Jenny is a nurse in the A&E department of a hospital across the border. Her commute to help those who can be helped takes two hours and forty minutes and the same time back if she’s lucky with the traffic at the border crossing, though she often gets called in again and by the time she arrives back at the hospital and has dealt with the fresh crop of emergencies she collapses exhausted into one of the empty beds.
I stay at home now and take care of Franklin. He’s four and beginning to ask questions I don’t have the answers to. Sometimes they’re the big unanswerables—you know them—and other times they seem simple—‘Is my mum like Felix Baxter’s mum?’—but which I can’t answer because I don’t know who Felix Baxter is.
He’s started making this face, Franklin. He brings his bottom lip over his top lip and makes it touch his small nose. It makes him look older somehow and like he’s disappointed in me. I remember feeling disappointed in my father when I asked him simple questions and received complicated answers. I don’t know if I ever made that face. Any answer at all would be better than what I give Franklin.
Once, when Jenny called me from the hospital I stood there listening to the sounds of the A&E department behind her—the different frequencies of beep—and felt the most relaxed I’d ever felt. I didn’t hear a word she was saying to me. Another time, around Christmas, again on the phone, I said that we were like ships in the night. Jenny said I didn’t understand the expression. More like if one ship was docked in the harbour while the other ship endlessly circumnavigated the globe, flashing its lights each time it passed by but not sounding the horn so as not to wake Franklin up, she said.
The evenings Jenny makes it home she sits at the kitchen table and eats a few mouthfuls of leftover pasta. Sometimes the kitchen grows dark with her inside it and she startles me when I open the fridge and the small light falls onto her back. Now and then she’ll come into the living room and sit beside me on the sofa and ask to watch the news but she usually leaves and goes upstairs a few minutes into the main story, when they update the daily toll.
Franklin asks the most questions when he’s about to fall asleep. Recently: ‘Is the moon always at work, even when we can’t see it? How often does it get to go home?’
•
By some miracle, Jenny didn’t have to go to the hospital last Sunday.
In the morning, still half-asleep, I felt her climb on top of me and guide me inside of her. She braced against my shoulders and began rocking back and forth with her eyes closed and her hair falling down over her face. We fell asleep again for what felt like just a few seconds before Franklin walked into our room as though he were being guided through fog in a dream. He climbed in bed between us and we all three fell asleep.
An hour or so later I woke up and left them curled like fossils and went downstairs to make pancakes. Jenny came down with Franklin in her arms and placed him, still sleeping, into a chair at the kitchen table. He began to stir as the first scoop of batter hissed and foamed in the pan. Jenny asked if I’d turn the radio down. I stood there making pancake after pancake, placing one on Jenny’s plate, one on Franklin’s. When I turned around with their plates they were staring at each other across the table. The weather was beautiful so I suggested we walk through the park after breakfast. Putting our shoes on in the hall I bent down and inhaled the pancake-and-sleep smell coming off both of their heads.
•
We weren’t the only ones who’d had the idea: friends and neighbours we hadn’t seen for what felt like years were in the park. Franklin ran back and forth reporting to his mother everything he’d found worthy of praise. A squirrel on a branch. Orange balloon stuck in the roof of the bandstand. A few friends had never met Franklin and they made a fuss of him, or tried to in the brief intervals he was back delivering his report. A slow dog that looks like a sausage. Jenny didn’t talk much to the families that were missing husbands and sons and they didn’t raise their eyes from the ground to look at her either. Red corkscrew in the trunk of a tree.
On our third lap of the park I saw someone else I hadn’t seen for years. John Witford–he’d been two years above me in secondary school. He and Jenny had worked together before we’d met. I was surprised to see him because he’d moved away. He was wearing a green woollen coat, buttoned up, which was odd given the heat. Jenny and I had met at his leaving party almost five years ago and he’d introduced us, if I remember right.
We exchanged some small talk. Franklin huddled close to his mother and started tugging at her until she relented and followed him into the trees. He led her by the arm and pointed in all directions to the source of some wonder.
