Friday 17th November
So, alone in the midst of all this chaos, Jane was floundering, helpless and hopeless. She had been in the darkness of the Mikado for too long; she had no idea of the time even. She finished off the last cold dregs of her third or fourth coffee and emerged out into the sunshine of a lovely summer’s day. It almost took her breath away, the sudden beauty of it all. As she walked through Stowmarket, basking in all that sunshine, she realised that this was a precious moment. No-one yet knew about her family; her father’s disappearance, her mother’s infidelity, her sister’s drug problem. If she should bump into anyone they would just see Jane, loving daughter of successful solicitor, the girl who lives with her older sister in that big house just off the high street, you know, the one with the big white gates and the gravel drive and the tall fir trees.
In a few days it would be all over the local papers, and everyone in this gossip-driven town would know, they would snigger behind her back, they would whisper to each other – that’s her, the Wilkinson girl, yes, no not the older one, she’s gone off the rails they say, yes a terrible thing, her father running away like that, and they say her mother’s no better, been carrying on with her sister’s husband I heard. Well I never, who would have thought such a thing.
* * *
PhiI can see the wide expanse of the sea from this window, from one side to the other, and it is a deep grainy grey, here on the East coast. They say the sea is blue in the Mediterranean, a deep rich blue – he had seen photographs and it didn’t look real; it was as if someone had coloured in a black and white photo. His mother had an album of old postcards from the First World War and before that even, and several of them had been tinted by hand, boys in khaki uniforms with bright brown hair and rosy cheeked girls in yellow frilly bonnets smile out of a black and white world. And that is what the Mediterranean looked like in those pictures. Just too blue. He had never been of course; he kept meaning to take June to France, or maybe Italy, but he never seemed to get enough money or time together. And if he ever mentioned it to her she would just smile and say ‘that would be nice’ in that annoyingly distracted way she had, much as if he had said we should buy some new furniture or change the car, and his enthusiasm dented by her apparent lack of interest he would go back to my newspaper and then the moment would pass.
He had only ever known this North Sea, and that not very well either. It is vast and unchanging and yet changing all the time as the sun when it breaks through the clouds sparkles and dapples on the ever-rippling waves, and the shadows of the clouds create darker patches of grey which race over the water, and sometimes the waves are quite rough and come crashing relentlessly in and then another day there are hardly any waves at all, just a placid lake of green-washed-with-grey water that shimmers and ripples in the sunshine.
But mostly it is a heavy brooding grey and the sky itself just a slightly lighter shade of grey which sometimes blur into each other, just as his memories are blurring into one another, he finds it so peaceful here, and sometimes he cannot really remember. Come on Phil, now concentrate, he tells himself.
They had a holiday here, once, only once and he must have only been a boy of nine or ten. It was so exciting – a real holiday by the sea. They lived only a few miles from the sea, but this was the first time he had ever spent a holiday at the seaside. And for the first time in his life he felt free. He can remember running and running along the shingle beach and the gulls flying and swooping low over the dark greeny-grey waves. Just running and running and the shingle never ended, there was no start or finish, just the release of running for running’s sake. And each step he took his sandals sunk in an inch or two and he had to heave them out of the ever dragging-you-down shingle, but this became a pleasure in itself, this strange feeling of heavy-leaded feet, and he never tired of it, this running on the shingle and the sound of the stones scrunching under his feet, and the waves breaking a few feet away and the screeching of the gulls as they raced him along the beach. And for once there was no parent, no teacher telling him not to do this, not to do that, no bullying and hiding from the older boys or Grice and his gang.
His Mum and Dad just let him be as they dozed in their deckchairs; his Mum with her knitting and a knotted hankie on her head; and Dad with the top button of his shirt undone, his jacket off for once and his head back basking in the sun, a small pile of cigarette butts growing beside his chair. Phil was free at last, and he just ran across all that shingle with the gulls screeching and the clouds scudding along too, and breathing in all that sea-weedy fresh sea air. He had never felt so free as he did on that holiday, and never since then either of course. Too old for running now. He can’t imagine running at his age, too many years sat behind a desk, and he’d put on a bit of weight too; no longer that skinny boy of ten. He just wants to have a bit of time on his own, a bit of time to think, a bit of time to himself. He never seems to have any time on his own. That’s all he wants – just a bit of time to think.