One.

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I should I have started writing this sooner, while your words were still fresh in my mind. I think we spoke about the sea, I know we spoke a lot about the sea.

 

Walking along the cliffs edge, redrawn over and over, you tell me how the houses here can disappear. The edge creeps closer and silently they slip into the sea.

 

There was a campsite you used to walk past and last time you went there it had fallen in. You describe how you looked at that empty space carved out of chalk and wondered how it might feel to lie awake there under a blanket sky.

 

You had to be careful with your step and so they kept you close.
And you would bury your shoes in the sand and hope for them not to be taken out to sea. Caught in the rip tide one curves one way, one the other, washed up one day on distance shores, never to sit side by side.

 

We waded through the estuary in all our clothes and drank vodka and coke on the inlet, carved out of the sand. I didn’t like the taste, it was just so they wouldn’t smell it on my breath.

 

You imagine the water to be inky black with trails of seaweed glinting green and wet flesh.
In fact it was pale against the dark; opaque, smooth and thick like warm soup, with the soft silky steps of sand and the feel of stiff wet denim against skin. The water reaching up to our chests as we held our arms high for no other reason than that’s what we’d seen them do.

 

The moon rose red over the sea that night, we thought it was the sun, that something had slipped and reversed the night for day.
And on that same day, the same spot, but sometime later. I watched 44 sunsets in one day he said, and the blood moon did not rise.

 

He always swam out a bit too far. That’s how I felt in the city.

 

 

Two.

 

She wrote to me about the fires and described how the sky was a smoky red haze and the air smelt of burning wood, how the smell reminded her of being in a spa.

 

‘And the falls of ash came down. Tasting the ash on my tongue’ she said, ‘That was gold and pink, like honey in the morning.’

 

She wanted to hear more about him. She wanted to know what he smelt like. She said she felt done with the city.

 

She talked about the ash clouds and yet I couldn’t see the sky anymore. The cloud here is like a blanket. The darkness is thicker than the smoke.

 

‘I wasn’t sure if this is what you had in mind.’

 

And there’s the image of the mountains draped in cloud with the birds which reveal themselves to be flex of greasy dust upon the glass.
I liked it better before I think, when you described it to me and wish I could see it again that way, thousands of birds flocking across the view finder, interrupting the slow movement of mist and forest and rock.

 

 

Three.

 

Trace the outline with your finger and lay a palm against the cool stone, not yet warmed by the sun rising steadily in the sky and threatening to break through the trees at the top of the lane.

 

A child’s handprint, fixed in the cement. From years before, when the first stone was laid. Those ‘happy’ times, those picture-perfect days.

 

You remember that she was scared of water and that one hot summers afternoon, still a child yourself, you’d filled a bucket from the tap at the back of the house, snuck up behind her and tipped it over her head.

Years later she will confide in you of all the things which scare her.

 

And still now, the hushing of the little ones who do not yet know the game. Hours before the long shadows lead the day to night and things which never should be said are spoken.

 

‘Don’t smoke away from the house’, a warning ignored, for the sake of a moment of solitude. Only the summer before a fire had spread through the bracken and raged for days, before it finally succumbed to the water pouring from the skies and sank back into the singed earth.
A cigarette carelessly thrown to the side of the path, often taken. Through the trees, to the top, to rest, for a stilled moment.

 

That’s what they said anyway. ‘City types. They don’t know the rules, or they don’t care’. That was the story and they were sticking to it. Like so many others.

 

And the record plays again.
With heavy eyelids against the minutes that creep yet further on, swaying gently from the music and the wine. And as the final notes tap out, her eyes flutter open and roam slowly round the room, finding nothing to settle on, as straight-backed gazes are averted, until they meet your own.