Saturday Sample: Something Hidden by Sarah Hegarty, summer wine

(The winner of our 2011 Short Story Competition) 

 

For Fiona                               

                          

“I know what we need,” Max said, striding on to the patio one Friday evening in late July.

Lorna hadn’t heard him come through the house. She had been listening for a different sound. 

She peered out from under the parasol, flinching at the heat. Max’s tie was undone, his greying hair flat with sweat, face flushed from the commuter train. Sun caught the beer glass in his hand. He smiled, and raised the glass at her, and Lorna saw an actor in a silent film, tightrope sliding under his polished shoes, the street falling away below.

Before he could explain what they needed, Max went back inside.

On the old wooden table the tub of ice cream Lorna and Toby had been sharing had turned to soup. All afternoon, until he’d gone in to watch TV, they’d been playing  Snap. At times it had been as much as Lorna could do to lift a card and lay it on the wobbling pile. Stealing under the parasol the heat had butted up against her, nosing and insistent, like a badly-trained old dog,  sniffing at the secret of her, hidden under her clothes.

She heard Max open the kitchen cupboard, and the chink of pudding bowls. But he must have thought better of it because he returned with only a packet of wet wipes, which he put next to her. Then he dragged over a fold-up chair.

“Sea air!” he said, as if he’d just invented it.

Lorna thought of consumptive Victorians trailing up and down promenades. She lifted her thin cotton dress away from her sweaty stomach.

“A change of scene would do you good,” Max added. 

 She tried not to hear the criticism in his words. Her mother had told her she needed to pull herself together. They shouldn’t have left it so late – seven years was too big a gap.  She was lucky to have the summer holidays off; she’d be fine by the start of term. 

“Where would we go?” she asked. The cramped, airless house was suddenly a haven.

“Rich said we could have his place in Devon.” Max touched her elbow. “Do you remember? We went there once, before Toby was born.”

 Lorna felt her throat constrict. “Great,” she said.  

 

On the journey, drifting in and out of sleep, Lorna tried and failed to picture the cottage. Max had said nothing more about their previous visit, and she couldn’t remember a time when their days had been as free and weightless, the space between them full of promise.   

 Max drove into a narrow lane. The car brushed the overgrown hedgerow, shaking butterflies from the dog roses and wild clematis. At the end of the lane was the cottage, its windows gold in the evening sun. Lorna didn’t recognise it.

 “We’re here!” Toby was scrambling out of his seat before Max had pulled up the handbrake.

Lorna pushed open the car door and hot air slid in. Barefoot, she stepped onto the scorched grass.  

“It’s wonderful here if you get the weather,” Max kept saying.

His skin turned red-brown. Toby’s face bloomed with freckles. Lorna dozed in the shade. Her limbs were soft, liquid. The books she had brought to read lay untouched in a stack by the bed, in the room under the eaves.

Exhausted by the sea air, calmed by the cool evenings, Toby went to bed each night without protest. Max and Lorna sat in the small sitting room, under the dull yellow glow of the standard lamp, watching TV.

In the wide, cold bed Lorna let Max hold her, and tried to feel comforted.   

 

At the supermarket on the other side of the estuary Max bought a hammock, which he strung between the apple trees in the small garden. Lorna understood it was to contain her. Wordlessly, they had settled into a routine. In the mornings they played with Toby: cards, or board games whose rules eluded her. In the afternoons Max and Toby went out.  

  “We’ll leave you to rest,” Max said, backing out of the gate.

  She wanted to tell him the garden was far from restful: the heavy air was never still. Bees and wasps harassed her; swallows lined up on the telephone wire opposite, mocking her by their sheer numbers; butterflies batted the windowpanes, blundering their way inside. Above the trees, on the hill behind the cottage, a pair of buzzards circled and hung, pulled together and apart like magnets. 

Lorna watched the buzzards until her eyes could barely make them out, until she saw them behind her eyelids. In the drift and swoop of their bodies she sensed a shared tenderness, something hidden, protected. She imagined the stretch of feathers as they took off, the lift of air under their wings.

 

One afternoon she woke, lurching from sleep, her dream clinging. The sense of the child had been vivid: skin against skin; a smell of milk. And a caress: delicate and light as air.

Slowly she remembered where she was. She felt the hammock under her, the warm air, heavy on her skin. But something had changed. A pulse beat in her throat.

She got up and wandered into the cool of the kitchen. The clock said three. Max and Toby would be out until five. She trailed up the twisting stairs, the dark wooden beams low over her head. The back of her neck, her underarms, even the backs of her knees were sticky with sweat. She peeled off her clothes. Heart pounding she twisted in front of the old, spotted mirror, straining to see her shoulder blades. She stretched her fingers up her back as far as she could, fingertips probing. There was no doubt.  

 

When Max and Toby returned Lorna was back in her hammock, in the shade, a sundress covering her secret. Toby went indoors to watch TV and Max brought her a glass of wine and a small pottery bowl of olives.   

“It’s so peaceful here.” He sat down next to her, slopping his beer on the ground. He shaded his eyes and looked up at the hill. “I hope – are you glad we came?”

The buzzards were back, circling over the trees. Lorna pressed her shoulders into the hammock.

