A Woman I Love

(There is a Mhairi that I know. She is sweet and good and generous. She is my inspiration for the charity work that I do. She helps me be a better person. And I love her for that. And she has a giftshop and so I wanted her to come to Port brokeferry.)

MHAIRI’S PORT BROKEFERRY GIFTSHOP

There’s a gift shop just tucked back from the front. You could easily miss it except that a sign on the street tells you where it is. The shop is called ‘Port Brokeferry Gifts’, the name painted in big green letters above the window. There are leaflets in the hotel and in the café and on the counter in the bank, telling you all about it.

The girl who runs it is called Mhairi. She was at the Art School and then she did a little teaching. Now she has the shop. It sells fishing boat models carved from wood by an old fisherman called Aiden. And sea birds sculpted in stone, and driftwood pieces painted to look like strange fish. There’s a ceramic mermaid with yellow hair and a silver tail. And a ship’s figurehead, a woman with her breasts thrust before her and her cheeks painted red and her hair in flamboyant stiff curls flowing behind her. There are old oil lanterns polished and brassy to look like new, and old photographs in black and white showing fisherwomen in long dresses and men with clay pipes. There are pieces of clay pipes, too.

In the window there are paintings. Watercolours of the beach. In one you can see Mad Martin holding his hands high and seagulls hanging above him like they were kites. You know it is him from the clothes that he wears.

There are three of Mhairi’s oil paintings as well, always three, colour splashed on stretched canvas in broad brush strokes. Pictures of the sea and the houses in Port Brokeferry. They don’t sell in the winter, but when the tourists come, Magnus sees them go and he feels the loss of them leaving the window. Mhairi is quick to fill the gap the gone-paintings have left behind them. She has a whole box of Port Brokeferry pictures, but the ones the town has lived with all winter, their familiarity somehow makes them belong and their going something like a theft.

One year Magnus bought a picture, one he couldn’t bear to see sold. It shows the sea on one side and on the other the whole stretch of the front with the shops and houses and the silver grey of their windows. He’d passed Mhairi’s shop every day for months, stopping to look at the painting. He felt that this one belonged to him even before he bought it, even before he made up his mind to buy it. He did without beer for two months, and bought cheaper cuts of meat and smaller pieces of fish. Eggs were cheap that year. Magnus ate lots of eggs. Then he had enough and the picture was his.

But what he wished most of all was that it could have stayed in the shop window forever. It looks different on his wall. Maybe it is the light, or the wall or that it hangs there alone, not one of three.

There are no people in Mhairi’s own pictures. Magnus likes that.