Wednesday in Port Brokeferry

(It's Wednesday so it feels right to post up the first of Port Brokeferry's Wednesday pieces today.)

LILLIAN THINKS SOMETHING IS UP WITH OLD TOM

Lillian Carey looks out from her kitchen window. It is still early, still dark. She can see that the light is on in Old Tom’s house opposite and the curtains of his bedroom are open. She considers stepping across the road to see if he is in need of anything. Time was she took any excuse to call on him. Her late husband was sometimes jealous.

‘What? Of Tom? Christ, Preston. Tom’s old enough to be my father.’

Didn’t stop her going though. A knock on Tom’s door and Lillian not ever waiting to be called in. She sat with him some early mornings, holding his hand in hers, the rest of Port Brokeferry sleeping. They talked in whispers so as not to wake anyone. Tom mostly talked of Mary. His eldest daughter. Gone to be a nurse in South America. There used to be letters every month and Lillian read them out to Tom. ‘With my love, from Mary.’ Then not letters, but postcards of trees that did not look like trees and people dressed in rainbow coloured shawls and the women looking stern as men with skin the colour of coffee, and wearing men’s hats. Then greater spaces between the postcards till they stopped coming altogether. Oh, years since the last one, so far back Lillian does not even remember herself.

Christmases Tom comes to her. Came when Preston’s health started failing and Preston was past objecting. Made no sense what Preston once thought and at the end he could see that. Now Preston is gone and Tom still comes. Every year for the past twenty or more. Lillian helps him dress now and walks him across the road at the start of the Festive day. Walks him back at the other end, even though the bed in the spare room is always made up in case he ever needs it. Tom brings scented soaps wrapped in pink or blue tissue paper, and a card for Lillian, and a handful of old letters, the paper yellow and creased, and the writing as familiar as her own by this time. Letters from a girl called Mary that Tom still remembers. He has forgotten so much, but not Mary. Lillian reads the letters after they have eaten. She has to wear her glasses these days. ‘With my love’ she says at the end of every one. She wonders what became of Mary on the other side of the world.

It is several days since Lillian saw Tom up and about. She misses seeing him.

‘You’re a good girl,’ he always tells her. Lillian in her sixties and she still likes to be called ‘good’ and a ‘girl’. She smiles at the thought.

She half fills the kettle at the sink and sets it on the stove. Behind her the radio is on. Turned low so that all the music sounds something the same. Just noise. Like the hum of bees in summer, or flies.

‘Something’s up with Tom, I think,’ she says. No husband to talk to now, so she talks to the cat. Calls him Preston sometimes and laughs when she does. The cat is at Lillian’s feet, its curl and uncurling tail stroking the calf of one leg, its small face turned up to hers as though it is listening to what she says.

Then Lillian sees Callum at Tom's window and she knows something is up.