Authors: Grace Wynne-Jones
‘I think I do.’ He’s moving slowly towards me, he’s
touching my cheek. ‘Because I’m frightened too.’
‘You are?’
‘Of course. I’m frightened you’re going to just turn away
from me, from us, again. I don’t think I could bear it.’
He’s standing very still. He’s looking at me with such a mixture of pain and hope, I just don’t know what to say. And then I know I don’t want to say anything. I’m tired.
I’m so tired of fighting this. If only I could read the white
spaces between his words – if only. But I can’t. And suddenly I can’t stand this space between us – this black space – so full
of doubt and fear. It’s become something fearful in itself.
I move towards him, tears coursing down my cheeks, and
he wraps me in his arms.
It feels so right, having Charlie’s arms around me. He’s
holding me so close, as if I’m someone precious. There’s a
sweetness to it, an innocence I always knew would be there.
His warmth is warming me deep, deep inside. The pain is
easing. We need this, me and Charlie. We fit.
‘How have you been?’ Charlie studies my face.
‘Oh, you know – sort of okay, I suppose. I’ve been learning
how to be alone. It’s important to learn that – isn’t it Charlie?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Rosie didn’t mind being alone – did she? I mean, she didn’t
have any other pigs around.’
‘But she had us – she had me.’
‘Yes, I suppose you’re right. She was quite sociable. She
did like company.’
‘She certainly did,’ Charlie smiles. ‘By the way, thank you
for that mug you sent me. It’s lovely.’
‘Oh, – so it arrived.’
‘Yes it did. It’s great.’
‘It wasn’t broken?’
‘No. No. Not at all.’
‘Charlie,’ I finger one of the buttons on his shirt. ‘Charlie,
do you know
Swiss Family Robinson
?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well – they got shipwrecked on an island – didn’t they?
Washed up with nothing but their broken craft. That’s what
my marriage has felt like for ages. Like I was on an island.
All alone.’
Charlie rubs my back comfortingly.
‘But then – you know –
Swiss Family Robinson –
they
found they could make a shelter from the broken pieces of their
ship, didn’t they? Something new. Something different. They
didn’t cling on to the past, and I mustn’t either. You know
what I think I’ve been doing this past year?’
‘What?’
‘I’ve been sorting through the debris, Charlie. Just sorting.
Searching. It hasn’t been easy.’
Charlie opens his mouth to say something – then he
hesitates.
‘What were you going to say, Charlie?’
‘I – I was going to say I’ve seen you occasionally – at
your sitting-room window. You looked a little wistful. I was
worried.’
‘So it was you!’
‘Yes,’ he looks a bit embarrassed. ‘Sometimes, when I was going to the studio I’d drive by your house. I’d park the van a bit down the road so you wouldn’t suspect. I didn’t think you’d want me to come in so I stood behind
a tree and watched. Only for a minute or two. I hope you
don’t mind.’
‘You watched over me. Just like in the song.’
‘Yes, I suppose I did.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Anytime.’ He kisses my eyelash softly.
My eyelash.
I get the feeling Charlie could kiss every part of me with
love. The small cowering corners. The Creature from the Swamp. The feisty lady. The fish with the smile. But he
doesn’t have to, because – because I realise I’m beginning
to rather like them myself. I have to. It’s the only way I can love him – letting go of this wish for someone to somehow
save me. To show by loving me that I am lovable – deserving.
I have to know that anyway. Before him. After him if needs
be. Otherwise it just puts too much power in his hands, and
I don’t think Charlie wants that. It just wouldn’t be fair.
‘Charlie, you know that song – “Someone to Watch Over
Me”?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, it’s about a woman who says she feels like a lamb
who’s lost in the woods, isn’t it?’
‘Those are part of the lyrics – yes.’
‘Well, I don’t want to be that little lamb any more, Charlie.
I’ve done that.’
‘I know.’
‘I’m a bit different to what I thought I was. I’m – I’m more
spacious somehow, inside.’
‘I know.’
‘How do you know all this stuff, Charlie?’
‘I dunno, I just seem to.’
‘I hope I know as much about you.’
‘You do – when you want to.’
I look up at the sky. It’s inky black now. There are stars
and the moon looks very bright.
‘Charlie, do you think they’re watching over us?’
‘Who?’
‘The people we loved? The people who have – you know
– gone?’
