Other

Verge

I sat and waited for four hours on the side of the road, picking at the grass that had grown up through the gap in the curbs.

The tips of my fingers were brown with the dirt and I was inspecting them closely when the tap on my shoulder came. It was a policeman. I looked down the road. His car was pulled up around a hundred yards back. I could just make out someone else in the car behind the reflections of the sky and the verge.

He asked me what I was doing. Difficult one that, I said. Depends what you mean by do.

He thought I was being smart. He told me to stop messing around.

In that case, i said, i am doing nothing. If you want the honest truth.

He looked pissed off. He spoke into his radio. Something about a problem. HE turned away from me as he spoke so I didn’t catch it.

The other person got out of the car. It was a woman. Young. She walked towards us. Policeman number one walked to meet her. He was fat, too fat to be a policeman.

They stopped to talk for a couple of seconds before she continued on towards me and he stood where he was and watched. Cars came past and slowed down thinking there was an accident. There wasn’t. But they slowed down anyway. Puzzled faces looking at me and not the road. There wasn’t an accident, But there would be in a minute.

She sat down and tried that trick of being your friend. I didn’t need any friends. So i didn’t speak.

She finally said that she would arrest me if I didn’t tell her what I was doing. I decided to tell her.

A car is going to crash just there, I said pointing just ahead. I wanted to try and stop it.

She said that was honourable but that this was a very safe road.

Oh? I said. And I pointed. A Ford Mondeo, green, swerved across the lanes, hit an oncoming white van, and both ploughed into the trees on the verge, the van catching fire. The noise was an explosion.

She ran to the scene. The fat policeman ran too, shouting into his radio.

I walked home. And I waited for the police to phone.

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Gone

I’ve watched him get more tired. They say it happens to us all, but it never happens to you.

He potters around the garden, kneeling on the wet soil to coax out a weed or two with his hands, shaking and heaving his chest up and down.

I watch from behind the patio doors we put in last summer. The sun is shining so brightly that he won’t be able to see me through the reflections of what was and has become his only empire.

He moves so slowly, now. It tires me to watch it.

In the kitchen and I am making tea. He moves in with a quick glance and he nods and smiles.

“Marjorie.”

I smile back and he takes his seat at the table where he begins to take a knife to the tread of his boots. He scrapes long strands of dried soil into a bin. And you almost think that all is normal.

“Where’s Pete?”

“He’s… at work George. You know he works during the day.”

“Ah yes, sorry. Getting forgetful!”

And he doesn’t realise it’s wrong. He’s given up reading my reaction, and I his. It’s just existing now.

We go out, sometimes. But it is difficult. It all looks foreign and the space he fits it into is not accommodating. It panics him. And I do not force him. I don’t get away much myself. I am as trapped in his world as he is.

And we still don’t know how he rationalises it. What he makes of me being here, me in the form of who he thinks I am.

A wife once, and now a mystery. The woman behind the reflection never seen. A mirage.

It’s just existing, now.

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Henry

Once, there was a man. His name was Henry. Henry didn’t like boats. The way they moved, it was something suspicious to him.

His whole life he avoided boats. 

One day, an elderly lady came to him and said “Henry, yes I know who you are, you’re the man who is scared of boats.”

Henry was a bit taken aback by this, he searched her face for clues but found nothing familiar in her craggy crevices.

“How do you know me?” he asked, subconciously backing off up the pavement towards Morrisons.She didn’t seem to notice.

“Oh, I have been about” she said, non-commitedly. But her face was friendly, and Henry’s interest was simmering beneath the hefty fat rolls of his fat head.

So they got talking, her name was Marian. Marian took Henry for Coffee. They drank tea.

After a couple of hours, Henry looked at his watch.

“Time?” Marian asked.

“Erm, what do you mean?” replied Henry.

“You look like you want to go somewhere?” she said.

“Oh, well, you know, we have been sat for a while”

“That’s true. But we don’t dock for another two hours…”.

She looked back to her cup, and swirled the muddy liquid as if she was panning for gold.

Dock? Henry was confused. He looked around. He was on a boat. He had no idea how he had got there. In fact, he was so surprised that he stumbled, tripped and fell off the side of the small wooden vessel, smashing his head on the side as he went.

Marian looked over the edge and tutted. Henry lay dead on the water’s surface. Face down. 

“If you go sailing,” she said to no-one, “your heart really has to be in it.”

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The Trial

It was written on their faces. Not literally. No-one had grabbed a pen and scrawled “Guilty” on them. But, you know what I mean, right?

They were led in from the right, the side I was sitting, and, get this: both of them in tracksuits. You wouldn’t turn up to court in a tracksuit, would you, if you had any respect. As I said, guilty.

