Izzy in Port Brokeferry

(The title of this Port Brokeferry piece takes us for a moment to Cologne in Germany. It is interesting that this small, out of the way place has these ties with faraway places. And I am growing to like this nosey woman called Izzy and I want to know what she is going to discover in the letters and postcards that her mam keeps.)

NUMBER ELEVEN, URSULAPLATZ, KOLN

Mrs Campbell is well today. Well enough she takes her turn in the shop, against Izzy’s counsel. Mrs Campbell moves stiff as stiff and coughs a little, but says it is nothing. Izzy hangs about, stacking shelves and unpacking magazines and arranging them for sale. She is watching her mam, sees the small knotted crease on her forehead, like she maybe has a headache. When Mrs Campbell sees Izzy looking she tells her she’ll be fine so long as Izzy goes.

Upstairs Izzy creeps into her mam’s room. She remakes the bed and opens the window for air. She picks up the clothes that have been dropped on the floor and the books and the opened letters – bills mostly. She creates some order in the room. It will be her excuse if she is caught there.

Then Izzy lifts the lid on a small black lacquered music box. The mechanism stopped working a long time ago so there is no music, just a ticking sound like a clock that has been speeded up. There is a small wooden dancer, smaller than Izzy’s smallest finger, and it stands on the point of one toe ready for the music to spin her into jerky circles. There are two small compartments in the box and Izzy lifts the lid on one. Inside there is a key on a pink ribbon. Izzy takes the key and uses it to open the top drawer beside her mother’s bed. She goes to the door of the bedroom to check that her mother is still in the shop, then she returns to the open drawer.

Tied up in the same pink ribbon that is attached to the key, are small packages of postcards, all showing pictures of Port Brokeferry, a lot of them the same, but sometimes a new view and taken together they are like a gallery of the village through the years, through all Izzy’s years and some from before. Each postcard has an unfranked stamp in the corner, and they also form a gallery of sorts.

Izzy takes out one of the bundles and unties the ribbon. She picks up the first card and turns it over to read what is written. All the postcards are for a man called Johannes. There’s an address on the same side as the stamp. It is somewhere in Germany, a place called Koln, a place called Ursulaplatz and the number eleven.

What her mother has written on the left does not amount to much. She tells Johannes about the weather in Port Brokeferry – sometimes the rain so heavy it bounces on the pavement outside the post office, sometimes the sun so hot that the milk curdles if it is left on the step past mid-morning. And she tells Johannes about Izzy sometimes, small things: Izzy falling asleep in church one Sunday, and Izzy getting a star on her work at school, and Izzy holding hands with a boy called Tom; Izzy does not remember anyone called Tom.

Not much more than that really, and the postcards all end the same, with longing and a promise that she will visit soon, or one day, or next year. And then ‘love’ and underneath Izzy’s mam’s name: Audrey, and sometimes a single kiss. And not ever sent to Johannes at number eleven, Ursulaplatz, Koln, Germany.

Izzy reads three or four and then binds the pink ribbon around the postcards, ties a neat bow and replaces the postcards in the drawer. She twists the key till the lock clicks and returns the key to the music box.

Downstairs in the shop, Mrs Campbell quietly rubs at her back, and she bids Sinnie good morning and they talk about the weather and the fair on the green and what it is to be young. And Izzy, hearing what they say, wonders what a young Audrey had to do with a young Johannes.