John grabbed my arm. He looked me dead in the eyes and told me that he and Jenny had spent three years on the boat together. He told me the wounded sailors—young, beautiful, innocent men– had with their dying breath asked Jenny to kiss them a final time as if she were their own mother and she’d never refused, not once, despite the blood and everything that was coming out of their mouths. This experience had formed between them an unbreakable bond. He repeated the phrase and tightened his grip. An unbreakable bond. His fingers made a complete circle around my arm. I was trying to understand what he meant when I saw Jenny leading Franklin back out of the trees and John walked—almost ran—away.
We lived close to the sea, just a ten-minute walk away, and I couldn’t remember the last time we’d walked along the shore, the three of us together on such a fine day.
•
It was, somehow, an even finer day by the shore, as if the sun was taking two steps back for every one forward. We walked along the path which ended at the foot of the cliff and the steps up to a small ceremonial lighthouse. To the left was farmland and to the right the shore. Cows in the field licked their lips at the tang of salt in the air and a flock of oystercatchers took off suddenly from the field, flew in a perfect circle above us, casting brief shadows on the path and dipping their wings in the surf, before landing again in the field, in the same spot. The waves coming in and drawing back over the shingle sounded like velcro shoes being taken off and put on again.
Franklin resumed his reporting, skipping over the rocks. Blue rope on a rock. Green coat.
A slight haze obscured the view of the farther shore.
That’s funny, isn’t it, I said to Jenny. Sometimes the nicer the day is the less far out you can see. When there’s a bit of cloud, you can look right through the front windows of the houses across the shore. Jenny said I sounded ‘folksy’ and maybe I did. A pair of bird’s wings but no bird.
‘Folksy’ is how she used to describe her mother’s sayings, the ones she had prepared for any occasion. When Franklin was touch and go for a while after he was born, her mother burst into the room one morning saying ‘it won’t always be dark at six o’clock.’
•
Jenny says I don’t see things until they’re in the rearview. Looking at the water and the blurred horizon, I started thinking about the poem I read at my father’s funeral. It was one of the requests he made before he died suddenly but not unexpectedly. When my sister told me the poem he’d requested, it brought back this feeling I used to have. I’d never seen him read anything—a book, a magazine, an instruction manual, a menu—ever in his life; anything he couldn’t get out of reading he handed to my mother, then when she wasn’t there anymore, to me. I got it into my head that he couldn’t read and cried about it at night when I was young, just slightly older than Franklin, in case anybody on the street or at school found out.
•
A boy a few years older than Franklin rode past us on his bike. He jumped off, the wheels still spinning, abandoning the bike in the middle of the path and picking his way over the pebbles and between the larger stones down to a boulder—eight feet high and double that around—that we call the Wren’s Egg. There’s six or seven Eggs along the shore but this one’s the biggest. The surface of the boulder looked smooth but the boy knew every hand and foothold and clambered up and sat on top like a drunk prince.
I asked Franklin if he’d like to walk up the cliff steps to the lighthouse. Jenny asked if we could turn back; she didn’t feel comfortable—she wasn’t dressed right or something—so we started home.
There was a quicker way home up a steepish path with a row of houses on one side. As we walked, Franklin asked if his mum could be at home tomorrow as well but I didn’t answer and he stopped and made that face.
Every house’s front gate was almost completely rotted, the wood bloated and sagging but dry and brittle like animals washed up on the beach. The hinges were all rusted too, and split as if they’d been forced open the wrong way. Further up the path, the poem was coming back to me a little—something about looking out far or in deep—but it wouldn’t stick. It was going in one ear and out the other. I stopped and looked at the sea, trying to remember it. What had been perfectly blue and serene down by the shore was, from up here, green and grey and the waves seemed to burst against the rocks intentionally.
‘Where’s that man going?’ I heard Franklin ask. Jenny had carried on walking. I turned and saw how far Franklin was down the path. He seemed miles away. He was watching a man walk up the cliff, taking the steps two at a time with his hands on his knees.
‘He’s walking up the cliff to the lighthouse,’ I said, going back towards Franklin and taking his hand. I felt much better, being able to answer him.
