The beach was deserted. And beyond the sand, the long grass was fighting against the strong wind. We stood silently for a while, watching the violent waves sweeping sand into the sea.
‘I’m leaving,’ he said.
I thought it was a joke, but then I saw that he was crying.
‘I’m going,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to get out.’
The wind roared through me. I searched his face for sunlight. But I couldn’t find it.
We were still living in the tenement and it was cramped and noisy; the neighbours had dogs and arguments. But worse than that, they had a baby. Her screams raged their way through the wall to our bedroom and we would lie in silence, fighting the urge to go and comfort a little life that wasn’t ours.
We walked along the shoreline, not hand in hand but close enough to touch. My boots sunk into the sand. The air was much colder but no less claustrophobic than our tenement; the wind was strong as it circled us, throwing my hair across my face, filling my mouth and my ears with the roar of the elements. My fingers had curled into my palms in an act of self-preservation. I couldn’t feel them any more anyway. We had to shout to be heard and that didn’t suit Johnny and me. We weren’t shouting people. It must have made it all the harder for him to shout it when he finally did.
‘I just can’t, Mar, you—’ He stopped himself. ‘I can’t stay here.’ He wiped tears from his face, and my fingers flexed out of instinct to reach for him.
‘Why not?’ I shouted over the waves.
All the wind in the world seemed to swirl around us and fall down into nothing. And, for a moment, everything was still.
‘He had your eyes,’ Johnny said quietly.
——
Margot smiled sadly.
I closed my eyes and took myself there – to stand with Margot on her beach, the freezing November air cutting into my skin, whipping through my dressing gown and into my pyjamas as I watched a young Margot, dressed in a brown coat, sitting in the sand and crying as the wind carried away all sound. I dug my pink slippers into the wet sand and dragged them out to my side, making an arc. A circle around myself. Margot looked so different with the dark hair that was swirling in the wind. As she buried her head into her skirt, her legs hitched up, I went to reach out and touch her …
‘You’ll be okay,’ I said.
‘Thank you.’ She smiled, and we were back in the Rose Room. The rest of the class were doing a good job of ignoring us. I wondered whether Walter and Else had been listening as they etched and scratched and smudged.
Margot picked up the charcoal and darkened the grass at the top of the cliffs. Then she took a tissue out of her sleeve, but instead of blowing her nose or wiping her eyes, she used it to carefully blur the edges of the charcoal Johnny, who was tall and thin and with his back to the picture, faceless.
‘So he just left you all alone with the baby? I’d have been furious.’
‘No, it wasn’t like that.’
‘But he did leave?’
‘Yes.’
‘So where was the baby?’
Father Arthur and the Motorbike
FATHER ARTHUR WAS sitting at the electric piano in the corner of the chapel. He pressed a key and a dulled note came out. He pressed another. Then he pressed them together. It didn’t sound good. He sighed and stood up.
‘Don’t stop, it was pretty.’
‘Good God!’ Arthur staggered and sat back down on the piano stool, his hand on his chest. ‘I will never understand how you manage to sneak through that door so quietly.’
I came over to the piano.
‘Do you play?’ I asked.
‘No. I was just dusting it and I decided to have a go. I’m not sure why it’s here, actually, because we don’t have a chapel organist.’
I sat beside him at the piano stool and pressed a note. It sounded like it was coming through a blanket. I pressed a few more.
‘When you retire, you could take up lessons,’ I told him.
He pulled the cover down over the piano keys. ‘Perhaps,’ he said.
‘That’s what retirement’s for, isn’t it? Doing the things you always wanted to do but never dared.’
‘So I should take up motorbiking?’
‘Would you be able to get on a motorbike in one of your dresses?’
‘They’re not dresses, Lenni.’
‘Are they not?’
‘No! I’ve told you this before. They’re vestments.’
There was a pause as I wrestled with the image of Father Arthur attempting to get his long white vestments over a motorbike without showing too much leg. Then, his robes billowing absurdly as he motorbiked around the city wearing old-fashioned goggles with a gang of Harley-riding clergymen following behind.