“Sure.” Soft, cool air flowed under her arms.   

 “It was a good idea to come, wasn’t it?”

     She heard the plea in his voice. “Yes. I love the – space.”

“Toby – I think – he was worried about you. Well – we both were.” Max reached across and patted her wrist.

“I know.” She kicked the tree with her bare foot to make the hammock swing. She didn’t look at him.

 “Lorna.”

  “Mmm?” The buzzards approached each other then veered away.

  “We can try again, you know. I mean, if – when you’re up to it.”

  She needed him to go back inside the house.

  “Lorna?” Max stretched out of his seat to peer under her sunhat. She almost expected him to lift her sunglasses.

  “I’ve changed, Max.” She kept her gaze on the hill.

  “Of course you have. We all have.”

 

That night Lorna flew, high up. The jet stream was a solid rush of air under her feet. On her honey-gold wings she cruised through clouds, brushing their soft edges; swooped through red-streaked sunsets. Lazily she glided above tiny hills and rivers, houses scattered below her like children’s bricks. Beside her the buzzard flew. In the curve of its wing was the small body. Lorna glimpsed dark hair.She touched the curled fist, and felt the fingers grip. In her chest her heart expanded, pushing at her ribs, bones fusing with the dream of flight.

When she grew tired she climbed onto the buzzard’s back, pressing her legs into its silky feathers. Hooking her feet under its claws she felt blood, thick and warm, against her flesh.

She woke before dawn to feel the familiar stickiness on her thighs. She had forgotten that, under her treacherous skin, the process would be starting again.

 

The heat began to ease. Max said the wind had changed. One afternoon they went out together in the car, along the coast and over a new bridge. Toby, fidgeting with excitement in the back, kept pointing things out: a field of jostling sheep, or an oddly-shaped cloud. Lorna sat in the front next to Max, a cushion behind her shoulders.

On the way back, three paragliders were drifting in the early evening sky.

“It must be great, to fly by yourself,” Toby said.

Lorna’s heart snagged on his words.: Instantly she saw the neat fields, far below; felt the rush of air under her arms. 

“They don’t do it by themselves, son.” Max raised his voice above the engine noise. “They’re towed up to high ground by a big car, like a Land Rover, then they let go.”

“Oh.”

 Lorna heard Toby’s disappointment. “But they still fly, Max!”

 

Back at the cottage Lorna hesitated in the garden. Excitement fluttered in her chest. She whispered to Toby.

 “Yes!” he shouted. 

Max, fiddling with the door key, turned round. “What is it?”

 “We’re going to do a project. Before supper.” Lorna indicated the garden. “It’ll be light for ages yet. It’s a shame to go in.”

Toby ran round the lawn whooping, “Hurray, hurray, hurray!”

Max walked towards her, relief on his face. This was the old Lorna: in the school holidays she and Toby were always making things. Max had often come home from work to find the kitchen table covered in cardboard, newspaper and paint. He used to complain it felt like sitting in her classroom – all they needed were the small chairs.

He grinned. “What’s your project?”

“That would be telling, wouldn’t it?” Lorna looked at him, daring him to meet her gaze.   

He looked away. “Great! I’ll get on with supper then.”

Lorna and Toby worked in the garden. When she sent Toby back inside for scissors and sticky tape, Lorna saw Max’s shadow jerk away from the kitchen window.

The light was fading by the time she went to tell him they were ready. He was flapping a wet cloth across the stove, mopping up water from the saucepan of pasta boiling over on the ring.

She led him round the side of the house. “Toby, we’re coming!”

They emerged onto the empty lawn and stood awkwardly, side by side. The edges of the garden were in darkness now; moths came at them haphazardly, seeking the lit windows.

After a few seconds Max muttered, “Where the hell is he?” Then, “Toby!” he yelled, “Toby! Where are you?”

Out of the bushes a figure ran straight at them. Dark, ragged shapes jostled and floated round it. Max gasped. Lorna screamed delightedly. Toby was naked, his pale skin smeared with dirt. Feathers sprouted from his back and shoulders. More feathers were stuck in his hair.

He circled the lawn twice, flapping his arms. “Crrrrrk! Crrrrrk!”

“Yes! Yes!” Lorna laughed and clapped.

Max stood still. “What – what is this?”

Toby stopped in front of them, panting.

Lorna noticed that all her efforts had not managed to make the feathers – her whole collection – match: Toby had been too fidgety. She hoped Max wouldn’t point that out. “What do you think? Do you like it?”

“Like it? What have you done? How – Toby, turn round.”

Max steered the child into the light from the porch. Under the layered sticky tape holding the feathers in place, Toby’s skin was streaked with blood. Max pulled up a length of tape and the boy cried out. Max examined his son’s flesh.

“These are puncture marks.” He whipped round. “Lorna! Surely – surely you didn’t ––”  

“It’s all right, Dad!” Toby hopped between them, shivering. “It didn’t really hurt.” His eyes glistened.

Lorna turned on Max. “It was our project! Why do you have to spoil everything?”

“These things are filthy! They’re covered in fleas! Stand still, Toby. I’ll try not to hurt you.” Max ripped off the tape.

