Tag Short Stories

The Bees in the Chimney – 3

Laurel Lindström Leave a comment

“Do you know what you’re doing?” The beekeeper looked at her with raised eyebrows and tried to ignore how unexpectedly sexy she looked in a beesuit. The tight gathering at the waist; a makeshift belt had hanging from it a hive tool, a bee brush and a rag. The belt was a length of thick string with loops she’d fashioned into it. Penny didn’t look up but answered, “no, not really, but I thought it time to try. I’ve watched you so often.” The beehive at the bottom of Penny’s garden had been in place for some weeks now, ever since the swarm had arrived in her chimney and she’d had the local bee wrangler come to deal with them. She hadn’t expected someone quite so tall and wiry and she found Mr Westerham a little intimidating.

The plan had been that once settled the bees would be moved elsewhere, say to his house or to a local apiary. But he’d kept coming to check on them and unawares she’d found random reasons why they should stay a little longer. And here they were. And here he was too. Again. She’d worried about the weather at one point, but he never did get to the bottom of what the weather had to do with it. Bees are bees. They go with whatever the weather is, wherever they are.

Sweating slightly, she was shoving the thin metal edge of the hive tool under the hive roof to get it loose enough to remove. She’d seen him do this many times. From afar it hadn’t looked that hard. Despite her new, super impenetrable beesuit she was less confident than she had expected. She prodded cautiously at the proposis seal the bees had worked into every possible gap. It was much harder to break than she’d expected. Her special gloves were a bit too big and their rubberised layer meant her fingers couldn’t move properly. She shoved a little harder with the hive tool and heard the cracking sound of propolis coming away from the two surfaces it was gluing together. She loosened the hive’s roof and with a beaming smile dropped her hive tool and grasped the roof’s edges with both hands and lifted it. 

“Oh,” she said breathless, stepping from foot to foot, looking about her, her mind a blank as to what should happen next. He reached over and took the roof from her, leaning into her warmth and sensing her worry. He leant the roof against the hive stand and stepped back, saying “now you’ve got to do the same with the crown board, but that’s much easier.” And he turned and headed back to his car. “Yes” she said, “the crown board,” watching him move up the garden on long lean strides. She pried off the thin layer of wood sitting between the roof and the bees, and less stressed put it on the ground against the roof.

She was held in the breath of thousands of honey bees, their propolis, honey, pollen a complex mingling of summer intoxications. Now in his beesuit Mr Westerham was back, peering over her shoulder into the hive. The scent of him reached slowly into her senses. In the unexpected light the bees were momentarily agitated and their sound rose loud and a little angry before settling slowly  back to a steady hum. “What next?” she said as he drew in closer, taking her hive tool in hand to reach for the first of the several frames hanging in the top box of the hive. As he reached over she felt herself pulled slightly closer to him as the tethered tool reached top stretch. She felt herself breathe in a drowsing blend, at once exhilarating and soporific. His hand on hers guided the hive tool to loosen the frame as he whispered “you take one side and I’ll get the other.” The clumsy gloves didn’t help, but together they lifted a small wooden rectangle, heavy with summer, heavy with honey and she let out a small gasp amazed at what she was sharing. Standing still, holding a frame full of honey and watching the bees calm and busy, shaping their spaces for winter stores and for new bees. He too was held still in a space he didn’t quite recognise, beekeeper or not.

Shuttered

Laurel Lindström Leave a comment

The dust blowing in from the Sahara was turning everything orange. Joe could barely see the tops of the hills from his little window, and the gold of the dust shimmered as the sun crept up behind the houses. The colour reminded him of a traffic light’s glow, the warning one, the one that meant put your foot down. But here in this remote place there were no traffic lights and no need to hurry. Here life was lazy, slow. This he knew, so he didn’t put his food down and instead turned away from the light. But his fingers were clenching and an urgency pushed at him as he filled the kettle and put the toast on.

