A corner for unused dreams

In my head

The beach - the beach was calling to me every day last week, so instead of writing I was walking.

Walking with the ghosts of my past. My long dead mother in the dunes. She would paint. Her focus the distant flat sea horizon, her hands on brushes and her pallet of colours, painting country scenes of trees from memory while staring out across the sea. Creating a wall between her children and herself with the canvas sat up on the heavy easel Dad found for her that would not blow over in the wind. The easel took three kids to carry. Mum would carry the canvas.

Beach people.

My Dad with his camera - the click and manual turn of film, the Leica held up in front of his eyes so we could not catch his blue, blue eye. A handkerchief with knots in the corners to cover the bald spot on his head.

My brothers and sisters would run off squabbling as I dropped down into an easy squat to investigate a shell or a pile of seaweed or a flash of tiny fish in a rock pool left behind by the receding sea.

I would memorise every movement in the rock pool then scuttle back to my bag, pulling out my writing book and fishing for the pencil to write it all down. Describing every second - every flash. The sand. The crab. The tiny stones shiny and iridescent in the water. Their magic receding with the waves of tide leaving nothing but dried up stones no-one would look at twice.

When I was older, though not much older, I met a man on the beach and we became friends. He had decided he wanted to write a book so we went into town one day - we drove in my car because he did not have a car. We went to the stationers and he spent all his money on a beautiful silver typewriter. It’s ribbon coiled inside, all wet and fertile and black and ready. It had a blue case with a black handle that begged to be held and spirited away. He also bought three pads of paper. He said the book was going to be about three hundred pages long so he bought that many blank sheets. He was not the type of person who took advice so I offered none. A stunning dark red fountain pen plus ink in a bottle with black ink printed in bold script on the label was added to the loot.

He paid in cash.

We loaded the means to write a book into the back seat of my car, in beside the children’s empty school day car seats.

I said “What is your book about?”

He looked at me. Then looked at the exercise book peeking out of my big solo mother-of-five hand bag. Then looked at the pencil holding up my hair, sticking up like a flag-less flag. Then he looked back into the sluggish week day town traffic.

“Just narrowing it down”. He said.

I tucked my story book down out of sight. Suddenly afraid of him stealing my words as though they were not for sharing anyway.

I admit to you now that I envied him that typewriter and all that paper. Mostly the paper. I never had enough paper. I would open up the sides of the empty weetbix box and write on the inside of it when I ran out of paper. No empty space was safe from my pencil. Every envelope was carefully unstuck and smoothed out. Butchers paper was cheap. Feeding children came first. I was embarrassed by my envy of his piles of paper and said nothing.

I met the man here and there - high tide, low tide. Middle of the road tide. I often asked how his book was going (we really had nothing else in common) and he would launch into a great long description of how busy his life was - with this and that. Many words spoken. None written. Pulled out with the falling tide.

For years I thought of that pile of bright white unused paper and that shiny new typewriter.

Sat in the corner reserved for unused dreams.