 Toby winced and squealed, crying now. Feathers fluttered to the ground. Lorna scrabbled to catch them but Max was faster. Crushing the sticky bundles he gathered them up, strode to the back door and stuffed them in the bin.

“Toby, come in and get in the bath. I’ll find some antiseptic.” Max ushered the boy indoors.

Lorna lifted the lid on the bin. She tried pulling the feathers from the sticky tape but they were ruined.

 

Lorna slipped out of bed and padded to the window. She pulled back the thin curtains and climbed onto the window sill, the old stone cool beneath her feet. Naked she crouched, knees against her chest, watching the dark slope of the hill. In a few hours the sky would lighten and the buzzards would be back. Through the open window the night air was silky as feathers. She yearned for the feeling of flight. She knew that in another life, an older life, she had been able to soar.

“Lorna!” Max’s voice startled her. He draped his dressing gown round her shoulders. “What are you doing? Come back to bed.”

 

“Only two more days!” Max sounded relieved. He was making breakfast for them all in the kitchen. He had insisted Lorna get up to eat with them. Since the incident with the feathers he had kept a close eye on her. He and Toby had stopped going out in the afternoons, too. “It’ll be good to get home again, won’t it, Tobes?” He slopped scrambled egg onto three plates.

“Yes, Dad.”

Lorna knew Toby was only saying what Max wanted to hear. And the thought of going back to the house in the sweltering suburbs, surrounded by bricks and tarmac, made her want to cry.

Max also had other plans. He had told her that she obviously couldn’t manage Toby on her own, even if she gave up her job. “We can get some help for you, when we get back,” he said. “If it’s too much for you,” he continued, hitting his stride, “we could look into boarding Toby. Just for one term, see how it goes.”

 

Lorna checked on Toby every night before she went to sleep. Sometimes, waking in the dark, she crept through the silent house to sit on the end of his bed and watch him: his smooth cheek against the pillow, eyelids fluttering in unknowable dreams. The distance between them crushed her heart.

 

That night it didn’t take much to wake him. He smiled sleepily at her. “What is it?”

“Shall we go for a secret walk?” Lorna put her finger to her lips.

She had pulled on jeans and a fleece. Now she helped him do the same. She slid his Spiderman socks onto his warm feet and stuck the Velcro across his new trainers. 

She led him down the stairs. The front door key turned easily and they stepped out into the shadowy garden.

The full moon watched them through fingers of cloud.

“Look,” she showed him. She wanted him to see everything in her world, all the things Max never saw. They set off up the lane, snails crunching under their feet.

“Where are we going?” Toby whispered.

“On an adventure,” Lorna said.

 “Yes!” He jumped up and down.

 “Sssh,” she reminded him.

He slipped his hand through hers, and she gripped it like a charm.

There was a stile at the end of the lane. Lorna went over first then helped Toby. Beyond the stile the path rose steeply through bracken, pale and flat-looking in the moonlight. She walked in front. When Toby stumbled on a root, or was surprised by springing leaves, she turned round to him. Each time she looked at him her heart leapt. They climbed in silence. The slope made them breathless.

Near the top, the path led into the windblown trees. Toby asked, “Are we going into the woods?”

“It’s not really a wood.” Lorna stopped. “We might see an owl. But we have to be quiet.”

Her voice sounded far away. Above here the buzzards flew, their streamlined bodies gliding through air.

The thicket was dense, the trees bent almost double by the wind off the sea. The path narrowed and they had to feel their way, ducking under branches that came at them out of the gloom.

Toby cried out: his fleece was caught. Lorna turned back to him and yanked it free. They heard the fabric tear.

“That’s my new fleece!” He sounded puzzled.

“We don’t have to worry about that!” She went to move on, but he stopped and crouched in the undergrowth.

“I can hear badgers!” 

“Badgers don’t live up here.” Lorna pressed on and Toby followed.

When they came out of the trees the wind was cold and strong. The path ran ahead then turned inland, over another stile. To their left, bracken and gorse sloped away to the cliff edge. Beyond lay the grey sea, waves breaking on black rocks. They stood watching the line of moonlight shiver on the water.

“What are we looking for?” Toby whispered.

Lorna felt the wind’s caress, stroking her limbs and tugging at her arms. She took a deep breath, filling her lungs. Her heart pushed at her ribs. Her shoulders throbbed; she glimpsed her daughter’s face.

And then, at last, above the wind she heard the child’s cry.

  “I’m coming.” She grasped Toby’s hand and stepped off the path.

  Toby said something but she couldn’t hear. He hung back, pulling on her.

  Lorna clamped her hand over his thin fingers, squeezing them. Hot, sweaty fingers, stuck to her skin. She remembered cool skin, pressed against her own; the cold hollow of her empty arms. 

  “Ow!” Toby leaned away, feet dragging, his hand pushing at hers. “Stop it! No!”

But Lorna was stronger. Gripping his wrist, she started to run.