In the distance he heard the putt-putt-putt of a fishing boat coming in and wondered how long it would take her to get home, how long before the toast started to burn, the tea to stew. He could hear the sound of voices drifting up from the shore, but he couldn’t see the people. He couldn’t see the man lifting crates of dead fish onto the quai. He couldn’t see her jump out of the boat and turn away from the boat, the man and the crates. But he thought he could picture them in his head, her, the captain and Mattia. Mattia. Tall and narrow, classic Roman nose, receding hairline hidden under a grubby beany. His large hands are worn and crabbed, his voice mumbly and infrequent. He walks ramrod straight, muscular, intimidating. He fascinates Joe.

Joe had only met this man a few times, but each time he had studied him carefully. He was to be Joe’s model for the romantic hero in Rock of Sorrows, Joe’s novel. An engimatic Italian speaking English with a lazy accent, waving his hands with every phrase, sucking on his cigarette. Seductive beyond the random scowls and silences. But getting this man onto the page was proving harder than Joe had expected. He wasn’t sure where to start. Joe was having the same problem writing his main character’s love interest, he just couldn’t find the thread. The plot and narrative arc were also more of a challenge than Joe had anticipated, so the writerly journey was going very slowly. Sometimes he couldn’t even spell.

Joe suppressed the nagging sense that maybe he wasn’t a writer after all, that it was just a vanity. He heard the door bang and called to Cathy “How was it?” He poured the tea and buttered the toast as she kicked off her sandals and threw her jacket onto the little chair by the door. Warm air drifted in as she tossed a couple of red mullets into the sink. They narrowly missed a bowl half filled with the dank remnants of yesterday’s washing up. They floated sadly on greasy grey water.

“Oh it was as lovely as usual, although the sea was a bit choppier than I like”. Cathy smiled up at Joe, open eyed, loving and gave his arm a little squeeze. But Joe had drifted off thinking again of what he could do about his novel, how to make his version of Mattia a bit more talkative, more friendly. He aimed a sincere smile at Cathy, and almost made it. “He’s an interesting guy, that Mattia”. In life Mattia wasn’t particularly interesting, he was just quiet. Joe was sure he ought to be mysterious and sexy in the book, but how to achieve it? Joe handed Cathy a mug of tea, watching as she slid into her chair and blew gently at the steam. It wasn’t really tea weather, not really a tea climate even but, being English, tea was always the answer no matter the question. The question was hovering but it hadn’t yet arrived.

 “Did you manage to get anything written last night?” she said conversationally. She really did want to know, want to hear that his book was progressing. Joe considered a small fib, a couple of details to give Cathy reassurance, but not necessarily the whole story. There was no story to tell. “I’ve got the structure outlined, I think”. An easy lie. Structure was something someone had said was important for a novel. He wanted to understand it so much, but writing Chapter 1 at the top of one sheet of paper and The End at the bottom of another surely didn’t count. Cathy’s late night fishing trips gave him extra time and space to write. The emptiness of night, the silence and aloneness, it was all supposed to create the perfect writerly atmosphere. And for Cathy it was wonderful to be out on the sea in the dark, waves slopping at the boat, creaking sounds and random splashes, silent fishermen.

When Joe and Cathy had first asked Mattia and his father if she might come out on the boat with them, the two men had been baffled. They couldn’t understand if they had misunderstood and if they hadn’t, why she would want to. “It’s very late at night, we go”. Mattia’s father had said with each hand holding fingers to thumbs and his wrists rising up and down. “What you want to do in the dark, on a stinking fishing boat?” Cathy earnest and intense was hard to resist. “Sometimes I want to be out on the sea in the dark and quiet and we don’t have a boat of our own. I won’t be any trouble. We have Euros for the fuel”. 

Joe had stayed in the background during the curious negotiations, pondering the idea of including the father in his book as well as Mattia. He gave a little cough and expanding on what Cathy had said, gave it a sort of patriarchal stamp of approval. “Yes, we’re happy to help defer any additional expense you might incur”, he concluded, smug and superior in his excellent use of the English language. The two Italians looked at him for a moment, and recognising a fellow male, but not entirely understanding what he had said, nodded. “Okay, we do this. You come tonight at three, we go. €50. Okay?”. And they returned to their boat, muttering and gesticulating with the occasional glance over their shoulders at Cathy, waving and beaming over her shoulder as she and Joe walked away.  

