‘Was it really a shark bite?’ She nods towards Barney’s shoulder.
He puts his head on one side and for a second they stare at each other, two wanderers who’ve both felt the pull of home.
‘A great white. I was surfing off the east coast of Australia.’
Delta huffs, grudgingly impressed. It’s fanciful, but I imagine Raff standing beside me watching this encounter and rubbing his hands together with glee.
Mack
23 December
Boston
LET HER BE
‘This is the shot to lead with,’ Phil Henderson says, decisive as always. We’re upstairs in the Henderson Gallery, the place he owns and where I’ve shown my work for the last few years, where I’ll display the Salvation Exhibition in February. Older than me by a couple of decades, he’s a sharp businessman and something close to a friend.
He twists his monitor on the desk so I can see the photograph he’s enlarged on the screen. Raff stares back at me, fedora at a jaunty angle, his silver hip flask raised to the camera. I came across him sitting on the sea wall one afternoon, having a nip of whiskey while he waited for the supply boat to get to shore.
‘Why this one?’
Phil throws his hands up. ‘People automatically expect a place like that to be cold and inhospitable. Unlivable. This guy makes it look like the coolest place in the world.’
I can’t argue with that. Salvation is an almost invisible mark on a map, but it’s left an indelible imprint on me.
There’s a parcel waiting for me when I get back to the condo, battered brown paper wrapping and airmail stickers that track its journey across the globe. I recognize Cleo’s handwriting straight away from her rules list on the fridge – I brought it home with me tucked inside the pages of a book. Placing the parcel on the table, I make coffee and load the dishwasher, side-eyeing it every now and then.
Did I leave something behind that she’s sent back? She hasn’t mentioned anything in our texts, but then they aren’t that kind of day-to-day conversation. They’re more … I don’t even know how to put it. More abstract. She tells me things about herself. That she had her one and only fight at thirteen with a girl who insulted her brother, and I tell her that as a teenager I sometimes wore one brown contact lens to make my eyes match. It’s cathartic for both of us, I think, a silvered arc of connection from Salvation to my condo.
I don’t regret it. I don’t. But now I’m here in the reality of my Boston life, I know it isn’t fair of me to use her as a crutch every time I feel low. I’m a father, first and foremost. I’m in the middle of a messy separation, and I know my judgement is sometimes clouded by resentment and old hang-ups. I don’t know how to do the right thing by the boys and be happy myself too. If it’s their happiness or mine, they’ll always win. I watched Cleo bloom like a sunflower turning its face towards the light. And then she turned to me and asked me to turn with her, and for a while, I did. We did. It was dazzling, a true privilege, and then it ended and I was left feeling like you do when you step off a breakneck roller coaster and your legs turn to spaghetti. Her too, I expect, so it’s only natural that we’re finding the connection hard to sever.
My eyes come to rest on the parcel in front of me. I’m going to open it now because it feels like a ticking bomb. There’s a layer of white tissue paper inside the brown paper with a note pinned to it.
I heard your weather tower is flashing red. C x
I rip the tissue and find a battleship-grey knitted scarf. Oh, Cleo, I think, holding it in my hands. It’s chunky and uneven, a little wider in places than others, as if the person who made it wasn’t one hundred per cent sure what she was doing. There’s snow in the Christmas forecast here in Boston. Is she heading back to London soon? Will she be sucked back into the vortex of her old city life? I look across the room at my cell phone, and then at the scarf, and I sigh and hold my head in my hands. Let her be, Mack. Just let the woman be.
Mack
24 December
Boston
EVERYONE’S SEEN GREMLINS
‘Dad!’
Leo shoots outside when I pull into the drive.
‘Be careful on the ice,’ I say, kissing the top of his head. ‘You don’t want to go down on that ankle again.’
There’s been a blast of suitably festive Arctic weather this week, constant mutterings of potential snow. I push my chin into the grey scarf around my neck as I grab my duffel from the back seat. Susie has invited me to spend tonight at home rather than juggle the boys between two places, which is a relief on many fronts. I don’t want to wake up on Christmas morning alone at the condo, and I definitely don’t want the boys to have to spend even a second of it there either. I’ve not bothered with any decorations because it would be like pimping a jail cell. Mom asked me to join the friends and family who fill her home every year but that would have meant not seeing the boys, which is a dangerous precedent I’m not prepared to set. It was difficult enough not being with them for Thanksgiving. Mom did her best to paper over the cracks, of course, turkey and all the trimmings, and it was a real moment to share my photographs of the island with my gran. We took our time, sat around the table, the three of us, poring over the images and our memories. I managed to hunt down some Irish folk music on my phone too, worth the effort when Gran closed her eyes to listen, a faraway smile lifting the corners of her lips. I love them for their efforts, but the holidays are for kids and I need to be with mine, so here I am, about to spend the first night under my own Christmas-lit roof in almost a year. We may have gone small on Halloween this fall, but I came over a couple of weeks ago to help Susie make sure we made up for it by going all-out on holiday decorations. It’s a competitive kind of neighbourhood when it comes to decking the halls, but we’re more than holding our own. White lights pick out the roofline and candy-cane garlands wrap around the porch pillars. Light nets throw diamond dust over the shrubbery and a family of glittering reindeer frolic on the lawn. There’s a fir tree up on the porch too with lights and bells that turn the chill wind into music. It’s walking the fine line between enough and too much, an extra bit of effort to ensure the boys don’t feel deprived. I’m dully aware that all the lights in Boston can’t make up for not having their family back together, but we’re doing our best and that has to count for something.