Men Like Air

by Connolly, Tom

  ‘Did you ever tell him about the pasta spider webs?’ Ellis asked.

  ‘No. We just fucked.’

  ‘You must have done. There’s no other possible explanation.’

  ‘I didn’t. I tend not to chat about you and your weirdness when I’m having sex. Maybe he was just writing a shopping list at the same time as the card and got confused.’

  ‘Write back to him,’ Ellis said, ‘and tell him we were touched by his writing to us after dad had pasta-way.’

  They laughed until their stomachs hurt. Then they sat awhile in silence and thought their own thoughts and felt the taste of grief on their tongues and discovered that in the space of only a few days the taste had grown familiar and now it felt second-hand. Ellis shut his eyes and watched his father emerge from the bike shed at the cottage, carrying a bucket full of water. Denny swung the bucket round in wide circles above his head but none of the water fell out.

  ‘I thought he was a magician when he did that,’ Ellis said. ‘Did you know how he did it or did you think he was a magician too?’

  ‘You’re doing that thing again,’ Chrissie said.

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘That thing of having a conversation in your head and then bringing me in on it late. You’ve always done it. You’re so useless, Ellis. If you were the last man left on earth, you wouldn’t notice it for weeks.’

  She kissed him and left him to the freefall of random memories in his head.

  Another wave breaks. Ellis drops the Colombo Port shore pass back into the box and notices the dark scratched wood of a once familiar picture frame, in which is held a photograph of a lighthouse and a fishing boat run aground. He carries it outside and looks across the water to that same lighthouse and wreck. He watches the fishermen arrive at the huts in their battered trucks. Towzer Temple leans heavily against his boat and coughs himself awake. He takes a banana from his coat pocket and eats it. He delves into the same pocket and pulls out an old crisp packet, which he seems surprised to have found. He makes a chute out of the packet and pours the crisps into his mouth, pulling a sour face as he tastes them. Lazily, he kicks the side of his boat, betraying their stale marriage, and pulls a bottle from the other coat pocket, and starts to drink.

  A few hundred yards away, the tide snakes around the wreck of the Bessie Swan. Ellis watches it curiously, as if he’s arranged to meet someone there but can’t remember who.

  Perhaps, he tells himself, if I swam out there…

  But he knows he will not do it.

  If I walked out of the house and across the beach without stopping and dived in and swam there and back and ran straight home and dried myself in front of the fire, I’d have done something extraordinary. I’d have pushed myself. Kickstarted my system. If I did it once, I could do it again the next day, and again, and I’d do it every day, it would become second nature and I’d be a different person, the sort of person who did that every day. My life would have changed.

  But he’s not able to change it. He’s too busy. Too busy playing tunes on his shrimping net, watching his neighbour’s washing loop the loop in the wind, seeking out pebbles with perfect holes, lying beneath the lighthouse and watching it sway. Too busy photographing clouds when the colour of crimson bleeds into them at dusk. Too busy waiting. Too busy keeping watch.

  He takes from the metal box something unfamiliar. It looks like a blue plastic cigarette, and when he picks it up the plastic unravels and Ellis sees that it is the long, thin wrapper of a packet of dried spaghetti, the sort Denny used to buy when Ellis was a child and pasta was as long as your arm. As long as your dad’s arm.

  Sign up to our mailing list at

  www.myriadeditions.com

  Follow us on Facebook and Twitter