’s mother spun herself into a mute cocoon. She trembled under the husk of her silence and, for most of each day, stood with the stain of her face pressed to the glass of their large porthole. After two or three days of staring, Bernadette developed conjunctivitis and the ship’s nurse would come twice a day, pat her trembling arm and administer eye drops. And, as soon as the nurse had left, Bernadette would be back at the porthole again. Janet wanted to tell her it was no good, it was too late, what was the point of all that staring out to sea, Philip was long gone and she, her mother, would end up going blind and then they’d all be even worse off. But Janet didn’t say anything. Couldn’t risk opening her mouth. Couldn’t let the truth bubble to the surface and gurgle out.

Twice Janet went looking for Angus. Once she thought she saw his back disappearing at the end of a corridor and she’d rushed after him, turned the corner, only to see one of the cleaning crew pushing a large trolley stacked with stiff white linen and navy blue towels. On the second trip, tiptoeing through the areas reserved for the crew, she came across a cat. She was bent over stroking its head, smiling at the arch of its back, when a man in overalls emerged from a metal hatch just in front of her. Janet pulled her hand up and leant back against the wall to let the man past. Waited for the man to tell her off. But the man turned to her and looked her up and down.

‘Hello,’ he said. You must be the Waters girl?’

‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘I am.’

‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘We did everything we could.’ He looked down at the cat that was curving in and around Janet’s legs. ‘Do you like cats?’ Janet nodded. ‘Well,’ he said, picking the cat up, ‘we’re still ten days from Sydney.’ He cradled the cat on its back in both arms. ‘Why don’t you hang on to her until then.’ Janet shook her head. ‘I couldn’t…’ The man interrupted her. ‘Of course you could. She loves company. She doesn’t get enough down here.’ Janet put her hand out and stroked the cat’s belly. The cat lay docile, its front paws massaging the air. ‘What’s her name,’ she asked. ‘Hettie, the man said, passing the cat over to Janet. ‘Take her now and I’ll be up later with some food for her.’

Janet walked slowly back up the steps and along the corridors with Hettie lying in her arms. The cat was soft and doll-like. Janet had never known a cat like it. The cats at her Pop George’s cottage were fierce and untouchable. They spat and ran and clawed and ran again. She’d never even been able to stroke one let alone cuddle one like this. She put her face down to the cat’s nose. Let its whiskers tickle her cheeks. The cat stared, unblinking, and purred. For a moment, perhaps even a couple of seconds, Janet forgot about Philip, forgot about Angus, forgot about her accusing brother and her grieving parents. Forgot even that she, a felon, was on her way to Australia. She only had eyes for the cat.

To be continued.

Categories
memoir poetry

Kristine

Your death sat between us

Dead centre on the table

Flanked by the Pinot Grigio and a tossed salad

Spoken of like a coffee morning or a game of whist

..

You were wearing shorts

I’d laughed and you laughed with me

You wanted the sun on your skin

No one could deny you that

..

You fluttered away in early summer

An autumn leaf blown off course

A bird lifting off from the wire

A rare moth swallowed by the dawn

..

There was a celebration of your life

Your plan, your day

My words the frantic swarm of sanderlings

Jostled by waves on the incoming tide

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