It hadn’t always been like this. My love had been light, without form, diffused throughout my body. It had surged through my heart, riding the red blood cells, surfacing in my lungs like a fish. But I’d managed, by some alchemy of good sense, to compress love into a thing I could carry – this density of wanting. So I held it, ready to give it away. But not to anyone. It was mine and I liked the feel of it in my arms.
I found a mirror. There was only one left. Inside me the dehydrated carcass of my love for my father gave a feeble kick. I’ve tried many times to expel it, thinking it cannot be healthy to carry this shrivelled thing for so long. Yet I might as well try to rip out my own soul. I wished I could find a present that would nourish the old love and bring it back to health. But my father’s not a man who needs anything much except now, perhaps, a shaving mirror.
The cardboard box it came in was unimpressive and a little battered from being opened and closed many times. I opened it too and took the mirror out. One side magnified my face. Around the edges of the frame the glass was marred by smears of glue. Still, it was the only one left in the shop. I thought about searching through the store for a small padded bag it would fit neatly inside. But the aisles were so full of people. Pushing my way through them, to go so far and to have to come back again, would take me beyond my threshold for pain-free shopping. I carried my father’s mirror to the nearest till.
Of course there was a queue. But I tapped the small reserve of patience I had brought along for the purpose and remained calm. The woman in front of me was a long time at the checkout and seemed about to explode, for she had just brought a three-for-two deal down the crowded stairs only to find that one of the items was not included in the offer. She would have to pick everything up again – the two wire baskets filled with unwieldy gift-packed items and the three fat bags of things already purchased slumping at her feet – and struggle back upstairs. You could see from her face that she hadn’t even liked the things she’d chosen. She’d settled for less than her ideal because she didn’t know what it was – yet had to find something to give. On this, the last Saturday before Christmas, she still had names on her list to be accounted for, matched against items – unsuitable ones if necessary.
I paid for the mirror and took my two thin bags and my love out onto the street. At which point, having done all my shopping for Christmas, I was free to go where I pleased. I could have looked for the man in the places he was likely to be but I didn’t. My love, sometimes so bold, felt inclined to be shy. Instead I went to a small shop filled with fine foods and people buying them. I bought Welsh honey and slabs of halva, and olives in a jar, things I can’t get in my village.
Back on the street I allowed the worries of others to flow around me, while I fastened onto the excitement of lights winking in the dusk. Glitter and candles and velvet to conjure a kind of life in the dark heart of winter. I could already taste the regret I would feel at the end of the day, standing on a station platform among too many people skirted by bags. We would wait in packed rows, unable to sit down, since all the benches would be taken and besides we might lose our chance to board the next train, a train ten minutes late, a half-hour late, a train promised, a train which might never arrive. ‘Please stand back behind the blue line!’ pleads the announcer. Is he afraid we will throw ourselves onto the tracks?
At last my two presents and my love and I will be carried away from Cardiff. On the train I will sway standing up all the way back to the place where I know, for sure, that the man is not.
At home I will set my love down and there let it rest for a while. A bit knocked about at the corners but still at the core quite intact; quite as lovely as ever. All ready for the New Year.
Acknowledgements
‘Pumping Up Napoleon’ was published in Mslexia.
‘The Love I Carry’ was published in New Welsh Review.
‘The Dancing King’, was published in My Cheating Heart, (Honno, Aberystwyth).
‘Scary Tiger’ was published in Outercast 2: Insanity.
Seren is the book imprint of Poetry Wales Press Ltd
57 Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales CF31 3AE
www.seren-books.com
© Maria Donovan 2007
ISBN 978-1-78172-130-8
The right of Maria Donovan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.
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