Tin Man

by Sarah Winman

No, I don’t like whisky. I choose the painting instead. It was her first ever act of defiance.

Dora stood in front of it, raised the hammer, and said, Do it and I’ll kill you. If not now, then when you sleep. This painting is me. You don’t touch it, you respect it. Tonight I’ll move into the spare room. And tomorrow you’ll buy yourself another hammer. All for a painting of sunflowers.

he felt like that he never went home straightaway because the loneliness would pounce.

Two ends of the spectrum, the haves and have-nots, whether it be faith or money or tolerance.

Billy said, Did you always want to do this? And he surprised himself and said, No. And Billy said, What then? And he said, I wanted to draw.

Billy said, You have anyone, Ellis? And he said, No.

And the way he said it was gentle and direct and uninhibited, as if the death of love was normal.

She was there, his wife, a peripheral shadow moving across a doorway, or in the reflection of a window, and he had to stop looking for her.

An old flame of Mabel’s. Comes here once a year to play her song. That’s love, you said.

I’m just trying to hold it all together, that’s all.

that’s why he didn’t see the car until it was too late.

And Ellis thinking, All this fuss over nothing. I’ve never felt so clear.

Make me look like a poet.

Men and boys should be capable of beautiful things.

And when it all comes together? asked Ellis. It’s life, said his mother.

Take it all in as if you were going to paint

Always be gratfull

See how it changes the landscape. See how it changes you.

You were important to me, he wanted to say.

There he was with his arm raised high. Follow the Yellow Brick Road, Ell!

We don’t want to overdo it, do we? We’ve got so much time.

And Ellis remembered thinking he would never meet anyone like him again, and in that acknowledgment, he knew, was love. He could see his mother concentrating on Michael’s words, how enraptured she was. And when he stopped, she bent down and kissed him on the head and said, Thank you. Because everything she held on to and everything she believed in came together in

that unexpected moment. The simple belief that men and boys were capable of beautiful things.

when music still stirred, when beer still tasted good, when dreams could still be hatched at the sight of a plane careering across a perfect summer sky.

It was life as he knew it shutting down.

He scattered Michael’s ashes down by his favorite stretch of river, as per instructions. He was alone. The wind bit hard across the meadow. It was the end of summer.

NOOOO

Michael had saved them.

Make me look interesting, he used to say. Make me look like a poet.

This is loneliness.

I stop. Ambushed by his quiet defense against the disease, the bigots, the press, the Church.

that just because you can’t remember doesn’t mean the past isn’t out there. All those precious moments are still there somewhere.

Was he your first love? Yes. Only one, probably.

And I fell in love. Madly, intoxicatingly so. I think he may have, too.

I could see it in his eyes. Everything was different.

And I’d remember my love for a man that almost made everything possible.

I’d already accepted I wasn’t the key to unlock him. She’d come later.

My trilogy of desire, I liked to call it, but I’d no great love after him, not really.

sometimes I feel as if my veins are leaking, as if my body is overwhelmed, as if I’m drowning from the inside.

Van Gogh’s dark cypresses spear the sky. I’m here for you, Dora Judd.

There’s something about first love, isn’t there? she said. It’s untouchable to those who played no part in it. But it’s the measure of all that follows,

As I grew older, I came to understand this woman was my mother’s freedom. We love who we love, don’t we? I hope she loved her.

And I wonder what the sound of a heart breaking might be. And I think it might be quiet, unperceptively so, and not dramatic at all. Like the sound of an exhausted swallow falling gently to earth.

And in the foreground, the quiet shape of two lovers. Always two lovers. Shadowed in memory.

I look at these young men, not in envy but in wonder. It is for them now, the beauty of discovery, that endless moonscape of life unfolding.

Everything was real, not perfect. And yet that’s what had made it so perfect.

Who were we, Ellis, me and Annie? I’ve tried to explain us many times but I’ve always failed. We were everything and then we broke.

In my chest, the sound of an exhausted swallow falling gently to earth.

And he feels all right. And he knows he’ll be all right. And that is enough.

Had me crying at 7 in the morning