‘That’s something I don’t know, Jasmine,’ Charlie wraps
me tightly in his arms again. ‘I wish I did.’
‘I don’t think they are,’ I sigh. ‘I used to think they were.
Susan says we even have Guardian Angels guiding us. Susan
says a lot of things like that. But now I think life’s over when
it’s over. Like a marriage. Like love.’
Charlie buries his face in my hair and breathes deeply.
‘I’ll tell you something that may cheer you up,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘I read somewhere that Mell Nichols is short-sighted. He
only wears contact lenses for work. So that day he saw you in
that hotel foyer – that day he turned away looking bored. He probably didn’t see you at all. So there’s still hope, Jasmine.’ Charlie squeezes my shoulder reassuringly. ‘You and Mell
may still be an item.’
‘I don’t want Mell any more.’ The words tumble out before
I’ve thought of them. ‘I want you, Charlie. It terrifies me,
but I do.’
I feel the earth swaying again, like it did in that earthquake.
Any moment now the ground will crack open.
But it doesn’t.
‘Is it going to stop you – that fear?’ Charlie speaks the
words slowly. Cautiously.
‘I used to think it would. I was sure it would. But now – h
ere – the fear – it feels different.’
‘In what way?’
‘It feels – and I know this might sound strange – it feels like a more ordinary kind of terror. Nothing that unusual
after all.’
Charlie cups my face in his hands and kisses me. A long,
deep kiss that’s sweet and tender and somehow so familiar.
That’s full of a bruised kind of happiness and a sweet kind
of sorrow.
And then, at the same time, our eyes are drawn upwards.
Is it our imagination, or is something odd happening above
the old tree? A strange light is playing through its branches.
As I look more carefully I seem to be able to discern…I
grip Charlie’s arm tightly…could it be?
For there, in the ghostly luminescence are many forms,
including faces – faces from the photos I saved from the black plastic bags. I don’t know all of them – but I recognise Mum and Dad, Aunt Bobs and Uncle Sammy. They’re smiling and
their eyes are full of love. A huge and endless kind of love. The kind of love I have only ever hoped for. But now I feel
it. I feel it all around me.
And then – could it be – could it? Is that the faint
shimmering image of a pink pig with large gossamer wings?
Is that Rosie looking down on us from above – her snout
quivering with pleasure?
‘Charlie is that…are we…?’
‘Shhhh, Jasmine,’ Charlie says gently, his eyes full of
wonderment. ‘Let’s just believe.’
And he’s right – I know it suddenly. I know you can’t
analyse everything. I’ve tried that, and it doesn’t work. In
one moment I could rob this moment of its mystery. Say it
was a meteor shower – something prosaic. Proven. I could
turn away from Charlie too. But I choose not to as I stand
here. I choose to listen to my heart.
The faces are fading now but the stars seem brighter.
‘What a truly amazing, magical place the universe is,’ I
think, in a daze of happiness. I always suspected it somehow.
Me.
Jasmine Smith. Forty-one, going on fourteen.
I smile at the moon. And she beams calmly back at me. As
if to say that what seems so amazing to me now, may one
day seem more commonplace. When I’ve travelled further.
When I’m less afraid. More commonplace, but no less
precious. Something not outside the law of nature, but deep
within it.
Something contradictory in words because it is far beyond th
em.
Like love itself. An ordinary miracle.
Grace Wynne-Jones was born and brought up in Ireland and has also lived in Africa, the US and England. She
has a deep interest in psychology, spirituality and healing and she also loves to celebrate the strangeness and wonders of ordinary life and love. She has frequently been praised for the warm belly-laugh humour and tender poignancy in her writing and has been described as 'a novelist who tells the truth about the human heart'.
Her feature articles have appeared in many magazines and national papers in Ireland and in England and her radio play
Ebb Tide
was broadcast on RTE 1. Her short stories have been published in magazines in Ireland, England and Australia, and have also been broadcast on RTE and BBC Radio 4. She is the author of four critically acclaimed novels:
Ordinary Miracles
,
Wise Follies
,
Ready Or Not?
and
The Truth Club.
S
he has written and broadcast a number of talks for RTE's 'Living Word' and 'Sunday Miscellany' and has been included in the book 'Sunday Miscellany A Selection From 2004 - 2006' (New Island). She also contributed to the travel book 'Travelling Light' (Tivoli).