The Penultimate Port Brokeferry Postcard

(This is the penultimate piece for the Port Brokeferry project and we have heard Mad martin looking for Col all the way through, and here is Col... but the mystery of why he keeps to the shadows will have to wait for the final piece.)

COL

It was not the first time he had been home. And he still thought of it as home. Still, after all this time away. Some years he had missed. Something had interfered with his plans in those years and had kept him in the other place that he did not think of as home. He thought all those missed years a little darker when he looked back on them, like there was nothing worth remembering in them, except what had not been. So he tried to get back more and more. Just once in the year, when Port Brokeferry was busy enough he might not be noticed in all the new people there.

He came by car and he came alone. Just for the day. He arrived in the morning early, wearing dark glasses till the town was about its business and enough people on the street that he was just one more. He came on the weekends mostly. Sometimes a Saturday, sometimes a Sunday. Depended on the weather. Wouldn’t be the thing to be walking the beach in the rain, or the streets of Port Brokeferry. Besides, in the rain the crowds were thinner and he might be known.

He came to see. How things were. How Martin was. And Athol. He came out of a sense of duty, and something else that he could not explain, even to himself. Today had been a good day. As good as these Port Brokeferry days ever get. It was busier than in some years and that had helped. He liked to get there early enough he could watch Martin down on the beach feeding the gulls from his pockets. He knew that was how the days started in Port Brokeferry. And seeing Martin in his kilt, standing just in the sea, it was like going back to a different time, when it wasn’t just Martin, but Athol and Col, too, standing looking out to where the blue-grey smudge of the sky sat on the blue-grey smudge of the water, looking and wondering what it would be like to sail away from Port Brokeferry and into the stories that Finn told when there was a drink in him.

Not much changes. Col knew that. Guthrie had taken over from his dad with ‘The Bobbing Boat’, looked the spit of his dad, too, like it could be that Col was back in that time when they were three and not easily separated, and ‘up to no good’ the policeman said then, and now Athol was the policeman. Funny how things turn out.

And ‘The Ship’ was just ‘The Ship’. And Struan Courtald was still working at The Victoria Hotel, though he’d got a waistcoat now, with shiny buttons, and a fob watch on a chain, and he was a little thicker about the middle, but still tilting his hat at Ina McAllister, used to be Ina Shale. And then there was Berlie’s, always there for the same two weeks, and though it had changed through the years – different music, and louder with more lights – some things were the same.

Mhairi’s Port Brokeferry Giftshop was quite new and he did not know who Mhairi was. But today he’d stopped to look in at the window. There was a picture of Martin on the beach, a painting. And he could not pass it by. He paid for it on credit card and afterwards thought that was a mistake. Then, having stored it under a grey sheet in the back of his car, he was not sure of the sense in having bought it at all.

He came each year to see how Martin was. He knew that Athol looked after him and that was something. He kept a distance though, in case he was seen and recognised for who he was. Just close enough he could see that they were both well, Martin and Athol. Just the two of them, when once there were three.

He stayed till the end of the day, till Athol had seen Martin to his door and seen him safely inside and then closed his own door. Col knew there was nothing more to see after that. He climbed into the car and waited. Like he was catching his breath, like he was preparing himself to dive into the shock of cold water, like leaving was something hard.

He saw the woman from the hairdresser’s, Christine her name was, if the sign above the shop was to be believed. She was a bit unsteady on her feet and a man who was just as drunk was with her and they took the long way from one lamppost to the next, stopping to kiss in the centre of each pool of yellow light. And because they did not know they were seen, the man was touching her under her clothes and the woman made no protest and only laughed.

He waited till they were passed. Then Col reached into the glove compartment of his car. Folded into four was a piece of old newspaper. He carefully unfolded it and read what was printed there, even though it was too dark to really see the words.