Alice in Port Brokeferry

(This originally appeared on another site, has since been removed and so finds its way here as part of the Port Brokeferry place)

ALICE HAS A FRAMED PHOTOGRAPH BY HER BED

She stands looking out of the window, dressed only in her underwear, but standing in the shadows. The sea shifts, green under a blue sky. There’s always been the sea, she thinks. Always there, shifting, and shushing, bidding the people of Port Brokeferry hush. Only Alice will not be told, will not hold her tongue. She calls out a name, loud enough that heads turn on the street outside the café, but no-one knowing where to look.

Alice, unseen, touches her own neck, like he did once. Lays her palm flat against her skin, just under her hair that is loose, and grey now. If she closes her eyes, keeps them closed, she thinks it is something the same, her hand like his hand on her neck.

But it isn’t the same.

And if she listens hard, she can hear his voice, believes she can, his voice at her ear, giving her back her name, slow and whispering. ‘Alice. Alice. Alice.’ Like he used to do.

But today it is just the sea she hears, shushing and shushing.

‘Bastard!’ she calls, and lets her hand fall to her side.

Blue over green, and far out on the water something like flames, burning, burning, sunlight tip-toe dancing in gold slippers on the surface of the sea.

‘Bastard,’ she says, quiet now.

Alice keeps a picture of him close to her bed. In a gilt silver frame, dust behind the glass and the photograph black and white, the paper yellow with age. He smiles out at her, a boy in a fisherman’s jersey, his sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and a mending net on his lap.

He had it taken specially. And on the back he wrote his name, just his first name, in letters like a child. She does not know why he did that, as if it was something she could forget.

Alice lifts her hand to her mouth, presses the tips of her fingers to her lips, and it is something he did, her fingers to his lips when he left her bed, in the dark of not-yet-morning. She watched him walk the length of the street to his mam’s house at the far end, five mornings in a row. And the last day, there was a spring in his step, she thought, and he hummed a snatch of song. It annoys her that she can’t remember the music.

Shush, shush.

‘I’ll tell her today,’ he’d said. ‘I promise. And then…’

Only, there was no end to what he said. And Alice never saw him again, doesn’t know if he did tell her, his mam.

‘Bastard,’ she says. No sound this time, just her mouth giving shape to the word. ‘Bastard,’ and ‘bastard,’ and ‘bastard.’

Alice stands looking out of the window, dressed in her underwear, standing in the shadows, and she cries over a boy she once knew who wrote his name on the back of a photograph in case she ever forgot.