‘Surely it hasn’t come to that, love?’ he says as we get to our feet. ‘Those things are no good for you. In fact, they’re dangerous. You could end up having an overdose.’
‘I know what I’m doing,’ I say as he opens the door. ‘I’m a big girl now. No need for safety caps.’
‘Yes, well, even big girls can get themselves into trouble,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘That looks like pretty strong stuff you’ve got there.’
‘I’m fine, honestly, Paul,’ I say as we step outside. ‘You mustn’t worry.’
But as I go to close the door I remember something.
‘Won’t be a sec,’ I tell him, running back inside. ‘Just need to get my lucky pen.’
‘Lucky pen?’ he calls from the front step. ‘Blimey, I’ve heard it all.’
I go into the living room and look on the coffee table where I last had it, but it’s not there.
‘That’s strange,’ I say. ‘I’m sure I left it here this morning.’
‘Oh, come on,’ says Paul, walking into the room. ‘We’ll be late. Look, I’ll lend you my lucky Bic.’
He grins and reaches into his pocket, pulling out an old biro with a chewed cap. I take it and put it in my pocket. But as we head for the door I feel strangely uneasy. Where can it be? I can clearly remember putting it down next to the pad I was writing on.
‘I don’t know what I’ll do if I’ve lost it,’ I say to Paul as we head back outside.
‘Oh, it’ll turn up,’ he says, locking the door. ‘Things like that always do.’
I nod my head but as we walk to the car I have a bad feeling in my stomach.
‘Retrace your steps,’ says Paul, pointing the fob at the driver’s side of the car. ‘Always works for me.’
While he makes a fuss of adjusting the mirror and making sure his seat belt is properly secured I take my phone out and check to see if I’ve had any messages. There are none. I start to compose a text but there’s so much to say I don’t know where to begin. I delete the message and put the phone into my bag as Paul starts up the car.
‘Anything important?’ asks Paul as we slowly pull away.
‘No,’ I reply. ‘It can wait.’
Paul turns on the radio and the car fills with the crackly voice of a DJ but all I can think about is my lucky pen. It’s an omen, I tell myself. Maybe my luck has finally run out.
A lugubrious sun hangs in the late-afternoon sky. It casts a feeble light across the surface of the water as I sit on a bench watching the last of the fishing boats make their way into the harbour.
I’d asked Paul to drop me at the seafront on the way back from the solicitor’s office where I’d spent an hour drinking tepid tea and reading the contents of my mother’s will. When all the documents had been signed the solicitor, a pleasant young woman called Maria, had handed me an envelope: a letter from my mother. It was a shock. I never expected Mum to leave me a letter.
Paul offered to stay with me while I read it but I knew I would need to be alone to hear my mother’s final words, so I decided to take myself and the letter to the benches at Neptune’s Arm, the mile-long stretch of breakwater where my mother and I used to sit before Sally was born to watch the boats come in. It seemed fitting somehow.
The wind is icy and it whips around my face like an angry hand as I sit with the unopened envelope on my knee. Several feet below me the fishermen growl and bluster as they haul their heavy nets full of flounder and silver eels on to the shore and shoo away the seagulls who, following the scent of death on the air, whirl remorselessly above their heads.
The birds wail in tandem with the howling wind. It is a cruel, brutal noise that always makes me think of the vultures that descended on the death carts in Africa during the famine of 1984, pecking scant flesh from the emaciated bodies of children. I remember lying on the living-room floor watching the scenes unfold on the TV screen while behind me Sally played with her dolls, oblivious to the hellish images that were already boring into my memory. At one point she stopped and pointed at the screen where a little boy with emaciated legs and a swollen tummy batted flies from his face. ‘Where’s his mummy?’ she asked and I told her in my matter-of-fact way that his mother was probably dead. ‘How did she die?’ Sally asked. And I told her that she had died from hunger; that the sun had dried the earth, that the rain had failed to come and the crops they needed for survival had shrivelled and died. ‘Was Mummy starving?’ she asked. ‘When baby David died? Did our crops fail?’ And I shushed her as I heard my father’s footsteps coming down the hall and switched the channel to a quiz show where a man in a shiny suit was showing a crying woman what she could have won.
The sea below me thuds and the waves hurtling in and out sound like tiny explosions. Boom, pause. Boom, pause. I find myself lulled by the noise. It makes me feel safe. Finally I tear open the envelope and flatten the lavender-coloured paper on my lap, and as I see my mother’s distinctive curled handwriting the waves fall in step with the pounding of my heart.
30th Sept., 1993