About the auhtor

Sarah Hegarty was born in Bristol, and has an MA in Creative Writing from Chichester University. Her short fiction has been published in Mslexia, the Momaya Annual Review and placed in competitions. Two of her short stories will be published this year in Spring and Autumn anthologies from Cinnamon Press. Her first novel, The Ash Zone, won the 2011 Yeovil Literary Prize. She is one of the mentees on the 2013 Jerwood/ Arvon mentoring scheme, and is working on her second novel. She lives in Guildford with her family.  

 

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Precious by Stephen Bridger, Sauvignon Blanc,

He is as sure as any father can be that his daughter must have stolen it.

‘No, Daddy, I didn’t take it.’

Zia is nine. She doesn’t fidget or look away. Her hazel eyes are wide open, urging him to believe. And he wants to, but there’s a weird complicity here. A game she’s playing as much as he is because it has to be her. If it isn’t then he’s lost. Up until now this possession has always been a permanent fixture.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Jeffrey, you’re obsessed!’ His wife spits the last word back at him.

He knows what kind of day she has had by the way she unpeels her work shoes from her sweaty feet, or the manner in which she hugs, kisses and lifts Zia into her tired arms, or the moment she lets go and sinks, deflated into her armchair.

He boils the kettle, places the decaffeinated teabag into her favourite mug, the one with the two smiling foxes on either side.

‘I expect it’s where you left it.’ There’s a time when she would have invested more energy into her assessment of his failings. ‘Men can never find anything,’ she adds.

The Six O’clock News is about to start. When he sets her mug of tea on the trestle table beside her, she barely glances up at him.

Zia has had her dinner – two fish fingers, peas, and reheated white rice – and now sits at the kitchen table, her left leg swings like the beat of a metronome, while she chews the top of her pencil and focuses on the next sum in her arithmetic exercise book. ‘Do you need help?’ he asks.

‘No, Daddy, I don’t.’

He has already searched her school bag, the side pockets of her grey uniform, the drawers of her bedside table, under her bed, under her mattress, in her odds and bobs jars on the windowsill, in her two piggy banks and in her wardrobe with the jumble of boxes containing soft toys, dolls, miniature tea sets, spirographs, a telescope, a selection of My Little Ponys and even a pink Light Sabre which had once been her favourite thing but now sits neglected next to all the other stuff she’s outgrown.

‘They grow up fast, don’t they?’ It is one of his wife’s favourite expressions. He nods his agreement. ‘One moment they’re this high, and the next…’

Zia is their only child. He doesn’t know why his wife invokes the plural to make her point. They will never be capable of having another. One cycle of IVF paid for by the NHS and the other three are not. When Zia arrives on a frosty morning in January, they both decide she’s worth more than the sum of their disappointments. By then he can no longer work. Instead he has to battle through various assessments and appeals to claim his Personal Independence Payments. The princely sum of seventy-two pounds and sixty-five pence. Not much more than his hourly rate as a plumber, but spinal stenosis has put paid to fiddling with downpipes and u-bends.

He refuses to believe they are poor. They just have to make do with a little less. He stays at home. His wife works.

 

His father gave him the silver coin a week before he died. His voice little more than a hoarse whisper, his face emaciated, his eyes dull and lifeless. Withered fingers pressed the silver into the palm of his hand. ‘Keep it,’ his father said. ‘It’s yours now, like it was my fathers before me.’

He knows the story. They all do. Passchendaele. The third battle of Ypres. August 1917. In the trenches or some muddy hell hole, a sniper’s bullet hit his grandfather full square on the chest. He would have died save for the silver shilling within his breast pocket. The coin still bears the marks of where the bullet struck. Two millimetres – the thickness of the tarnished metal - the difference between life and death. A memento handed down from grandfather to father to son.

He wouldn’t be alive today without its protection - nor Zia - her life as much tied to her great grandfather’s coin as it is to him.

 But his wife is right. When last checked he could buy a 1916 silver shilling for barely more than the cost of a franchise latte. It shouldn’t mean anything, and yet it’s the last thing he touches when he leaves the house, and the first thing when he returns, a habit so ingrained that the next morning his fingers linger on the hallway shelf where it normally sits, and he pauses for its absence, filled with a strange foreboding.

‘Wait, Zia. Wait!’

Her hand turns the front door handle.

‘What is it, Daddy?’

‘Let’s have a mufti day,’ he says.

‘What’s that?’ Zia stands there, front door open, her tiny eyebrows squished together, frowning.

He’s as confused as she is. Maybe his mother said this once, or his grandmother. ‘It means a day where we can wear what we want, Zia. A day of….possibility.’

‘But I want to go to school.’

‘Not today. School is off. How about we watch TV, make pancakes…’

‘But I won’t see Ginni!’

‘You’ll see Ginni tomorrow.’ But he remembers tomorrow is a Saturday and she won’t and his face crumples, unsure why he is lying and why it is so important she doesn’t leave the house when it’s not raining, not even that cold. It’s the week before half-term, eight days before Halloween and all that nonsense which comes around with wearying predictability every year. It seems so fake and yet Zia loves it.

 ‘Promise?’

‘Yes, I promise,’ he replies.

While she is changing out of her uniform, he phones the school.

‘I hope she’s better soon,’ the school secretary says.

‘I’m sure she’ll be back by Monday,’ he replies.

