(And news today is that I have just won another competition. I am very surprised with this win. I had thought the announcement must have been made and I had missed it, and then out of the blue a trophy and a winner's certificate and some cash. I have never won a trophy before, so this is loads of fun. Here's the start of Sunday (the last day) in Port Brokeferry.)
THE DAY IS SLOW IN BEGINNING
Like most places, Port Brokeferry is a little slower in starting on a Sunday. However, Mad Martin knows no clocks and is on the beach the same as any other day. Just like in Mhairi’s picture he stands with his shoes off and his socks, his feet in the lacy water’s edge. The gulls circle nearer and nearer, their eyes sharp to any movement Mad Martin makes to his pockets where breadcrumbs are and the leftover scones Callum delivered the night before.
The street is quiet and the air still. Even the boats in the harbour seem like pictures of themselves, everything still. And quiet, except for the gulls flocking round Mad Martin and somewhere, just faintly, the sound of music. Maybe there is a radio already tuned into the day.
The lights are on in the bakery, the same as always, and the smell of morning rolls and cinnamon whirls and fruit loaf drifts on the air, as if to wake those sleeping in Port Brokeferry. And Callum is talking to himself and if you listen you can hear he is saying how much he misses old Tom and he reminds himself to drop in on Sinnie later in the day, Sinnie who was not in the shop yesterday and who, when Callum chanced a look in through her bedroom window this morning, was sound asleep and not writing down any dreams in her notebook as is normal.
The Bobbing Boat café will not open until very late in the morning. The times are on the door and Sunday is the only day that is different, not starting at nine but half-past eleven. But Guthrie is there already. He has taken a clean damp cloth to the tables and given the front window the once over. He stopped to watch Pamela remove her shirt and drink from her water bottle and catch her breath before heading back along the beach. She must be a model he thinks, or an actress from films. Guthrie has one table set for two. And napkins by the sides of small plates and some picked flowers in a tall glass tumbler. It is a breakfast date that he has and he wants to make an impression.
Eileen does not wake swearing this day. Not because it is a Sunday and she is respectful of that. Eileen sleeps past waking. It is her day off. Guthrie says Sundays he can manage the café by himself, and so she did not set her alarm the night before. She and Magnus talked late into the night anyway, and so they are both sleeping late, in Eileen’s bed this time.
And Rose is up today as she was yesterday, with the back door thrown wide and a cup of tea in her hands and she is reading again some of the things she wrote yesterday: The piece about how it could have been with Uncle B, and something about a man in a kilt and a grey suit jacket looking for someone called Col and Rose has written that Col is an imaginary friend from childhood, and being grown the man in the kilt has lost him.
And Corinne. Not up, but awake. Her head on the pillow and her eyes fixed on a small blemish on the ceiling. Like a watermark, and she sees in it the shape of a fish or a crescent moon. She is thinking of Munro and wondering if he might be awake and thinking of her. Or dreaming. He could be dreaming and Corinne could be walking about in his head. He held her hand yesterday. Did not say anything, but he didn’t need to. Just holding her hand was enough and when she got home she wrote his name in her book, at the top of the list of things she loves, and she thought of crossing out Mr Bredwyn’s name, but remembered the book of poems she had taken from the library and decided to leave the teacher’s name below Munro’s and just above W.B. Yeats’ name.
Sleepy and slow the start to this day in Port Brokeferry, and it is a time for dreaming, and taking time to oneself, and finding one's feet, and not looking at the hands of the clock too closely. It is Sunday.
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