A miracle; no other way to describe it. After the washing-up of Sunday lunch, she and Freddie had either taken a left out of the front gate and walked towards Mam’s parents, or turned right over the railway bridge to Dad’s. Attempted recall techniques had included a retracing on Google Maps of as much of the route as could be remembered by a failing 90 year old brain and cajoling her granddaughter to drive her on their weekly car trip along every exit of every roundabout in the town. Pris was giving up hope. There were over a hundred roundabouts and at least five hundred possible exits. Some she recognized; some not. Road realignments, estate clearances and the ripple-out expansion of shopping centres, had remodelled the once familiar. Every now and then something – the sight of an old industrial chimney, a stretch of stone wall, the metallic nose of rusting industrial archaeology blasting through the car’s air vents – promised to tug a distant memory chime, only to muffle, return into the unrecognisable and remain silent. Did she have 10 years?
Pris had awoken that morning, in an apprehension of excitement. The two “lost” addresses were clear in her mind. Using the bedpull trapeze ring, she manoeuvred herself upright avoiding the bedding bloodied by the nightly nosebleeds, reached for pencil and paper on the bedside table (there were caches strategically placed all over the house) and wrote them down.
“Don’t really understand all the fuss,” In fear, Cherry had almost spat out the words. This foolish quest was what kept her grandmother going. What would her reaction be if the addresses still stood as physical houses? Worse, what if they had been a victim of the clearances and were now anonymous grassed-over mounds with the same ghosted street-names remaining?
One found, one to go. There on the corner of Mam’s parents’ house was the original cast-iron nameplate . Phosphoresecence.A mind-picture drifted lazily upwards and surfaced in Pris’ consciousness. The moonlight was playing hide and seek with the clouds. A fully rigged sailing ship was galvanising the tiny sea creatures and algae into glowing activity as it sashayed across the bay. It was as if the essence of her being, the fake sentimentality of childhood, the closeness with her brother Freddie before the parting, was distilled in the names her grandparents had given their houses. The cool of the moonlight burnt through the heat-haze of her parent’s estrangement, and Freddie’s addiction. She felt a growing judder as the tabs of her fragmented self adjusted, reconfigured, and started to find the corresponding sockets in the jigsaw puzzle of life.
The finding of The Barque would make her whole, clear and ready for whatever the future would bring; she was convinced of it.
