MARTIN GOODMAN

Puffins in flight

If nuns were set loose in a wider world, their graffiti would cover whole walls in lurid slogans. Instead they keep to whitewashed cells, and produce devotional texts in a tidy script.

Leonard’s mother had lots of their writings. They hung in slender frames on the walls of the living room and kitchen. Desidemta was one, the most famous because the most typical. Leonard had grown up with it, yet couldn‘t recall a single line. The message was simply there on the wall. It was cosy and it was good.

He had chosen a similar get-well card when his mother was taken into hospital. It was coloured sky-blue and showed a seagull flying against a bank of cloud. ’We can because we think we can’ was written across the bottom, like handwriting but in gold. She had stacked it with the others in her bedside drawer.

‘I‘ll not get well,’ she said. Her hair had been white for years. In earlier days it had stood up on top

of her head like a poodle’s, tied in bright bows made from narrow strips of velvet. It hadn’t fallen out like they had feared, but now it was lank. ‘Can I bring you anything?’ he asked. ’No. It’s time for you to go.’ She nodded slightly to the side of the bed.

’And take that thing with you.’ It was a zimmer frame. As well as the chemotherapy they had had to

operate on her leg. Now she was supposed to walk, little by little, to give the leg some strength.

’You’ve got to try, Mum. The doctors say so.’ ‘I know what the doctors say. They say I’ll never walk normal again. So

why should I try? Why waste the effort?’ He reached out for her hand but only to touch it lightly. Sometimes the

pain reached every part of her so that the touch of even a word could hurt. ’I love you, Mum,’ he said. ’You love me too much. That’s your trouble.’ She pulled her hand back.

’You’ll be better when I’m gone. You can live a life of your own.’ She was letting go. There was nothing for her to hold on to. ’You never remember anything good,’ she had complained on an earlier

visit. ’Every story you tell is of a day that went wrong. We thought we were giving you a good life, your father and me. We wanted good things for you. Now here you are, all grown up and choked with bad memories.

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How do you think we feel about that? I’m your mother, Leonard. That‘s all I am. A wife and a mother. I lie here and wonder what it was all for.’

Leonard sat on the bed in his bedsit with a writing pad on the slope of his knee. He was writing to his mother. It would be a letter about some good things in his life.

He had to cancel out the first two memories. One was of his sister. That was bad enough in itself. She had left home at

sixteen and vanished into London. The memory was of her sitting on the dusty earth beneath their garden swing. A tortoise was on her lap. When she lifted it up and its legs stuck out to paddle through the air, a long white streak was left on the navy blue pleats of her skirt. It seemed like a miracle, that what looked like a stone could leave the same droppings as a bird.

The second cancelled memory was from the same summer. A rabbit was bought for the two of them, complete with hutch. They

stuffed dandelion leaves through the wire and filled a glass feeding bottle with water. That night the rabbit gave birth. There were a number of stumbling blobs of creatures to stare at through the next day. By the following morning there were none. The mother had eaten them all.

This wasn’t the pet the parents had hoped for. The rabbit and her hutch were sent back to the pet shop.

He could see what his mother meant. Memories did come out bad. He gave it some thought, and came up with an explanation. The bad

things were remembered because they were so strange. They stood out. Acts of kindness came in such a steady flow they were the stuff of his daily life.

He thought on, jumping forward about a year to a running race at a holiday camp. He was a good runner as a boy. Tell him to run and he would. When the shout came to go he set off and was a close second as they raced across the field. Then the boy ahead of him veered to the left to head for his mother’s lap. Leonard followed his lead and did the same, as fast as he could. He looked around at all the mothers without their children, guessed that he had won, and turned to look up at his own.

He expected a smile. The line of her mouth was straight. She lifted him out of her lap and pointed to the finishing line, where the last of the stragglers was crossing.

That was life apparently. You were set down at a point apart from your mother, and encouraged to end up still further away. It was a game he had never understood.

He dropped the pad to the floor. Its top sheet was stillblank. He changed tack, searching instead for the best day in his life, and found he had

Puffins in flight 45

abandoned his childhood. The memory was from the recent past, of a day when his mother was nowhere near. Maybe that would please her. She was funny that way.

He had taken Carol and a tent up the Al. The idea was to get to Lindis- farne. Carol liked the mead and he might buy his mother another text for her wall. But the causeway to the Holy Island was flooded by the tide and they motored on to a campsite in the flat land near Seahouses.

It was too late to do much that day. They had a fish supper and played some machines, then took a bottle of mead back to the tent.

It was their first time in a tent, in twin sleeping bags joined together by a long zip. The light that was still caught in the night sky was tinged green by the canvas. Carol smiled, her cheeks flushed and her frizz of hair bunched up above her ears by the inflatable pillow. The smile wasn’t for him. Her lips were sticky and sweet from the mead. She giggled even as she complained about the firm ground beneath her back, and made him take his full weight on his elbows. It was like doing press-ups.

Afterwards it was strange, They were locked together in the bag, when normally she would roll out from under the quilt and trip off to the bathroom. She compromised, and crawled out to crouch over a box of tissues. He wanted not to watch, so closed his eyes and listened for the sea. Carol was laughing. She was still happy. He couldn’t hear the sea, only that laughter and the buzz of his brain. The mechanics of life.

They were back in Seahouses early the next morning, taking breakfast in a cafe. Down at the harbour they bought tickets for the first of the day’s sailings out to the Farne Islands. To fill in the time before their boat left he followed Carol back up the hill and they looked around each of the shops as they opened.

The boat chugged and they edged between the harbour walls, pushing towards the sun as it rose above the grey waters. Then the birds came. The guide named them; the shags, the guillemots, the kittiwakes, the cormor- ants. The white birds caught the sunlight like silver in their wings, while the black ones cut into the sky as clear as silhouettes. Their flights were a display, and when still they posed. Each found some hold on the islands, atop a black crag or tucked against a cliff face, their breasts held against the wind.

He took a picture, of Carol s-g before a backdrop of an island of seals. They were vast hulks of flesh folded over brown rock.

Grace Darling’s lighthouse remained a distant landmark. The boat was tied to a jetty and they climbed out to wander paths set across one of the islands by the National Trust.

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The rock was made soft by stretches of pale grass nibbled back to the roots. They knelt beside the other passengers from the boat to peer over a cliff edge at nesting kittiwakes. The nearest was within reach of outstretched hands, each bird keeping fast to a clutch of eggs laid on each ledge.

Across on the other side of the island there were areas marked by low lines of string as being out of bounds. Burrows pocketed the earth, and puffins scuttled between them. Leonard laughed. The birds weren't comic, the colours on their beaks were not like the paint on a clown's face. They just seemed so busy. It amused him to see that the pace of life was hectic even on an island.

The boat turned in the direction of the shore, and Leonard took in his last view of the birds. A puffin flew towards the boat and then on. Its flight was low, its body the size and shape of a Christmas pudding. The tiny wings buzzed like an insect's to keep it above the water. As Leonard watched he had to shield his eyes, then look away. The black dot was burnt to nothing by the sun.

He picked up his pad. With his finger against the bare wood he drew broad lines across the bottom of the paper, pressing down on the side of the lead rather than its point. These were the lines of the sea. He used his wrist as a compass to draw a semicircle of the rising sun above the horizon. It was a picture instead of a letter, and his mother wouldn't like it. She would feel the lack of words.

He paused to see if the words would come, then pressed on. He would give it to his mother as it was, and she could hand it straight back. That was how it should be. It was a way for him to let go.

He drew a small circle which he crossed with a short line, then c o l o d it in black. The drawing was of a puffin just before it found the sun.