ROSE’S IDEA AND IT COULD JUST WORK
The telephone interrupted her from her work. She thought of it as work, what she was doing, and she was irritated at having to stop. She considered letting it ring, but then thought she should not. It turned out it was her sister, Carrie, checking on how she was.
‘I’m fine, really I am. Better than fine. The best.’
Carrie said that she was thinking she’d come out sometime mid-week. Just for a day. If Rose wanted. If she was feeling the need of some company. Carrie thought she could spare a day, or maybe two, and it would be good to see the place again.
‘It would be lovely to see you, Carrie. Really it would. And you would love it here. Not sure if it’s how you remember it. Different, I think, from how it is in the pictures we’ve got, but it’s still lovely. I’m enjoying the peace and being away from everything. There’s really no need for you to come. Not if it means putting yourself to any trouble. I am writing again.’
Rose hoped that last thing might dissuade her sister from visiting. At least for the moment. Rose had plans, and a rhythm to her day that she was enjoying. And the writing was going well.
‘Yes, almost as soon as I arrived. In the notebook you gave me. No, that doesn’t make them your stories…Just short pieces, but then I had an idea and I am quite excited about it. A bit early to be saying that, maybe, but I am…What’s my idea? Well, it’s being here that has given me the inspiration, being here in Port Brokeferry. I wrote something about Uncle B… no, not biographical, something imagined. Yes, you were in it and mum and me. The photograph you sent gave me the start. And it was the first I had written for a while and, though it was only a short piece, I thought it was not that bad… No, Carrie, that’s not the idea. It just gave me a nudge in a particular direction. I immediately wrote a second thing. Something more up to date. About someone else I’d seen in Port Brokeferry, and it was another short piece, like a sketch, and I wrote a title on the front of my notebook then. It just came to me. In a flash, like it can do when you are writing. And I thought I had something.’
Rose was excited and talking fast and waving her free hand in the air like she was painting a picture or drawing music from an orchestra, and she was out of breath.
‘What’s the title? I’ve called it ‘Postcards from Port Brokeferry’. And the idea is to write short pieces, about the people. Yes, short like a postcard. A hundred of them. Maybe more. I want to populate a whole imagined village, a place like Port Brokeferry, with a hotel and a café and fishermen’s cottages that can be rented for the summer, and each piece adding to the whole, but each piece short, so that you can read it on its own and it still is something, but taken together it will be like a large jigsaw that shows the place. Like making my own ‘Milkwood’. All voices and people dreaming and living. Yes, Dylan Thomas. And a whole village captured in small bits.’
Carrie said that she was thrilled to hear that Rose was writing again.
‘I think it could just work,’ said Rose.
Carrie asked how the weather had been and was she eating properly and did she need anything sent from the city, maybe some books to read or her mail fetched from her apartment.
Rose told Carrie not to fuss. She was fine. She really was. The doctors had been right, she said, and the place was a tonic, all the tonic she needed, and she was writing again, and that was something.
And Carrie agreed that it was.
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