Yorkshire Writers' Lunch

It’s three o’clock in the morning.  I am awake.  Again.  I gaze through the open curtains at the bare-faced moon.  It is a delicate, dreamy blue and it stares back, unblinkingly, at me.  I wish it could tell me where you are. I turn to your empty pillow and hug it pathetically.  Where are you?  I know you are out there, somewhere, alive.  I would sense it if you weren’t. I’ve told the children that you have gone away for a few days with work.  I hate lying to them, but what can I do?  Cassie asked if you had gone to stay with her dad. For what must be the hundredth time, I trawl every quadrant of my brain for anything unusual in the days leading up to Tuesday morning when you left for work, as normal.  I’ve been over this so many times in my head and with the police.  You left, as you always do, in a rush.  You didn’t take your wallet and bank cards.  You never do.  Just enough money for the ...

What was more shocking - the fact that my 50 year old second cousin had died, or that I found out on Facebook?  Or, was it the fact that I cried?  I cried like I loved him, really loved him, yet I hadn’t seen him in at least three years, and following that occasion I had decided I really wouldn’t mind if I never saw him again.   He barely acknowledged me, and I was appalled at the person he had become.  It was at my brother’s house.  I had travelled a long way to see my brother, and Terry was there.  He had become a frequent visitor.  He was a mess, and was looking to my brother for support, but it was too much for him.  It wasn’t the fact that Terry needed help which bothered me though.  It was the fact that he seemed so utterly self centred, that his needs and his suffering was so much more important than the needs of anyone else; that he seemed so oblivious to others.  I had an hour to spend with my brother, and he’d told T...

The day my husband left for Mars, we had beans on toast for tea. We sat around the table, the children and I, stabbing beans with our forks, and looking out of the window at the dusky sky, wondering if one of the little silvery dots was him.  I cried, of course, when he told me.  ‘You might as well be dead,’ I said.  Tom said it wasn’t like that. He said we would stay in touch, with video messages and emails.       He said, ‘Just think how proud the kids will be, when their Dad is one of the first humans on Mars.’   I said, ‘They won’t have a Dad anymore.’  He said, ‘This is a once in a lifetime chance.’  I said, ‘What about your life with us? What about our life together?’  He said, ‘This has always been my dream – to be an explorer, to be a hero.’  I said, ‘I dreamed of growing old with you.’  He said, ‘Please don’t try to stop me.' ...

His were dancer's feet, not meant to walk such empty streets. His graceful hands now freeze around a bottle drained of good intent. Eyes which once looked up in theatres full of adoration, now stare down at shoes with holes which let all hope drain out. That choreography of lament, the shuffling, aching bones and leaden limbs, shoulders hunched in grief, from carrying no weight of love. His pavement stage and gutter stalls are full of litter. His critics now the passers-by who frown and disapprove or throw a coin and not a rose. But in his head, applause lives on, his food of choice, and as he fades into his cardboard home, his dancing heart gives up the beat. Final curtain.  No encore.