And one of them, the smaller, was actually grinning.

The crime, though I’m not supposed to talk about it, well I suppose I shouldn’t, but… Jesus!

The prosecution lawyer, the young one, he started us off, talking about this and that and pacing around like you see on television. And the whole time I watched those boys and the whole time they watched their shoes and you just knew.

Of course, we already knew the details. That girl, that house, the mother crying into that cheap dress that, frankly, did nothing for her and that she wore everyday, even though she was on telly (even at a time like that, you would think someone would tell her). Well we had seen it every day for weeks hadn’t we? Over breakfast, down the caff, in Angie’s front room (she pretty much had a collection of stuff, it was freaky, I sort of thought she did it for a while but Brian told me to stop being a stupid sod).

The defence guy, he had an aftershave that followed him and left this cloud of slick. It set off the tall fella’s hayfever a treat and everyone started fussing. Bit of a lark that was! Complete farce.

But we heard him out, though he seemed to want to emphasise things like we were kids. I felt like standing up and telling him the state had entrusted us with responsibility so could he please treat us like we were worthy rather than patronising us with his little pauses and emphasis on the “facts” as if we were just learning the word. I didn’t though, caus when I told Angie what was happening, she gave me the lowdown on the do’s and don’ts so I was pretty well rehearsed. Not that I should have said anything, but, you know.

I’ve been watching those press guys quite a bit. They sit in the gallery scribbling away and I know one of them works at The Star. Ginny, that’s my daughter, she wants to be an actress or something (though I can’t see the talent there myself). So I’ve been trying to catch that lad’s eye, see if he can sort something out. Haven’t succeeded yet but I’m bound to catch him sooner or later, they say the trial could go on for weeks and we’re only four days in!

I’m looking at those boys again though, and do you know what? I know one of them. I thought I recognised him before, but it’s only just come to me where from. He was at playgroup with Ginny! I tell you, it makes me sick to my stomach. I nearly vomited right there. It could have been her.

And his mother. Well, I’m not surprised what has happened, not surprised at all. And the judge said we shouldn’t judge but he hasn’t met that lad’s mother. They should arrest her as well. He had no chance.

There ‘summing up’ now. To tell you the truth, I’m bored of listening. They don’t talk like normal people, they talk like they are trying to confuse you. And, I don’t want to sound stupid, but aren’t we the ones they should be making the effort to talk simplest to? After all, it is our decision.

And we’re all back now. Those boys have stopped smiling. The judge, he is loving it. He’s doing all these pauses and the press area is stacked full and he keeps taking all these side glances over there and smiling that way, you know what I mean. And we’re all sitting there waiting and Tina says it must have been like being on telly and do you know what? It was as well. I was finding it hard to stop moving about!

And the verdict gets read out and those boys start crying. Both of them. Big tears down there faces. And I look at the jury in disgust. Innocent?

I tell you, I don’t know why I queued all those mornings. I don’t know why I bothered.

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Shopping

Mrs P, Damillio walked the four hundred yards to Sainsbury’s at a pace she often described to friends as brisk. She went each Saturday at the same time, four o’clock. Just as the rush subsided.

It was a walk she used to complete with her husband Jack, but since his death the previous year she had refused all offers of accompaniment.

The staff, of course, all knew her. They passed the time of day, the weather, the polite enquiries, with her. She liked it.

Then she stopped.

Three Saturday’s passed before the staff decided something  was amiss. They walked down to her home to see if anything could be ascertained. It could not.

They asked friends of hers they knew who shopped there too if they had seen her. They had not.

The police, when they called them, were not interested. “A woman is allowed to shop elsewhere,” they said, a little snootily.

On the sixth Saturday after Mrs P. Damillio vanished, she reappeared. The familiar rattle of her small, wheeled tartan shopping carrier could be heard from a distance and, as the staff gathered to wait, the grey collection of curls, the tweed stiffness of the jacket, the crouched figure of a woman in her eighties, the face of deep trenches, came into view.

She said hello. She mentioned the weather. And she went about her shop.

Shoved forward, on of the boys asked her where she had been.

“Been?” she asked.

“Yeah, like, we haven’t see you for ages?”

“Is that so,” she said. And she shook her head as if this had come genuinely as a surprise.

“Were you ok?” he ventured further.

“Oh yes, quite well. Better than ever perhaps. But then, who is to say what better is? Who is to say where we have been, or where we shall go?”

Someone giggled breakdown and the staff dispersed into piles of sniggers and shushing from older members.

And Mrs P Damillio watched them and smiled.

“And what’s my name? My first name?” she asked after them.

They stopped. And no-one knew. They blushed and stumbled for excuses.

And she smiled still, and whispered: “Home. Back home. Again.“