Free Tying Down The Lion by Joanna Campbell

“The stakes are reasonable.”
    “It’s all right, Sir,” the father says, looking pleased to be asked, but sad that it could never be possible.
    “You’d be welcome,” Dad insists through a cloud of smoke, shuffling and smiling like mad.
    “She wouldn’t understand, I’m afraid,” the mother says, trying to prise Bwa-Bwa’s hand off the elegant lady-joker wearing one red and one black shoe.
    I can see what has to happen. There is a sticky old pack of cards from Clacton in our bag. The ace of spades is missing and the jack of hearts has a bent corner, but isn’t that always the way? I give the Biba cards to Bwa-Bwa. I have never done anything as nice as that before. I would never have given them to Gillian.
    “You can have them,” I tell Bwa-Bwa. “To keep.”
    And after the no-we-couldn’t-possibly and the-pleasure’s-all-ours rituals, they accept the beautiful Biba cards. The smiling father looks back at us and his face shows he’s thinking, “How nice and ordinary they are. I’ll never have that.”
    Once the ship drones towards the Belgian coast, we return to the deck. The spray leaps up, stiffening our faces and turning our hands wet and cold on the metal railing. Dad holds his cigarette to Mum’s lips and she breathes hard, leaving her apricot lipstick on the tip. Her hair is trapped under a blue scarf with an anchor pattern, a few blonde wisps flying free in the briny wind.
    “I am so nervous, Roy.”
    “Have another drag, love.”
    “Beate resents me for leaving Germany,” she says. “Was I wrong?”
    I imagine Mum as a dragonfly skimming past a spider’s web, while the ordinary insects are caught.
    “Hey, hold the bloody bus, love,” Dad says, trying to push the escaping hair under her scarf. “I found you hanging on by a thread. I took you away to start again. That’s not scarpering.”
    “But I left them,” she says, her smoke snatched by a sea-breeze. “They had always tried to make me safe, but I made no difference at all. I was always just a…ach, what is that odd sea-creature that stands on its head and eats with its toes?”
    “I can roly-poly underwater with a beach-ball between my knees,” Victor suggests.
    “A barnacle, love, do you mean?” Dad asks her.
    She nods. “Yes, something that always must depend on someone else.” And she frowns at the bleary crayon-line of the horizon, unwilling to leave the no-man’s land of the boat yet.
    The thrilling discovery of land excites everyone else on the ship. We all turn into Vasco da Gama. Children are held up to see it and put down again, disappointed with the dun-coloured streak in the distance.
    “When I first saw England,” Mum says, “I wanted the ship to turn round and take me back.”
    “I feel like that now, Bridge,” Grandma says.
    The sight of land doesn’t mean stepping off the ship. It takes ages to actually reach it, longer than it took to cross the everlasting sea. Dad takes Grandma and Victor to look at the shop while Mum and I squash into seats scattered with pastry crumbs at yet another scribble-patterned table in a smoky bar, surrounded by crowds of clammy, yawning people.
    “So, Jacqueline, I’m going home at last,” she says, sounding more German than ever.
    I grit my teeth, but this business about going home is the gist of the project, so I’ll have to grin and bear it, if it is possible to grin through gritted teeth. It must be, because that politician, Edward Heath—the one who wants to sail round the world and Dad says he blooming well should and take as long as he likes about it—manages it.
    “Mum, for this project, we used pictures for inspiration. And I found one of a factory in Berlin.”
    I want to say how I saw the little building, what’s left of it, and thought of Mum. “I thought of you.” Do daughters say that to mothers?
    “I...thought…it would be good,” is what burbles up instead. Pathetic. But she is looking at me as if no one could have told her anything better.