Back To Work

(Wrote two stories before going back to work yesterday... yes back to work... summer's over... but today it is warm again and the sun is shining and my sunflowers in the garden are sunny-faced. Hey ho! Carrying on with Friday in Port Brokeferry, here's another piece...)

A PATTERN TO ROSE’S DAYS

It was only the second day, but already Rose felt that something like a pattern was emerging, her days finding themselves mapped out and ordered the same. She’d risen early again and, though the sun had not risen with her, she’d watched the day shift towards something brighter than it was. The air was cooler she felt, but she’d sat the same as before, a chair dragged over to the back door and the door open so that the wind blowing off the sea was in her face. She tasted salt when she licked her lips.

Rose nursed a cup of black unsweetened coffee, holding the cup in her two hands and the cup held close to her face, so close she could feel the warmth brushing against her skin. She remembered as a child, how her mother would lay one palm soft against the side of Rose’s face, soft and warm. And she whispered in Rose’s ear, her lips close enough the words were like kisses. And it was a list that she whispered, a list of all the good things in their world: pancakes with maple syrup; Saturday mornings and three of them in the one bed with the curtains open; sand-castles with paper flags on sticks stuck into the towers; ladybirds on the ends of their fingers; the sound of bees trying to find a way through the shut glass of their kitchen window; money under the pillow and the broken milk-tooth gone; drinking banana flavoured shakes through a straw and the milk so cold it made your head hurt when you finished it too quickly.

Beside her on the kitchen table was the open notebook Rose had begun writing in, and an uncapped fountain pen laid on top: an invitation to writing. She picked up the pen and began again. Small pieces she wrote. Like snapshots of her day, the people in it and the place where she was. Postcards to herself, it felt like. Postcards from Port Brokeferry, she thought, and she wrote those words as a title on the front of the book.

She did not notice how cold it was, working without break well into the morning. It was a knock at the door that interrupted her. She considered ignoring it, but when the knocking sounded a second time, she set down her pen and went to see who was calling on her.

It was the postman. He cleared his throat and then read the name that was written on the front of an envelope he was carrying. It was Rose’s name.

‘That’s me,’ she said.

He held the letter out for her to take.

It was from her sister. Must have been sent the day that Rose left. It was brief, saying nothing that Carrie had not said at the station as part of her goodbyes. But wrapped inside the single page of the letter was a black and white photograph that Rose recognised, though she had not seen it in years. It was from their time in Port Brokeferry, when they were children. They were on the sand, her mother and Carrie and Rose, three smiles and eyes narrowed against the brightness of that day, and suncream or ice-cream on Carrie’s nose and a grey shadow on her mother’s cheek. And just creeping into the picture, there where the scissors had cut, was the arm of a man, his hand empty, looking for someone’s fingers to hold. Rose did not remember his name, just that they called him ‘Uncle’ and he was one of the good things in their world once, his name something her mother whispered in Rose’s ear. She turned the picture over and written on the back, in pencil that had worn thin as smoke trails, was Rose’s name and Carrie’s and her mother’s name, Sylvia, and Uncle B. Nothing after that ‘B’, the rest cut from the photograph and cut from Rose’s memory.

After a snack lunch, sitting by herself at the kitchen table, Rose spent the afternoon typing up what she had written in her notebook. She had the radio on turned low and a glass of red wine to hand.

In the evening she walked the length of the beach and back again, filling up the time till bed, the sound of the fair hanging over everything in Port Brokeferry. And Rose tried to catch once more the whispered good things that her mother kissed into her ear, all those years ago, Rose straining to hear again the name that she had forgot.