Alwyn

Find something ugly in the nets and you throw it back. That’s how it is in my world. Not in hers. She displayed her deformed catches in the museum and wrote about them endlessly.

We had just one thing in common: we trawled the depths.

The contents of this box are the last of her. The unpublished writings of a grave robber. I don’t believe in hanging onto the past.

As the flames snatch at the pages her last article, The Iron Age Castle, is published to the wind, together with umpteen letters from the hospital and a handwritten order of service with her name on it.

A Valentine’s card with a big red heart, signed with just a question mark. I don’t even remember sending that. Which proves my point. I used to argue with her: how can you say what people were doing two thousand years ago when we can’t even remember facts from our own lives?

Another layer of things from a much earlier time. A newspaper cutting: New findings at Bronze age burial mounds. Stacks of lecture notes bundled up with string. Exercise books: A history of Greyling Bay, parts one, two and three. What a bloody waste of paper. I told her that nobody would read it. Now they never will.

Photos of the twins’ first Christmas. I’ll keep those.

Another article: The Mesolithic Fisherman of Greyling Bay. It’s about how hard it was for the Stone Age settlers to fish. All of this from some pieces of flint.

Photographs of the wedding. Even in the best suit she could afford to buy me it’s still obvious that the posh totty had potted her bit of rough. Our black and white selves, smiling and innocent, are cremated as one.

Last is a letter, dated five years after we married. It’s not like her to have anything out of order. It’s on headed paper from the University, and although the writing looks like a woman’s it is signed Malcolm.

Dear Cerys,
I don’t know why you are avoiding me, I only want to see the twins and…

The letter ignites.

Find something ugly in the nets and you throw it back. That’s how it is in my world.


Allan Mayer

The View From the Edge

From up on the Icarus Rock, the sea looks as smooth as a steel blade and almost indistinguishable from the sky. When I was a child I used to watch the fishing boats from up here as they returned to the harbour. Now only three remain.

Malcolm stands behind me. He’s a big man. When they downsized the university, he had to leave. He just didn’t fit anymore.

We walk together a lot. Well, Malcolm walks and I get pushed. I am playing my part in the ancient Greyling Bay tradition of “showing the cripple to the wind”.

There used to be a hospital here where people came to get better on fresh air. Only I will never get better. Nothing in me has ever moved properly, and it never will. They say I’m not wired up right. Even now I’m telling my arm to move. Nothing. When I do make things move they call it an involuntary movement.

Involuntary my arse.

“George,” Malcolm said to me this morning when he lifted me out of bed, “You know I love you, don’t you?” Of course I know that. I was there when Mum said, you promise to look after him until the day he dies, and he said yes. And then she closed her eyes.

I’m looking down now, at the rocks and the beach. I have never been this close to the edge. Beyond my tartan blanket my front wheels turn in the air, my harness holding me safely in my wheelchair. Malcolm buckled me in tightly this morning, like he always has. He has lifted me all my life without once dropping me. I can hear him mumbling away now, but the wind whips away his words as quickly as he can say them.

“Don’t worry son. I’ll come with you. We’ll be together. All of us. Please forgive…”

“Whitey!”

The voice comes from below. A man scuttles like a shabby crab along the beach. For a moment he stops and looks up, following the progress of a solitary gull as it heads towards me in its spiralling flight.

The rocks, the sand, the sky and sea retreat from my sight as Malcolm pulls me back.

And although he is silent, the vibration from his hands passes through the handles of the chair, into the backrest, and communicates to my bony spine that he is sobbing.

And when my right arm raises, I smile. I knew it would.


Allan Mayer