He makes Zia a hot chocolate, and then lets her watch cartoons on the TV while he carries out another search of their house. He goes through every pocket in every trousers, even those he hasn’t worn in years. And when she tires of television, they play a game of treasure hunt – he has secreted half a dozen mini chocolate bars from a variety bag bought for the Trick Or Treaters. Zia greets each new discovery with a shriek of joy, but the only thing of importance remains unclaimed.

There’s the occasional muffled sound of sirens but no more than usual, and when he checks the local news reports there are no reported accidents. No acts of violence. Just the usual Friday morning in South London.

He is being an idiot. He has overreacted. But when Zia asks to go to the park, he says no.

‘You said we could do anything!’ Chocolate smears her lips, her left cheek, her fingers.

He wipes her protesting face with a Jay Cloth. ‘You know what, why don’t we try out your Halloween costume? We’ll surprise Mummy when  she comes home. How about that?’

This endless negotiation exhausts him, and he’s not good at it. Is he a bad father? But his doubts run deeper than making Zia stay at home when she should be at school. He loves her – of course, he does – but is that enough? He has always compared himself to others – other parents, other relatives - who laugh and chat as if this were the most natural thing in the world, but it isn’t. For him. He’s older. He walks with a stick. The spinal stenosis and surgeries have reaped their toll on his failing body. Getting anywhere takes effort, energy and will, and the supply of each is dwindling.

Sometimes he wonders whether the tension between the three of them is a product of the way Zia arrived in this world. An unnatural occurrence when nature and the natural order decreed otherwise. It’s a stupid thought, made stupider by the fact he wouldn’t have it any other way but his bond with Zia is fragile. He witnesses this fragility in a thousand ways -  and the older she gets, the more he considers that one day their connection will break and she will drift away as if there was nothing between them.

He wants her to grow up. He wants her to have the chances and choices denied to him but at the same time – and this is the contradiction he holds tightly within himself - he wants the Zia whose whole world can be encompassed by his arms. But now she has Ginni, Emma and Francine and too many others of whom he isn’t even aware of.

There is a world growing outside of him. A world he will never know. Soon she will have other friends. And boys, and what will he mean to her then? A dutiful call? A filial act of obligation?

 

His wife returns home with a plastic carrier containing a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc still cold from the supermarket refrigerator, and a party sized bag of cheese and onion crisps. She swings their daughter who is now cloaked in her witches’ garb in a wide arc around the kitchen. Zia whoops in delight, her hat flies to the floor, her feet narrowly miss the nearest of the kitchen chairs.

‘How was school today?’

‘I didn’t go to school, mummy. We had a mufti day!’

It takes a little explaining. He’ll tell the truth later.

He reheats his wife’s favourite lamb curry which they eat with rice and two different jars of shop bought chutneys. All three of them sit at the kitchen table. This is the first time they have sat together this week.

‘What are we celebrating?’ he asks when he’s pouring them both a glass of wine.

‘Oh, nothing,’ his wife replies. ‘I just thought…I deserved it.’

 

Three weeks later, Half Term and Halloween over, the coin still missing - not forgotten, but he’s learning to accept its absence as a new normal, something he will tolerate because he has no choice but to. And he has to acknowledge that despite his fears – irrational as he now admits  -  nothing bad has happened to him or Zia. ‘And nothing will,’ his wife assures him when he confesses. He expects her to laugh or scream, but instead she smiles – a weak, half smile - and places her hand on his shoulder as if he needs support. ‘I didn’t realise you were so superstitious. You didn’t think that coin was lucky, did you?’

 

Zia has written her usual wish list to a Santa whom she no longer believes in, while he accumulates the required yuletide stuff –  a snow globe (she always has a snow globe), scented candles, glittery wrapping paper, Christmas crackers – counting every penny as he negotiates needs and wants in Poundland and the Charity shops, but there is an item he cannot find – a calendar with pictures of her favourite singer from her recent world tour. It is enough to drive him half mad hunting for something which should be there but isn’t. In the end, he has to ask his wife.

‘It’s thirteen pounds and ninety-eight pence,’ she says. ‘Daylight robbery!’

‘Can I have a look?’ He holds out his hand.

She flicks her eyebrows to the heavens, but hands him her phone.

‘Do you want tea?’ She pushes herself up from her chair.

He shakes his head and scrolls. There are over 400,000 results related to her search – Amazon, Etsy, the official Taylor Swift domains and many others - but most aren’t for calendars. Many are not even related to the singer, but at the bottom of the screen there’s an offer on eBay for under a tenner. He clicks on this link, taps impatiently on the side of his chair for the site to open. It’s his wife’s eBay account. He knows it’s wrong but can not resist the opportunity to see what she last bought. Instead the screen opens at her selling history. It’s there. The King’s head in half profile, his left ear blurred and blunted from the imprint of the German bullet. George V DEI GRA: BRITT: OMNI: REX inscribed around its circumference. His silver coin. Sold for the cost of a calendar. Or a cheap bottle of wine and a packet of crisps.

He stabs at the X on the top right of the screen, places the phone on the table beside his wife’s chair and presses both his shaking hands hard into his thighs. The spinal stenosis has numbed his legs but there’s still a faint echo of pain where his fingers squeeze withered flesh.