That was two months ago and not much of Rock of Sorrows had made it onto the page, not even a structure. But he was pleased that Cathy gave him those extra hours to work in, flattered that she made sure he had a fully charged laptop and phone, pencils and notebooks. He had been content to sit there with an oil lamp casting gentle light over his random notes and sentence scraps. But there weren’t many more words now than there had been at the start of the experiment. And the struggle was getting too much, despite the online forums with other writers in other time zones working on similarly tricky dilemmas. Those conversations had started out being very stimulating, with story prompts, advice about narration and how to make the show-don’t-tell thing work. But it hadn’t been as easy as Joe thought to put any of it into practise. Instead he was getting bored with listening to people whinge about the costs of self-publishing, the impossibility of finding an agent, artificial intelligence and recalcitrant characters and dialogue.

“Let’s see where you are? Can I read what you’ve got so far?”. Cathy bright eyed and caffeinated was searching the desk, fingering notebooks and looking at him expectantly. Silence. Joe turned away, went to the window and opened wide the shutters. He saw the orange dust shrouding the tops of the hills as he let in the broadening day. He put the notebooks and his pencils in a drawer, smiled a rueful smile and gently pushed down the lid of his laptop.

Glow

Laurel Lindström 1 Comment

The sea, the sea, the sea, the slowly swelling sea. She looked up from her book to see if his boat was coming in yet. They should have been back in port by now. Evening light was lingering slowly grey across the risen waves as they pounded the harbour wall. From her viewpoint halfway up the hill, warm and dry in her sea facing room, she could see no boats coming in, just the churning feathered and unrelenting waves.

Startled and cricking her neck as she came too suddenly awake, the thumping on the door chorused in sync with the booming wind hitting the house and calling a warning. On the doorstep stood her lover, wet and weeping. “What’s happened, what’s the matter? Come in come in out of the wet and tell me what the matter is, what’s happened. You’re crying. What’s happened?”

He was a small man, Jason, and he moved with a strange sideways gait, thanks to a legacy hurt, a childhood injury that didn’t heal right, something to do with a slide as she recalled. She always noticed this movement and its curious irregular swing. It never changed. A constant, a strange sort of comfort. But the tears, the tears were not a constant, nor a comfort. She watched as he dumped rain slickers, boots and hat on the hall floor, splashing sea and rainwater onto the narrow walls where the water droplets slowly dribbled into corners and wept away into the carpet.

“Come in by the fire and tell me what’s wrong.” She pictured a run over dog, damage to the boat or a landslip that might’ve overcome her beehives. She was a little alarmed to see him go straight to the booze cupboard and pour himself a stiff one. Then he stood, staring out at the darkness and watching the rain hurl itself against the windows. Sparks as she threw another log on the woodburner before closing the door swift and tight against the surging heat. “Jason, what is it? Please.” She was starting to feel urgent, a more than anxious foreboding rising up inside, almost to nauseousness. She watched him sip his drink through the tears and choking gasps. The choking gasps might’ve been the whiskey: Jason didn’t drink. Even more cause for alarm as he contiued to sip and wheeze.

By now the storm had overwhelmed ocean, sky, hillside and all the rooftops, pathways and trees. Nothing was beyond its reach. Everything the storm touched was held in a tight and noisy and deadly embrace. Everything was teased with its terror, with rising fears that this time the weather might win and somehow take them all. She often told herself this, that it would one day take them all, that the weather would be the ultimate winner. But this was a silliness and she focused again on Jason. As Fiona leaned in close to him she felt fear tighten its grip and she knew it wasn’t the boat or the bees. “What happened?” she whispered, her round face tight and drawn of colour despite the woodburner’s warmth stretching throughout the room. “I was watching for your boat, but I must’ve nodded off so I didn’t see you come in.” Jason swallowed the last of his whiskey and slowly reached out with great deliberation to put the empty glass on the little table beside him. His face was very red and his tears were slowly falling. His eyes downcast and he picked at random bobbles of wool on his jumper. Then he took her hand and tried to look at her through the tears. Her eyes were wide with anticipation and her face pale with unsaid understanding, despite the warmth of the room. She knew. She was calm. But she needed the words. “It’s Callum isn’t it? It’s Cal. Where is he?” “Gone.” Jason sobbed and put his free hand over his face, clutching Fiona’s hand tighter and trying to keep his shoulders from rising with his buried sobs. “He went overboard with a huge swell we didn’t see coming and we got him out but by the time we did, in fading light and with the ring and the boathook and even a net we got him out, we didn’t lose him but it was too slow, we were too slow; he was too long under the water, he was too long without air, he drowned in front of us and the sea just kept pulling and pulling at him and we kept trying to get him in close to the boat and he fought and struggled and reached out for us but the sea kept burying him under, kept on and on and on until there was nothing but the bulk of him, dead and us still hanging on to the net. We lost the boathook and the ring. Nothing worked, nothing worked to keep him above the water. But we got him back. The sea couldn’t take him, but it was too late for Callum. Too late.” An overwhelming torrent and Jason fell sobbing into Fiona’s lap, buried under waves of sorrow and the horror of his last few hours.

