(No news today. My Plan is to have the last of these Port Brokeferry pieces hanging here before we reach Christmas, the whole project complete. So here's another one.)
BREAKFAST WITH GUTHRIE
He let her into the café and then locked the door so that they could be alone and not disturbed. He kept the lights off too, not drawing attention to the place. He pulled out her chair so that she could sit, and unfolded a napkin and laid it on her lap. Guthrie was showing off. She could see that and she laughed.
‘It’s like a real date,’ she said.
‘Something we missed out on,’ he said.
He’d made coffee and there were fresh scones from Callum’s bakery – ‘still warm,’ she remarked – and grapefruit halves and fresh orange juice. And of course there were the flowers in the glass tumbler. She could see that he’d gone to some trouble.
‘I’ve thought about this place,’ she said. ‘Over the years. And wondered if it was still here and if you were still here. It’s funny being back and it looks the same and it looks different, too. And Eileen, she reminds me of myself as a girl. And you like your dad, slipping extra silver into the tips jar when she isn’t looking. The same but different.’
‘I’ve made some changes,’ said Guthrie. ‘And it is a good little business. Better in the summer than the rest of the year. But we do alright. I left for a while. Like you. Worked for a sour-faced man serving fancy drinks to men in suits and women in pearls. But I missed the sea, the sound of the gulls and the smell of the air. And I missed Port Brokeferry and the people here. So I came back.’
She understood. She said she did.
‘And now you’ve come back, too,’ he said.
Guthrie made to take her hand and she shrank from his touch. It was unexpected and caught him by surprise.
‘It’s different for me, Guthrie,’ she said.
She looked pale. She looked pained. Just briefly. Like she was revealed for a moment. Smaller, too, it seemed. Guthrie was dealing with his own small hurt and so did not notice. And then she was smiling again, the pretence resumed.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
Breakfast with Guthrie was not meant to be like this. There was a reason she had made the arrangement and it was not for this.
‘No, it’s not you Guthrie. All this, it’s sweet and I should have come back sooner, and if I had then who knows, it could have been something else and not what it is.’ She did not look at him. Kept her eyes focussed on the plate in front of her. ‘Only there’s something you don’t know and it is why I came back and I never expected to find you here. I don’t know what I expected, really. Wasn’t thinking straight. And then seeing the name out front and you behind the counter and the girl dancing between the tables – it was like looking in on myself and how I once was.’
Guthrie did not understand. She was smiling. It did not quite fit with what she was saying.
‘Like I was not really here, except as an observer of who I once was.’
Guthrie waited for some sense to be made of what she was saying.
‘I’m sorry, Guthrie. None of this is what I want to say. It is hard for me. And I’m not getting it right, even though I have thought about this since I arrived back in Port Brokeferry.’
‘It’s fine,’ said Guthrie. ‘I shouldn’t have… it was silly… to think that you…’
She leaned across the table and pressed one finger to his lips. Like they were actors in a film, and she held the gesture as though she was waiting for the director to yell ‘cut and wrap’.
‘I am not well,’ she said. ‘There were doctors, specialists. So many of them, and they said I am not well. And it’s serious and there is not the time I thought I had. Guthrie, there is not the time. And why I have come back, it is not to do with us, with you. It is something simpler than that. It is the feeling of being home and that is a place where things begin and end. And so I am come home.’
He did not know what to say so he said nothing.
'And this,' she said, trying again to bring it all back to the moment. She waved her hand to take in all that Guthrie had done, the table and the plates and the flowers and everything. 'This feels like being home. There is time at least for this.'
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