Investigating the life of things across space and time
They all saw her. Standing on the boardwalk outside the old woman’s house, smoking.
The old woman was dying of cancer. Not from cigarettes, but still. They did not approve.
In the house, the old woman was frantically peeling potatoes, scraps of skin flying everywhere, sticking to the sink, windows and her woollen clothing like a plague of starchy warts.
On the boardwalk her daughter sucked in oxygen and nicotine, blowing yellow halos at the setting sun. She crunched her toes into the cold sand of the beach, shivering in the pushy wind.
From here she could see into the darkening kitchen where a hurricane of grey hair spun into shadow, but mostly she looked at the reflection of the sunset on the window, its beacon brightness shining like the edge of a new coin, and wondered if sailors would see the gleam and steer away from the crescent, or spill on the rocks so close to home.
Joseph reaches down and picks up a shell. He hands it to the boy, who is dragging a red plastic bucket across the sand. “Here. What about this one?”
Bill assesses the offering intently. “No Daddy,” he says firmly, “It’s broken here, see.”
It is late when I see you moving into the flat above the pub opposite. Must be past 11, because I hear the doors swinging open, hot blue noise gulping for air.
“And this is the sign for asleep,” says Alison, closing her index fingers and thumbs together in front of her eyes. “Go to sleep now my darling.”
She smooths out the duvet cover with her hands, uncreasing the printed astronaut suit, flattening the stars in their cotton void, repositioning the blue Earth from sliding off the side of the bed. She kisses Bill’s hair, feeling his fragile skull millimetres away from her lips. “Night night.”
“Night night Mummy,” he says.