FLYING KITES IN A RAGGEDY SKY
© Suzanne Bosworth
Published by Books Ireland

Stepping over stones into a crumbling sheep pen, exploring, expecting nothing, I found a man huddled under a crisp sugaring of snow. I thought he might be ill,  or dead, and lifted the corner of his coat away to see.
   I wondered. I wasn’t sure, for a moment, if I hadn’t seen him before.
   He turned his matted head and focussed red, rheumy eyes on my face. His breath bubbled like air blown through milk. ‘Monica,’ he said thickly. ‘Monica.’ He reached out a crooked mauve hand to tap at my arm like a dog.
   I stared at his heavy forehead and his mouth and followed the line of his jaw, caught by barbed strands of half-remembered connections.
   After the sifting and settling of family and things, here he was. The derelict remnant of a footloose father, blown like a scrap of rag on to a desolate, frozen headland where sheep tugged at iron-age hollows.
   Monica.
   He left taking just the clothes he stood up in and holding a string bag filled with unseen things, my mother Monica shouting down the road after him. Me, sitting on cold concrete garden steps, staring dully at a snail printing its dotted line across the crazy paving as she cried at the kitchen table and regretted ever signing her life away.
   Forty years on, exhuming her most private corners, cracking and prising open her miseries and sad secrets and her pathetic scraps of proof that people might have loved her after all, I found his photograph with his name on the back. A card, with thin writing faded to a tracing of purple, tied with red ribbon and tucked between the tissues of a wedding album. To Monica, on our wedding anniversary. All my love, Ben.
   And what of Monica?
   Glad to be rid of a man she couldn’t rely on to come home or lie next to at night.    Left on her own to run to fat and other men, scared and lonely and pushed to the back of the family drawer for taking up with other women’s husbands.
   She never talked about him. Never explained it wasn’t my fault he had left.
   And when, forty years on, they handed me a small wooden box filled with whispering ash, I was still wondering if she ever would.
   A blasting wind screamed and whistled round the broken walls of the sheep pen and I sat down next to him and said: let me make you more comfortable. Ease you over a little.
   His eyes blinked, half-lit, the dark hole of his mouth straining for air. A thin purple filigree, meandering like rivers on an antique map, traced through parchment eyelids.
   Come here, I said. Let me cover you over.
   I’ll tell you about a time we had before you left.
   We were on the coast and I was seven and you were teaching me how to fly a box kite. It was dark green and a rich Bird’s custard yellow with wooden struts and I was querulous because I couldn’t work out how the strings went.
   And what you did was, you stood behind me and put your arms around me and your hands over mine – big hands yours were, and strong. I can feel them now: rough, dry fingers and dark hair on your wrists and the backs of your hands, and the smell of coal tar soap, and Capstan Full Strength Navy Cut on your breath.
   The string was wound on a wooden bobbin and you taught my hands how to unwind the string and then you said, ‘now run Alice, run fast!’ and I ran awkwardly and tripped on my spade but up went the kite and I sobbed with excitement, the kite fighting and dragging like carp on a line. And you came and held my hands again and I wondered if we mightn’t both be blown away into the tug and buffet of a rough and tumble wind.
   Do you remember that? I said to him, looking down at his face.
   His eyes were fixed sightlessly, unblinking in the wind, a blown fleck of grass caught at random across mottled grey.
   Finished. One second, barely alive with a history and a beat and a trace, the next he’d scudded away, his lifeline snapped in the rough wind, leaving me holding on to wooden bones.
   It was a raggedy sky, that day on the beach, with our hair whipped into our watering eyes and voices snatched away.
   The wind took it. Broke the tethering line of the green and yellow kite and rushed it high out of sight.
   Tiny in the wild bucking and diving of air and sea, I stood and stood but I couldn’t see where it had gone, and refused to go back with my father to the hotel until we found it again. So he sat me down on the breakwater and told me about raggedy skies being the shoals of wayward clouds escaping from the nets and lines holding them back. That’s where, he said, everything goes that you think you’ve lost or you can’t find or have to leave behind. And up there the clouds carry it all across the sky at wild speed, and because it’s so far up you don’t see how wildly they go.
   Your kite is away, he said, having the time of its life.
   His body settled and sank and found its own gravities, and I eased him down to lie on the ground, neatening his clothes to fit softly against his skin.
   As the landscape turned a thousand shades of blue, I searched the hollows for cracked joints of wood and twigs, and with two or three matches sparked a small fire into light on shreds of greasy wool and dead grass. It snapped and spat and hissed with yellow light, pushing half-seen images and old eyes back into the dark sockets of the landscape.
   I gathered stones to build over his body against the wall of the sheep pen. Said his name out loud in the whipping wind. Better that there should be no rigid, alien burial rite with no-one knowing him but me, and ritual making a fool of an unfamiliar stranger.
   All night, miles from the tiny points of yellow light on the mainland, I sat by the fire in the sheep pen, dreaming and remembering and watching the flickering shadows. All night I dozed and woke, feeding the fire until pale grey edged on to the eastern horizon and everything was shades of blue again and gulls mewed and cried in the damp chill.
   The wind had dropped away. I fed the fire one last time for comfort and boiled water for coffee, pulling bits off a loaf and a pound of cheese. Pushed and rearranged pieces of stone on the mound, unwilling to leave.
   Finally I damped the fire down. Picked up the last spent match, smoothed the flattened grass. About to go, it seemed right to leave a small circle of stones on the patch of ground where I had sat; a quiet signature to show a passing connection.
   It was looking back at the headland in silhouette against bright blue and white that you could see it. A wavering, soft-pencilled line of grey, drawn up from the iron-age hollows, fading out to nothing beneath the scudding sky.