Frank & Red

by Matt Coyne

Frank had become accustomed to his wife appearing as she had been at different ages. It was one of the weird things about Marcie since she’d ‘come back’. Some days, she would turn up in the twenty-year-old form of the woman he’d first met. On other days, she would look the way she had in the years before she died.

He looked at Marcie accusingly. ‘That’s your fault. You moved the curtain.’ ‘Franklin, I’m a figment of your imagination. How the hell did I move it?!’

He had once heard a saying that went something like: ‘You don’t need a parachute to skydive once.’ That’s what he was thinking about: that falling in love with someone, and allowing yourself to do so, was like falling without a parachute. And that’s okay when it’s the love of your life, because you only intend to skydive once.

‘As is a tale, so is a life. Not in how long it is, but how good it is.’

‘Okay,’ Red said after a minute. ‘I’ll go again. I spy with my little eye something beginning with L.’ ‘Is it the last dying embers of my will to live?’ Frank replied. ‘Nope!’ said Red, delighted that Frank was apparently now fully involved. ‘Guess again.’ There was another long minute. ‘It’s lamp post! See? The lamp post over there.’ Red pointed towards the street. ‘Your turn.’

Frank’s mouth twitched a half-smile at the memory. It was the most irritated and happy he had ever been. Funny how kids could make you feel both at the same time.

I’m writing this because you are going to be a mess. I know you, Frank. You have a poet’s heart but a big dope’s head. You’re going to think there’s no point, and you’re going to drink too much and think that life beyond us is a big hole. Well, guess what? It is. Life is a big hole, unless you fill it with things, people and experiences and stuff. And that’s what you need to do. So, be sad for a bit. You should be. I was great!

He began to wonder if no longer seeing and speaking to your dead wife meant that you were through the worst of your nervous breakdown – or if it meant you were just into another phase of that breakdown, a phase in which you imagined that your dead wife was sulking because she was mad at you, following a hallucinated argument that had never happened. He stopped thinking about it. It made his head hurt.

Frank’s clothes were scattered in tiny mounds all over their bedroom and bathroom, as though a gang of old men dressed in Marks and Spencer’s trousers and shirts had been raptured where they stood. He

The house was full of photos. Frank used to complain about it all the time: the walls they filled, the clutter they made on every surface. But after their second pregnancy failed, he had come downstairs one night in the week that followed and found Marcie sitting at the kitchen table, framing even more snaps from their albums. He had asked her why, and she had replied that life was full of shitty moments, so the perfect ones deserved wall space.

‘I don’t know.’ She sighed. ‘Maybe I am just a figment of that imagination of yours. Or maybe I’m a ghost, or whatever. The truth is, you’re drowning, Frankie. Maybe I’m just armbands.’

Just choose one, take the disc out and stick it in the DVD player.’ That seemed like a lot of trouble to go to just to watch a film. ‘Why don’t you just download it?’ Red asked. ‘Oh, I don’t know, because we’re not all Elon bloody Must?’ Frank replied, adjusting the cushion behind his head and closing his eyes again.

Frank had then made the case for the fact that mobile phones were the worst thing that had happened to humanity since it had crawled out of the mud, and told Red he would rather set fire to himself than own one of those godforsaken things. ‘You know there’s more computer stuff in them than NASA took to land on the moon. And what do we use them for? You see ’em out front there, walking down the street, the gormless buggers, their heads buried in the things. There could be a hole in the road the size of the Grand Canyon and they’d walk straight into it and still be tippy-tapping away on YouTubes and Instantgran

Frank is my spirit animal.

All this stuff about, “Ah, it’s water under the bridge.” Fact is, sometimes so much water can flow under a bridge that the whole thing gets washed away and destroyed.’

And if it had come as a surprise to find out that adults did not know everything, it was even more of a shock to find out that, in fact, it was worse: adults were idiots. Yeah. They pretended to be super clever, walking about wearing suits and drinking coffee and eating salad, and driving and tying their own shoelaces, but when it came down to it, they were nowhere near as clever as they pretended to be.