Free Missing You by Louise Douglas Page B

what he has lost.

 
eleven
     
    On Monday, Fen’s day off, she goes into his room. She stands for a moment, looking around her. Sean’s collection of CDs is stacked along the wall beneath the window, and there are more in boxes beside the facing wall. His guitar leans against the wardrobe door. There’s a small pile of coins on the chest of drawers, a can of deodorant, a comb, a handful of receipts and a hard hat. A high-visibility vest is hooked over the back of the chair. Fen sits on the bed and picks up the framed photograph which was lying, face down, on the carpet below the window.
    It’s a picture of Sean with his arm around the shoulders of a woman. The woman is beautiful. She has dark hair, almond-shaped eyes, a long nose, and the confidence in front of the camera that only ever comes with real beauty. In the picture, Sean’s hair is a little shorter than it is now, his face less tired, and his forehead touches the woman’s forehead, so she must be quite tall. The woman is wearing a chic, short-sleeved black dress. An expensive-looking, cream-coloured handbag is tucked under her elbow. Propped into the bottom corner of the frame is a smaller picture. It’s a photograph of Amy as a chubby toddler on a Mediterranean beach, smiling, her hair in bunches, holding up her hands to whoever is taking the picture, asking to be picked up.
    Fen puts the photograph back on the carpet, nudging it under the bed so that she can vacuum the room without Sean realizing she has been spying. She strips the bed and piles the linen, the duvet and the pillows on the floor. The mattress is stained and smells of ammonia, the familiar farmyard stink of stale child-pee. Fen pushes back her hair and then she grabs one side of the mattress and, heaving, hurting her fingernails and straining the muscles in her arms, she tries to turn it. She has pulled it half off the bed, when she sees the little blue notebook that had been hidden between the mattress and the bed frame.
    Fen knows she shouldn’t intrude on Sean’s privacy, but having done so already, albeit accidentally, she has no qualms about what she does next. She opens the notebook, its cover circled with coffee-mug stains, and reads the words inside. It is filled with lines of poetry, scribbled out, amended – no, not poetry, she realizes, but lyrics. The songs are all love songs. On some pages are little sketches of a woman illustrating the sentiment of the lyrics. Some of the drawings are beautiful, some are ugly. On the second to last page, Sean has drawn a naked man with his head in his hands and then scribbled obscenities over the drawing.
    Tomas used to write illustrated poems about love. He used to hide them too. More often he destroyed them so that nobody else could read them and misinterpret them. He set fire to them or else he tore them up and dropped the pieces over the side of the bridge that took the road over the river in Merron. The pieces of paper fluttered like leaves to the water, where they met their reflections, and were carried, spinning, downstream. And there was a beauty to the destruction of the words, there was a poetry.
    He was fascinated by the conflict between water and fire. Sometimes he would make paper boats and float them at night, setting fire to their paper sails with the yellow flame of a disposable lighter.
    ‘Water always beats fire,’ he said, sucking the side of his thumb because the lighter wheel was rusty and had made it sore.
    He and Joe wanted to go to Japan to watch the peace ceremony at Hiroshima. Tomas told Fen there was an eternal flame burning beside the peace pond and it would only be extinguished when the last nuclear weapon was destroyed. He said the beauty of this symbolism was designed to mask the horrors it hid. He said men would never get rid of nuclear weapons so the flame really was eternal. It would burn until the sun began to swell and sucked the planets and moons of the solar system back into it, like a multiple birth