(At the start of the summer break I had two targets: to finish writing the first complete draft of this Port Brokeferry project and to complete the first draft of my second children's novel. I am back to the day-job work at the middle of next week... but both pieces of writing work are complete. Yay! And I wrote a few more stories as well, and a whole bunch of flashes - which are just thought exercises for me. And now? I'm pretty tired and a little sad to leave the characters in my children's novel... at least for a wee break until I get the energy to start polishing and tightening. Here's another Port Brokeferry piece to be going on with.)
A WORD WITH KYLE
Elspeth worked in the paper shop again. Kyle phoned her about twelve. A big favour, he said. Promised to make it up to her. Just a few hours, he said. Maybe less. She agreed. It was easy enough work, the early afternoon shift. Kyle sounded like the old Kyle, she thought.
Then, in the time it took her to walk to the shop, she’d thought things over.
‘What’s this all about, Kyle?’ she said, and her voice was sharp and the words clipped.
He looked away from her. But he could not hide what was in his head. Elspeth had seen this before. Just the same. And she knew the trouble that was in front of him.
‘Who is it?’ she said, and she mentally began running through the names of the girls it could be. Then she recalled seeing a blond woman talking to Kyle at the edge of the green the night before. A woman from the fair. All tits and arse, her mother would have said. It had been nothing really, the two of them talking, only now Elspeth thought it might be something.
‘Look, you can’t do this,’ she said. ‘You can’t do this to her. To Susan. Think about it. There’s consequences. In two weeks the fair will be gone but what you are doing will still hang around your neck and be something between you and Susan. Is that what you want?’
Kyle told her she didn’t know what was what. She didn’t know anything.
‘I know you, Kyle Downs, and I know you are thinking more with what is in your pants than with the brain that God gave you,’ she said.
Kyle ran his fingers through his hair and forced the air out from his puffed cheeks, forced it slow and making a noise that was like the wind when it is small. There was a look on his face, like he was a boy again and he had done something wrong and been caught and didn’t know what to say.
‘I’m all fucked up,’ he said. ‘Everything is. I’m sleeping on the sofa in the living room. Been like that since Christmas almost. Things are all broken and there’s no putting it back together.’
Elspeth touched the back of his hand. ‘And how does what’s going on with this blond woman help matters?’
‘Her name’s Lynn.’ Still Kyle could not look at Elspeth.
‘But how does it help?’
He shrugged, even more like a small boy in front of her, like the small boy he had been once. ‘I don’t know. It just does,’ he said.
Elspeth turned the sign on the shop door to ‘closed’ and flicked the snib. Then she took Kyle into the back of the shop. There was a table there and a stainless steel sink against one wall. Elspeth filled the kettle and put it on to boil. She rinsed out the teapot and dropped in two teabags. Kyle checked his watch when she wasn’t looking.
‘It’s never easy,’ she said with her back to him. ‘You have to work at it. And even then sometimes it isn’t right. But still you have to work at it. There’s Corinne to think of. What do you think this is doing to her?’
Kyle sat slumped in the one chair. Elspeth sounded like his mother. He didn’t know what to say.
‘Brokeferry is too small for her not to find out. And when she does? Is that what you want Corinne to know about you? And how long do you think Susan will put up with people talking about how it is with you and her and everyone giving her pitying looks in the street and inviting her for coffee and the awkward silences when they don’t really know what to say?’
Elspeth had heard things and she knew something of what Kyle had told her.
‘It’s all too hard,’ he said.
Elspeth turned to face him. ‘It’s the same for everyone. Some make it look easy, but there are bad patches in any marriage. Remember? Mum and dad not speaking for a whole month, not even a word, and all because she’d gone and bought a new dress when they had no money to pay for the ordinary bills. Remember? You have to work through the bad things.’
‘It’s been months, Elspeth,’ Kyle said. ‘And things have been said and there’s no taking them back.’ He was dismissive, waving one hand in the air as though she could be brushed away. His thoughts were with the blond woman called Lynn drinking alone in her trailer and looking at the clock and wondering where he was.
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