The last we'll hear of Corinne in PB

(As a child when walking to the shops I made up games to pass the time and the walking. I raced oncomers to landmarks between us, but I couldn't run, could only walk, and walking fast so my legs were wobbly. Of course, they didn't ever know my small victories, or my failures. I play those silly games still. Not walking now, but writing. I set myself a target this year: 30 competition hits. We are in December and I heard this week of my 29th: onto another waiting shortlist. Only one more result to come in for me in December, so we'll see. Here's more from the ending of PB - and I do like Corinne.)

THE SCHOOLGIRL CORINNE LOOKS FOR MONDAY-MONDAY

The day drags its feet. That’s how it seems, this long slow Sunday. No different from any other Sunday, except what she wrote in her book. About a boy called Munro and he took her hand in hers. And now it is an age till Monday comes, and she will see him again. And she wonders till then, all the long slow day, wonders if he will take her hand again.

She keeps the door to her bedroom closed. There is music playing in the room and she is reading from the book she took from the library. And she turns to a poem called ‘To A Child Dancing in the Wind’. She holds the book in her hand, her two arms raised, and she dances, there in the small space of her room, for it says ‘Dance there upon the shore’, the first thing that it says, and it’s like he is telling her to do what she does, this poet called William. And with the window wide and the air moving in her room and the sound of the sea, faintly, and the gulls crying somewhere, it is like she could be the child. ‘What need have you to care’ says the poet, ‘For wind or water’s roar’. And Corinne, her yellow hair flying behind her as she dances, knows that he does not mean wind and he does not mean water. It is something about the buffeting of life and the poet is old and has suffered rejection from a Maudlin woman. ‘And tumble out your hair,’ she reads, and she shakes her head and her hair. ‘That the salt drops have wet’ – and she thinks of tears then, in those ‘salt drops’, and she does not make sense of what she has read, not with those tears, but it matters not to her, for she knows poetry can be like that: one moment knowing and understanding and the next lost in the words on the page.

‘Being young you have not known

The fool’s triumph, nor yet

Love lost as soon as won.’

And she stops then, her dancing, and she is suddenly afraid, and it is something about what he has said, this sad man whose poetry book she stole from the library. And Corinne wonders if Munro will take her hand on Monday, if he ever will again. And she recalls that Mr Bredwell’s name for the boy is Monday-Monday, and Munro does not know why, no one knows, and maybe there is no reason. Except there is a song that she has heard. Not a new song. And the first line is ‘Monday Monday, so good to me’ and that lifts her for a moment, and then she thinks that there’s another line in it, the old song, something about not knowing if he ‘would still be here with me’.

But Corinne is being silly with such thoughts, and she knows that she is. The last two lines of the poem on the page in front of her say as much:

‘What need have you to dread

The monstrous crying of wind?’

And there is no reason, for Munro took her hand in his, and it was enough. That's what she wrote in her book. And the day is long, this slow dragging Sunday, and Corinne looks for Monday-Monday and knows it will be good to her when it come. And then she is dancing again and her hair tossing and she has dropped the book of poems on the floor of her room.