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Night fell heavily. The smell of sugar and sausages and onions and stale perfume
hung above the tables, warmed by tealights and chatting breath, and it merged into a giant scent that ebbed and flowed like a spring tide. Cardigans were pulled across shoulders, and neighbours – once insular, once shy – leant upon those same clad shoulders and whispered boozy secrets into disbelieving ears. Nancy helped Joe and Charlie on the drinks table, ladling out the non-alcoholic punch called Silver Jubilee, and the much more popular alcoholic version called Jilver Subilee, and people danced and told jokes, all in celebration of
That night, though, the neighbours watched with care, not judgement, and hands were gentle as they rested on her back, guiding her to safe passage that was a chair or a wall, or sometimes even a lap. For that night they all learnt that the boyfriend had gone. Had taken a bag of his things and some of her things – things she wouldn’t even know about until much later – things like an egg poacher and a jar of maraschino cherries. As I passed her dancing shadow, she reached out and grabbed
turned back and saw my mother poking Mr Harris angrily in the chest and I heard my mother say, ‘If you ever ever take advantage of a woman in that state again, God help what I do to you, you arrogant shit.’
Pint of water. Thank you, Jenny, you’re doing really well. My father helped Mrs Penny onto the sofa and covered her with lilac sheets, and as she slept my mother stroked her forehead, kissed it even, saw the child.
But Jenny Penny said nothing. She knew my mother’s words were mere scaffolding holding up a crumbling wall.
Had my parents ceased for one glorious moment, to stop and be still in the silence, they would have heard the sound of my brother’s heart break in two. But they heard nothing except the sound of the Cornish waves and birdsong that were to fill their lives and ours to come. It was left to Nancy and me to pick up the pieces that my brother had become; to resurrect his shrunken spirit and pull his pale tear-stained face from beneath his pillow and give sense to a world that had given him none: he loved, yet wasn’t loved back. Even
‘We’re moving,’ my father suddenly said over a full English breakfast. My brother and I looked at each other and carried on eating. The back door was open and August’s heat was sending the bees wild, and their intoxicating buzz thankfully filled the silence that had settled in the wake of our cruel indifference.
and he wondered if he really knew his own children; a thought that would trouble him many times throughout the coming years.
She paused to allow the absurdity of what she was saying to slap us across our cheeks and to wake us up. It didn’t. We carried on eating in a daze.
Dogs barked three houses over and children danced screaming into the onslaught, laughing and awash with joyful terror. The thunder roared and shook the ground.
And we stood in the middle of our garden, unsheltered, unprotected and looked around at the turbulence of the lives we backed onto, sat next to, the lives of the neighbourhood, and it shook clear our apathy until we saw again what our life here had been. There was the sledge our father had made, the one we took to school, the envy of all; and the ghosts of swings and climbing frames that had held us, and dropped us, the sounds of our tears. And we saw again the cricket and football matches that had scuffed bare the grass of the bottom lawn. And we remembered the tents we had made and the
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