Fiona sat very still stroking her lover’s wet hair and damp back. She noticed he was sodden through and that a soft mist rose from his crumpled body as the spirit of the sea drifted up now to claim her in a steamy caress. Her heart seemed to have stopped in her chest and her breathing was blocked. As night and storm slowly faded across the hours, the lovers were still stiff and still and silent as the morning light stretched into the room and eventually roused them.

Then to face the horrors of police, inquest, funeral, and all the ancillary processes of death. And then six months later what Fiona and Jason did next. What they and Callum would have forever, together. A window. A stained glass window in the village church that would memorialise Callum and all the other sailors the sea had claimed. 

She said loud “I want the window to be blue. I want it to be of sea and sky, of dawn and dusk, of what is beneath and above the surface, of truth and of turmoil. I want it to be modern and old, a luminous link between what is and what was, something ancient.” A little confused Jason nodded his agreement as the artist took notes and smiled a gentle understanding. “What was he like, Callum?” she said looking from one to the other. That neither of them could answer straightaway was at once a little puzzling and somehow encouraging. The artist tried a different tack. “You want this window to memorialise Callum, yes?” Jason this time with a sudden blurt, “no, no, not a memorial, a celebration of the sea and those it has claimed. A celebration of glory, of wonder and of life.” Fiona squeezed his hand. “Yes” she said, “that’s it, a celebration so that every scrap of light that shines through your work will be like a new light, a new life.”

The window took some time to complete, but it was finally installed one sharp winter morning, with a ceremony and blessings and the trappings of holiness. The watching sea glittered proud and beautiful whispering to a gleaming sky and the light of life. The small gathering stood back to hear the whispers and watch life’s glow reach into the church, illuminating all that it touched. Life. Immutable. Endless.

A Christmas message

Laurel Lindström Leave a comment

I It’s Christmastime and here we are

Each alone and yet in shared space

We’re secret and shared, random, but gathered in

We watch as one sips wine or waves across the room

We see another pick stray hairs from a dear one’s shoulder

We wonder at their constance, what they love and hold dear

We think of late night trains and sunken lanes in darkness still

And we know we don’t stand alone.

II It’s Christmastime and here we are 

Sharing spaces, affirmations, discourse and shapes

We are the passion, the remembered yet unspoken lusts

We watch for unknown moments, desires and secrets, none quite the same

We see memories lost in eyes at once remembered, that may never have been

We wonder at friends, at skies rent with lightning, at moments of awe

We think of instruments whispering somewhere far away

Pound’s petals on a wet, black bough

III It’s Christmastime and here we are 

Beyond our walls, new connections, the spit and echoes of ancient stories

We are each others’ lost memories quick silver dulled

We watch and set the lenses straight for what we’ve found

We see beyond the blah blah getting in the way 

We wonder at common memories, yet yearn for what’s missing

We think can we embrace unseen shadows, and then we do

A whistle’s echo hovers, and flutters leaves on the branches

IV It’s Christmastime and here we are 

We tell our stories of connections, of being kind, of patience with fools

We’re the keepers of tales, of the how, the who, of what we love 

We hear of families, horses and hounds, kittens, goldfish, the books, the music, all the others 

We listen to sounding angers, loss, the chaos of joy, calamity’s descent

We catch each others’ sounds and see and we are present

We hear harmonies, coherence conjoined

And how we come together is mysterious and wonderful

And as you are mine I am yours, we are ours

We are companions all, in these our endless moments.

