The 12th Jun 2010 WriteOnSite Winning Entry
The house is lovely,full of the scent of beeswax polish and the thick,sleepy aroma of pastry. Mummy's been working for days, rubbing the faded parquet in the hall until it glows with the same warm expectation I see in her face. We polished the windows together with newspaper and white vinegar, which made my eyes smart when I got too close, and we stole a few sprigs of greenery from the shrubs in the park and stuck them in a little jar on the mantelpiece.
He smells all wrong. His heavy coat stinks of sweat and seawater, and of the thick engine oil that shimmers on the sea around the docks. When he shrugs the coat off it flops over the bannister like a dead creature, damp and senseless. He squats on his haunches, bringing his face down to meet mine, and for an awful moment I'm afraid he's going to kiss me, but he seems to know that I don't want him to.
'I've missed you, my darling,' he says, in a funny, scratchy voice which I've never heard before. His eyes...his eyes are so sad and dark; he keeps glancing over his shoulder as though someone might be creeping up on him. 'I don't suppose you remember me very well, do you?'
He holds out his arms and Mummy pushes me gently towards him, reminding me that I promised him a hug. Every time we wrote, Mummy and I, she would put it at the bottom - 'Claire sends you a big hug and will have a bigger one waiting for you when you come home.'
I want to cry. His jumper is horrible and scratchy, and full of the sour smell of tobacco, but there's something else too - it's as though fear is woven into the wool, stitched into every seam. He holds me at arms' length to look into my face again, and his hands are rough against my skin, hard and not like hands at all.
'I thought of you every day,' he says, in a funny wobbly voice. He smiles, and there's something familiar in the smile but it's as though somebody else is wearing it.
'When we were guarding the convoys,' he says, 'when the subs were crawling underneath us like cockroaches under the bed...then I thought of you waiting for me.'
He strokes my hair, and his hand is gentle; I don't feel the harshness of the calloused skin any more. I feel the fingers trembling, and I can see his shoulders shaking, now - my tall, strong Daddy who used to carry me on those shoulders and laugh down at my Mummy.
'You were like a little beacon in the dark.' He looks at me with the sad, haunted eyes of a ghost who has come home and found everyone gone. I wonder how he must have felt, so cold and frightened all those nights when I lay close against Mummy in the big bed, in the warm hollow his body had left when I was tiny. Now it will be his bed again, and I'm not very happy about that. I can see, though, that he needs the warmth and comfort more than I do.
I'll have to be his beacon for a little longer, yet. I'll have to guide him back through the storms of whatever horrible dreams he's had, back to the world where Mummy and I waited for him. I give him a big hug, and over his shoulder I see the drip, drip, drip of water from the bottom of his coat, falling like tears onto the shining parquet floor.
Copyright © 2008 Rob Richardson. All Rights Reserved.