My Policeman

by Bethan Roberts

suburbia-on-sea, the place the old go to gaze at sunsets and wait for death.

she showed me her bottles of nail varnish. When she opened one, I smelled pear-drops.

The blood seemed to have thickened behind my eyes and all my limbs had gone to rubber.

But you know how hard it is to look away when you see something you want.

His smile is like a harvest moon. Mysterious. Full of promises.

Back then I was easy to please. Because when you’re in love with someone for the first time, their name is enough. Just seeing my hand form Tom’s name was enough. Almost.

I suspect that you know about desire, about the way it grows when it’s denied, better than anyone.

WHEN I LOOK over the fields to the sea, on these autumn days when the grass moves in the wind and the waves sound like excited breath, I remember that I once felt intense and secret things,

I heard nothing, save my policeman’s ‘yes’, for the rest of the day.

What else can make him real, except for my words on paper? When no one else can know, how can I convince myself of his actual presence, of my actual feelings?

can assure you,’ I said, ‘I could never make you look like a tower block.’

SUNDAY, A DAY I’ve always hated for its quiet respectability,

I had a sudden itch to run after him, kiss his hand and tell him he was braver than any soldier, to wear that much make-up in an English seaside town, even if that town did happen to be Brighton.

it. But when he died I knew this to be utter folly, because there was no word for what I’d lost other than love. There. I’ve written it.

What does one learn? To fear all strangers, and distrust even those close to you? To dissemble whenever possible? That utter loneliness is inevitable? That your lover of eight years will never stay more than one night, will become ever more distant, until you finally break into his room and find his cold, grey, vomit-encrusted body slumped across the bed?

I drove recklessly. Stealing glances at him whenever I could.

‘For a policeman, you’re very romantic.’ ‘For an artist, you’re very afraid,’ he said.

Brighton is the very edge of England, and there’s a sense here that we’re almost somewhere else entirely.

Things can happen here that would not elsewhere, even if they’re only fleeting.

It’s the great artwork. The one we’re all trying to imitate.’

I’ve always enjoyed snooping around stately homes,

I wanted, I realised, to wade deep into the water, to go under and let the sea hold me again, let it wash away all the noise of the beach, let its coldness numb my scorching skin and slow my thoughts to a stop.

The low glow of one of the park’s few lamps lit the flowers the deepest crimson, and it struck me that the colour was like someone’s insides. Like my own insides, perhaps. Mysterious and changing.