News From Home

She pulls the past together, gathering weeds, squeezing minnows of memory through shrinking nets. My ex-wife phones from a former home, a village by the sea now sinking on a shelving shore. ‘Brian the pub-crawler took another tumble he now gets rat-arsed on his crutches. They closed the post-office. the new Indian store don’t sell stamps.’ I see them again through a sludge of low tide. Some have declined in mildewed cottages, feet potted and planted, moving sideways through time. Some ankles have developed cankles. The once young dangle baby toes from stout arms. The elderly then are elderly now. ‘Jack Brown got married again, his polyps hang like dewlaps. Elsie Maynard divorced Ken at last, he’s with a fat woman that’s got studs in her eyebrows.’ I feel her need to update, to cover sea walls with new growth or decay. ‘Albert Didcott and his wife Dotty moved to the new estate. Their kid – the second youngest, was knifed on a Saturday night outside the Kings Head, it was in the papers.’ She fills in features until images floats upward. The forgotten and remembered bob between us as bubbles faces I must push out of a glass of muddy water.