‘Did you find a better deal?’ his wife asks on her return. One of the foxes grins at him as she places her mug on the coaster.

‘Yes,’ he replies. ‘It’s cheaper on eBay.’

‘Oh, is it? That’s good. Well, I’ll get it then, shall I?’

‘Yes, dear. If you don’t mind.’

About the author

Stephen Bridger is a former hospital doctor and a fledgling writer. 

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All Aboard by Jane Spirit, a beaker of juice

I can trace the pleasure my son is experiencing as I stroke his face. It makes me smile outwardly now that I am sure he is laughing inside, and I can be certain that I have made his day just as he has made mine. Steadying his head gently, I swish the ends of his auburn fringe just a little off his forehead to mark each circuit of the train’s wheels as they turn. It is their rhythm he is responding to, the regular beat of the steam engine as it chuffs and puffs us along towards Matlock station. I glance across at my wife who sits seemingly locked in her thoughts, dealing with her own illness, her own confusions no doubt. Our trip has been exhausting for her, the getting ready, the manoeuvring into the car, handling her sticks whist I load his wheelchair, the drive nagging at her pain levels, and then the effort of walking onto the platform and climbing onto the train and into a seat so that she can be comfortable. I concentrate on supporting Rob so that he can rest against me, almost prone on the banquette, whilst we wait for the slow beginnings of the train’s churning movement and its familiar gaining of speed.

We love this train. The effort seems nothing now that I know that Rob is happy, fulfilled, free to enjoy the moment. Of course, other people on the train stare at him briefly, out of curiosity, but it doesn’t bother him. Fellow passengers are drawn to look by the arc of bright ginger hair that frames his white face with its seemingly vacant eyes and skew-whiff expression. That eye-catching shock of red hair was not our only surprise when he was born, but we were so grateful for it. It gave us something to talk about with professionals, friends and family none of whom found it easy to address the elephantine question in the room: what kind of life would Rob have? Instead, we could diffuse the tension by making light of his looks, joking that there must have been a distant Celtic warrior somewhere amongst our ancestors. It made it easier for them to accept the accident of genetics that had delivered to us our unique, red-headed son to keep at least for a time.

We love to travel on the Thursday train. For some reason it is a busy day on the heritage line and the engine lacks the ideal power to pull the extra carriage added on to accommodate the number of passengers. Of course, they need as many of those as they can to keep the line and its volunteers in business. The engine struggles with all that extra weight of human expectation and excitement and the carriages seem to become like paper cut outs from a cartoon film, their seats moving emphatically backwards and forwards in rhythm and jerking their passengers with them. It is this repeated movement that Rob loves so much: It is his rock music, his cinema closeup, his escape into the world of his imagination if only for a few moments. We try to come each week that we can in the season.

So long as he has this, then I am content. Earlier, whilst we were waiting to board the train on the platform, a kind-faced woman had sidled up to me as I was helping Rob to drink from his juice beaker. ‘I just wanted to say,’ she had begun. As usual I had recoiled inwardly from her incipient pity, hoping that she would not go through with it, though too polite to stop her in her tracks. She hesitated as she looked at my wife and my son and then carried on: ‘What you’re doing is marvellous,’ she gushed, ‘You’re a hero in my book, the way you keep on going like this… It can’t be easy’. I tried to smile and mumbled something appreciative. Thankfully, she moved away quickly to join a friend further down the platform whilst I breathed deeply to suppress my embarrassment. After all, the woman had meant no harm by the assumptions she had made and the judgement she had passed on my situation. She simply saw a now elderly man with a wife who was barely mobile and seemed not entirely with it, and who was caring for his only son, fully grown, but whose gaunt face, wasted muscles and apparent unawareness of his surroundings suggested he might not be long for this world either.

Perhaps if I had tried to explain to her, she might have been able to understand why I am not anyone’s hero; how I am not ‘keeping going’ because I’m trying to keep up appearances or because I’m some kind of martyr keeping the faith at all costs. No, what I wanted to tell her was just how very much I enjoy my son’s company. Perhaps we cannot chat over a pint together at the pub, but he still lets me know what he thinks of me and listens to me intently when I speak with him in his way. As for my wife, well yes, I can see that she is fading, but then I find that we still share a joke, or a memory and we both smile much more than we cry together. I could not say all that to the woman on the platform of course, but the truth is that I am only ever truly happy when I am with my little family. I need them far more than they have ever needed me. I hunger for my time with them, selfish in my determination.

It is this greed that makes me savour the final stages of the train’s rattle into Matlock alongside my wife and child as I reluctantly ready myself for the end of the journey.

About the author 

Jane Spirit lives in Suffolk UK and has been inspired to write fiction by going along to her local creative writing class. 

 

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Leaving by Barry Garelick, espresso con panna

Judy was leaving soon. She was leaving San Francisco after six years there, leaving people and places behind. Jack was staying in San Francisco where he had lived for the last twenty years, though he was not unfamiliar with leaving his past behind in search of something better. They stood in the tiny kitchen of her studio apartment, wrapping the last of the glasses in newspaper.

