In Alice's Bed

(Continuing with Alley-Cat and Dodie Bredwell from Port Brokeferry, here's yet another Saturday piece... and I always said that Dodie was someone to like...)

A BOY CALLED MORAY

‘Is he a nephew or a younger cousin, or your father as a boy? Or is it someone you taught once? Is that it?’

Dodie was talking about the picture by her bed. The one of the boy in a fisherman’s jersey and his sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Alice should have put it away before. Every morning that she can remember she has woken seeing the boy’s face, seeing his smile thrown off the yellowing paper into her room. She called him sweetheart some days and bastard on other days. Always there, always young, and Alice moving further and further away from him, it seemed, further away in time. Still she’d kept him there in the gilt silver frame. But these past few days somehow Alice had forgotten he was there.

‘He’s someone I knew, that’s all,’ she said.

Dodie picked up the picture in its frame. She wished that he hadn’t.

‘I want to know everything about you, Alley-cat,’ he said, looking at the picture.

‘I am forty six on my next birthday. I am a teacher, but you know that. My favourite writer is Hardy, and I like Bach, and Play For The Day on the radio. I take my tea weak with no sugar and my toast with honey. I have a birthmark like a swallow tattoo on my shoulder and, unaccountably, I am in bed with a strange man who calls me by a strange name.’

‘Tell me his story,’ Dodie said.

She kissed him then, kissed the man she called Toadie for fun. He did not turn into a prince and she thought about saying as much. But he was still looking at the picture, still wanting to know.

Alice looked away from him and away from the boy mending nets who’d written his name on the back of the picture in case she forgot. The curtains were open and she could just see the furthest reach of the sea, just where the sky lay down on top of it. Bright blue the sky today, and the sea a blue-mist smudge beneath it.

She drew breath.

‘He’s a boy. I knew him once. When I was just a girl. He meant something to me then. His name was Moray. He worked on one of the boats. Fishing. There were a lot of boats then. A shrunken fleet, but still a fleet. They went out from the harbour here. And when they were gone the women kept oil lanterns lit and sitting in the window, so the boats and the men could always find their way home. My mother did the same once, for my father. I thought they were silly, those women. The boats came back or they didn’t and it wasn’t the lights that brought the men safely home. He said he wanted to marry me. Said he’d tell his mother. I watched him walk the length of the street to his mother’s house. But I don’t know if he told her, don’t know if she kept a light on for him that night or if that was my responsibility once he’d told her. There was no light in my window, not that night or any night, and Moray did not come home from the fishing. Not ever.’

Dodie set the picture down beside Alice’s bed.

‘It was a long time ago,’ she said, returning to herself, and she turned to face this man in her bed. ‘He was just a boy.’

‘And you were just a girl.’ Dodie stroked her hair. ‘My Alley-cat, a girl. Now there’s a thought.’

'Your Alley-cat,' she said. And she laughed and touched his lips with her fingers and then with her lips. When she opened her eyes again he was still not a prince. And this time she told him as much.