Yet More From PB

(It's strange having the two summer projects finished... my head feels empty and the thoughts rattle there. I have a few story ideas and an idea for a screenplay... but I am so tired from the two summer projects that I think I need a break... back to the day job on Wednesday! Here's another Port Brokeferry piece.)

MOIRA HAS SOMETHING TO TELL GUTHRIE

She was dressed, her hair brushed and her make-up on, dressed like she was expecting someone or going somewhere. She’d smoothed up the covers on her bed and thrown the window wide to let in the sea-air and the sounds.

She was crying. No sound, but tears wet on her cheek and in the cup of her hands held palms up in her lap. There was a pain in her. The doctors had warned her to expect as much. She’d been given tablets to take the edge off. The strongest they could prescribe. She was to take them as and when she needed them. Today she had not wanted to so she hadn’t. She sat in the one chair next to the small writing desk and suffered the pain.

‘Guthrie,’ she said.

There was no reason for saying his name, except that she was thinking of him more these days. He hadn’t changed. Not really. He was older of course, his waist a little thicker and his hair a little thinner and grey at the sides. But he was still the same man, inside he was.

They’d sat together in ‘The Bobbing Boat’ with the door locked and the lights out, only the yellow of the street spilling in through the café window and turning to dull gold the table between them, and the cups and the spoons in their saucers.

‘It’s good to see you again,’ he’d said. ‘You look just the same.’

It was not what he wanted to say. He never did put into words what was in his head. If he had, years back, things might have been different. She wasn’t sure if she’d have wanted that, things being different. She’d have stayed if Guthrie had asked her. And maybe that’s what she had wanted, that he ask her. He’d wanted her to stay, she knew that. Way back then she’d known it. But the words were never spoken and so she had slept with the new teacher and then left. Now she was back and Guthrie was telling her she looked the same when it wasn’t true and when he really wanted to ask her why she was sitting there with him in the near dark of ‘The Bobbing Boat’ at night.

‘I’ve come home,’ she’d said to him.

‘Home is where the heart is,’ he joked.

But it wasn’t a joke, not for him and not for her.

She brushed the tears from her face, and breathed in deep. The pain had passed leaving only a dull memory of where it had been. She checked that the pills were in her bag, a brown plastic bottle of them. The bottle rattled when she shook it. She got to her feet and crossed the room to beside the small sink in the corner, a short blue pleated curtain masking it from the bed. She ran the tap till the water was cold, filled the glass tumbler and drank it off in a single draught. It tasted like water she had drunk as a child. She looked at herself in the mirror. Pinched her cheeks pink and smiled at her reflection.

‘Guthrie,’ she said again.

In the yellow dark of ‘The Bobbing Boat’ she’d reached one hand across the table and taken Guthrie’s hand in hers. It was what he’d wanted to do, what they’d done years back, when they were kids and Guthrie’s father ran the café.

‘Home is where the heart is,’ she’d said and she’d bent her head to kiss the back of Guthrie’s hand and he was not laughing any more.

'There's something I have to tell you, Guthrie,' she'd wanted to say, but her words, like Guthrie's words, were not spoken then.