            ‘What are you going to do when I’m gone, Jack?’

            ‘The same things I’ve always done.’

            ‘Like what?’

            ‘Talk with friends and argue with idiots.’

            ‘Sounds like a poem,’ she said.

            ‘Everything is a poem if you listen the right way.’

            She placed the box of newspaper-wrapped glasses with the other boxes in the living room-turned-obstacle course. Some were sealed, and others not. The sealed boxes she would take with her; the unsealed ones would be stored in her parents’ house in Los Angeles. Jack sat in one of the two chairs at a small table just outside the kitchen and lit a cigarette. ‘Do you think you’ll come back?’

            ‘I may, or maybe I’ll go back to LA.  Or stay in Hawaii. Or go somewhere else entirely.’ She thought a moment. ‘It depends,’ she said, as if that provided clarification.

            ‘It’s good not knowing what you’re going to do next,’ he said.

            ‘I’ll keep that in mind.’

            She snaked through the boxes over to the window that looked out onto the street and the hill beyond it, on which were more apartments and houses. Under the window was a stack of papers and notebooks which she began separating into ‘save’ and ‘discard’ piles.

             ‘Why did you choose University of Hawaii?’

            She looked at a notebook and after some hesitation put it in the discard pile. ‘I was accepted by UCLA and Hawaii. I’ve already been to UCLA so I chose Hawaii.’

            ‘Because it’s further away? Or more exotic?’

            ‘Because,’ she said showing slight irritation, ‘I liked their program in public administration. Health care planning.’

            ‘Anything with ‘planning’ in it, I don’t understand. Urban planning, this planning, that planning. What is it? What is ‘public administration’? You get to call the shots? You got tired of social work and now want to be in some lofty position and tell other people what to do?’

            ‘No. That isn’t it.’

            She would have argued with him in the past, but she wasn’t taking the bait. She’s definitely leaving, Jack thought.

            ‘Maybe I’m tired of PhD psychologists evaluating me as if they know how to do my job,’ she said. ‘I had one of them tell me I should get psychotherapy if I’m going to be in this line of work so I can better understand how to help people.’

            ‘He really said that? I would have told him to fuck off.’ When she didn’t respond, he said ‘I’m serious.’

            ‘We live in different worlds,’ she said.

            ‘We live in different parts of the same world.’

            ‘I’ll miss you, Jack.’   

            He laughed and she joined him. There then followed a long silence. They were both comfortable with silence. She continued to busy herself with her pile of notes, and then back to her boxes. Jack remained at the small table, the short stub of a lit cigarette between his lips, and removed a battered notebook from his shirt pocket and a broken pencil in desperate need of sharpening.

            He looked at Judy and wrote: ‘Leaving people …’  He couldn’t think of anything to follow, and crossed it out. Jack was one of the people she was leaving he thought, and then wrote ‘I love her. Like a sister.’ He stubbed his cigarette out in a small dish that Judy had left on the table for him to use as an ashtray.

            Judy was short and thin with dark straight hair. By her own description she had the features of a Polish person (her mother was of Polish descent) – slight bags under her eyes and high cheek bones. She was in her mid-thirties but looked to be in her twenties sometimes. Today Jack thought she looked older.

 

They met at one of Jack’s poetry readings in 1977; over the years they became friends and would get together, at her apartment, or in his hotel room, or at Old Uncle Gaylord’s Ice Cream Parlor on Market Street. She was adamant about not getting together with him for a drink at a bar.

            He made friends easily, and was a familiar sight as he walked in various neighborhoods of San Francisco (most often North Beach), smoking a cigarette, waving to those who knew him. Some of his friends he knew from his New York days, fellow poets, of whom some were well known and others, like Jack, were struggling. He would hold court in coffee houses and bars, sometimes about politics and sometimes poetry, it was hard to tell the difference at times.

            Jack was in his fifties but his white hair and the stubble on his face made him look older. His ways were familiar to Judy by now; his arguments and accusations, his anger, and self-righteousness, his drinking, betting, and confusion. He was a poet who had some published books by publishers that had long gone out of business. She had tried to help him in various aspects of his vagabond poet’s life – finding him jobs that he quickly quit, loaning him money that he never paid back, and trying with spotty success to get him help with his drinking and living situation.

            Since she and Jack first met, various conflicts of the world served as a backdrop for Jack’s thinking and rantings: Iranian protesters on the streets calling for the removal of the U.S.-placed Shah; the tensions and attacks between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel in 1978, the exile of the Shah of Iran in early 1979, the taking of U.S. hostages in Iran later that year, the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

            It was now 1981 and with Reagan’s election, the country was shifting to the right. ‘He’s out of his mind,’ she told Jack shortly after the election. ‘We might have World War Three.’ She had talked about leaving, getting away from the madness.

            ‘Where would you go?’ he had asked.

            ‘Unless I go overseas, and I don’t want to, there really isn’t any place to go. Every state voted for Reagan.’

            ‘Minnesota didn’t,’ he had said.

            ‘Too cold.’

            They both had laughed at this after which Judy had said wistfully that she felt like the country left her. ‘Even some of my friends voted for him.’

            ‘Nothing is forever," Jack had said.

