Red Letter Day

28^th June

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_letter_day

Already you’re divided. Some of you are thinking what the hell’s she on about. Some (the more learned ) are smug in your knowledge of why it’s called a red letter day. The curious will go to wiki and find out.

 I am wondering which letter I’d paint red.

Probably ‘S’ for surreal

I remember the Scarlet Letter – BBC series – gal with fabulous eyes.

I’m in the front garden at mum’s old house.

It’s mum’s birthday. Well it WAS mum’s birthday. If she was still here it would be her birthday. It’s the first birthday she had when she wasn’t here. I think you see what I’m struggling to say.

As if that wasn’t surreal enough, I spoke to my dad today for the first time in about thirty five years. The words just flowed as natural as if we did it every day of our lives. Only we haven’t. I’m amazed that I could. That the sounds formed themselves and came out of my mouth without  curling and twisting and drying and turning into barbed wired and fluorescent , stinking,  vomit.

All the nights I’ve lain awake and practised what I’d say. How I’d say it. Where we’d be. And it wasn’t like that at all. And he didn’t sound like I remembered.

 Well – he wouldn’t would he. He’s 75 now. His voice is thin and whispery and raspy and rough from a lifetime of tobacco and lies. His teeth are mostly missing and his brow is shiny from the skull that strains to split the skin beneath. His hard earned tan has mottled his skin and he looks like his mother. Dark beady eyes that shift and glint. Pliable lips capable of anything.

He climbed off a bike that he wouldn’t have been seen dead on at forty. Age mellows our fashion sense it seems – even in bicycles. Before I know what I have done I have smiled and said hi and he has smiled back.

He comes into what is now my brother’s garden  and walks up the path towards me.

It’s too late now. It’s too late to look away and too late to disappear round the side of the house. It’s too sunny to expect him to say what I rehearsed him to say.

He doesn’t say anything resembling sorry.

He looks at the body parts on the lawn at my feet.

The marigolds are nodding orange and yellow heads under the too blue sky and I hear myself telling him about photographing a friend’s sculpture – as if I owe him an explanation about anything in my life.

“Somebody’s been busy.”

I don’t know if he heard what I said about the sculpture.

He leans very close to me and peers at the Canon slung around my neck – as if he is my father and is allowed to come that close.

I don’t back away.

I’m grown up now I don’t have to back away.

“Same as mine,” he smiles and walks towards my brother’s front door.

“Well, it’s not what you’ve got, it’s what you do with it,” I say to his back.

My first retort to him as adult to adult. It’s not scary. I don’t have to swallow my words. I don’t have to let them scurry about in my belly like hot coals.

He half turns back to me with his hand on the door knob.

“You’re right,” he tells me then goes into my brother’s house.

Like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

I stand on the lawn where just less than a year ago my mum lay dying with a fatal heart attack and I look at the nodding marigolds she planted and I am guilt ridden and sorry but I am not afraid and I am not trembling.