Judy was now looking out the window. It would be dark in a few hours. She would be off for Los Angeles the next day, and then to Hawaii a few days after that.

            ‘What are you going to do with your car?’ he asked.

            She looked back at Jack. He knew she suspected that he wanted it, but both played it as if he didn’t. ‘I’m leaving it with my brother.’ 

            He’ll probably sell it, Jack thought.

            ‘What are you writing, Jack?’

            ‘Some ideas.’

            ‘For a poem?’

            ‘Yeah. Ideas mostly. Lines of a poem.’

            ‘A poem about what?’

            ‘I don’t know yet. Sometimes I don’t know I’ve written a poem until after a few days. The lines I thought would go in some poem actually is the poem.’

            He suspected the poem would be about leaving – and being left behind. He wondered how many lovers she had had while she lived in San Francisco. He only knew about Karl; someone he never met, but felt like he knew, like a television show or movie that mentions someone that all the characters talk about, but who is never part of the show.

            ‘You still getting postcards from Karl?’

            ‘What made you think of Karl?’

            ‘I don’t know.’ He leaned his head to one side and rested it on hand, pretending his eyes were a camera and he was making a movie. ‘You told me he writes you postcards every now and then.’

            ‘Yeah, once in a while. I got one a few months ago. He was in Germany; he sent me a card from there.’

            ‘What does he talk about? On the cards I mean.’

            ‘Not much. What he’s seen. He doesn’t ask about me. It’s like he’s writing in a diary. He wanted to go to Germany; he was fascinated by Germany. The movies coming out by these new directors.’

            She said nothing and looked down at the pile of papers and notebooks, now just whittled down to those that she decided to save.

            ‘I once saw him coming out of a movie," Judy said. 'It was during an Ozu festival. Some theater was showing all these movies by Ozu, the Japanese film-maker. It was a little after we broke up. I remember coming out of the theater.' Judy said.

            ‘What was the movie?’

            ‘I don’t remember. But we said hello, and he went on his way. A few days later I get this card from him saying how Wim Wenders was influenced by Ozu and he was saying some things about the movie we had both seen. How Ozu’s movies are all about family and their break-up.’

             ‘Does he know you’re leaving?’

            ‘I haven’t talked with him. I doubt he knows. And I’m not about to tell him.’

‘He wants to get back together with you. How long has it been? Since you two broke up?’

            ‘Jesus, Jack. It’s been two years. And it’s not like we were going together for a long time. And he’s the one who broke it off. If he wants me back, he can call me instead of sending me postcards. He knows my phone number.’

            ‘Do you want him back?’

            ‘I’m leaving, Jack.’

            She wanted him back, Jack thought. He sensed a sadness in her, though he wasn’t sure if it might by his. He thought about old lovers, and then his ex-wife, the anger, his feelings that nothing was his fault and then how everything was. There was some in-between but he could never pin it down. The break-up of families; yes, Ozu was right, and it wasn’t just a Japanese thing, he thought. He thought about his son, now a teenager, who he saw when he went down to L.A. His ex-wife tolerated his visits and he would make an effort to stop drinking for at least a week before he visited. She had moved on and married someone; a nice guy who ran his own printing business in an old area of L.A.

 

He looked down at his notebook and read what he had written a few minutes earlier. ‘You asked me what I would do when you were gone. I gave you an answer but it wasn’t a complete one. Here is the rest of it: I’ll be thinking of you. I’ll be thinking of you as I write poems, as I walk around San Francisco, go to the races, smoke cigarettes, and drink coffee in the morning. I’ll be thinking of you as I try not to get drunk, as I go to sleep somewhere, hoping I wake up the next day. I’ll be thinking of you as we try to save the world. Each in our own way.’

            He thought about giving it to her, but decided not to. It might make a good poem, he thought, but maybe not. He would read it over later. Not now. Now it was time to go. Time to leave.

            He put his notebook back in his pocket and stood up. The sun was out in the way that it sometimes emerges on overcast days – not a full commitment to sunlight, but enough.

            ‘I have to go,’ he said, heading for the door.

            ‘OK, Jack.’ She made her way through the maze of boxes to meet him at the door.

            ‘I’ll be thinking of you,’ he said.

            ‘Me too.’

            ‘Write to me,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where I’ll be living soon, but you can send it care of Caffe Trieste. They know me.’

            ‘I will.’

             ‘I’ll still be here if you decide to come back,’ he said. ‘I’m not hard to find.’

‘Goodbye, Jack.’

            ‘I love you. Like a sister.’ 

            ‘I know.’

            They hugged, and she rested her head on his shoulder.

            ‘I have to go,’ he said.

            She stood at the door and watched him start walking down the three flights of stairs. His steps echoed in a dramatic fashion as he imagined Karl’s steps had when he left Judy that last time. When Jack reached the entrance he stood, looking out and then opened the door. He walked outside and stood, waiting for the door to close behind him, and lit a cigarette. 

About the author 

 Barry Garelick has fiction published in Heimat, Cafe Lit, Ephemeras and Fiction on the Web. His non-fiction pieces have been published in Atlantic, and Education Next. He lives in Morro Bay, California with his wife. 

 

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