© Laurel Lindstrom 2025

Too lazy to work out how to email you

Laurel Lindström 1 Comment

It’s beyond my patience threshold to work out how to email subscribers to a WordPress site. But WordPress subscribers get an automatic email when you post a blog which is great. So instead of only subscribers getting this news, everyone will. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

The news is that I have managed to sell, yes sell for actual money (not much), a piece of narrative fiction/travel writing! It’s here: https://theglobalvoyagers.com/destination-insights/hydra-greek-islands/laurellindstrom/hydra-small-island-big-impressions/ I hope you enjoy the article and support the site.

Enjoy!

-Laurel.

The Draftsman in brief

Laurel Lindström Leave a comment

Martin Cox left school at 16 with stellar grades. But too traumatised to progress any further academically, he instead took a low-paid, low-skilled job in a local drafting office.

Over the course of a couple of years Martin progresses in skill and appreciation of design and structure. He is an engineering genius and when he makes recommendations to change a patent application his life is turned around. He becomes very rich, but Martin Cox is a damaged man, a man whose past has left deep and abiding scars. He’s high-achieving, autistic, and craves routine and consistency in his life, yet he lives in chaos. He cannot relate to other people and is barely even aware of his own identity or his considerable limitations. Child abuse is not unusual in modern fiction, but a mother’s abuse of her son in the name of love is less common. Its legacy is rarely addressed.

When Martin Cox buys a house in the countryside, it is the first time ever he has spent any time out of London. He is slowly intrigued by the landscape and the history of the property. He starts to learn more about the original house, about the wartime hospital, about the school and about a young woman and her Canadian airman. As he becomes more fascinated, Martin starts to grow away from himself and towards others. He gradually comes to recognise the damage he has suffered at his mother’s hand, and even to care. His relationships become a source of healing, first the connection with his boss and later with his business minder. But these relationships are unclearly defined. The ambivalence with which the writer addresses Martin Cox’s sexuality is deliberate, a device to keep the reader guessing and a reflection of Martin’s own uncertainty and confusion.

Martin’s fascination with his house and its landscape, the local history, the wartime realities he learns more about as the book progresses, lead him to a mystery. As Martin’s sense of identity develops the reader sees his unacknowledged and unrecognised victimhood, mirror the solution of a mystery that only becomes apparent in the book’s climax.

The Draftsman is a compelling and highly original work of fiction. Readers come to understand Martin’s curious obsessions, contradictions and motivations through the course of the book. Martin’s logic, extreme orderliness and control are his default, but they mask his capacity to care or love. These limitations are a function of his mother’s unwelcome attentions.

© Laurel Lindström 2024

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Trial

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And error. The journey wasn’t improving and her map-reading skills were clearly nonexistent. The blind date had been fine, but what could go wrong in a Mexican restaurant where they served margueritas in glasses so big you could barely lift them. But this, finding a party somewhere in Santa Monica, was different and here they were on the 10 looking for the exit by trial and error. “I know exactly how we get there,” she’d said when she suggested this Santa Monica excursion as a second date. They’d met downtown, driving their cars on the 110 to the 10 stopping for coffee and leaving her car at a Denny’s somewhere off La Brea. He was driving and she was reading the map on her ’phone. He should’ve known this wasn’t going to work. She’d been a bit confused getting them back onto the freeway, so they’d ended up taking Apple Street running parallel to the 10. Slowly. 

He knew the way to Santa Monica, but chose to support her agency. It seemed only fair. On the surface street he took advantage of the dawdling pace to glance at her. He was wondering what had made that first date so great. Was it the voice, slightly drawling, peppered with pauses as she stared at the ceiling in search of the next words. Or was it the soft gleam of such very pale skin, almost translucent and unworldly in this dessicated Californian climate. Or was it that endearing vulnerability that made him want to wrap her up in his arms and just hold her forever. Or was it just tequila and lust. Libidinous joys had been sparse of late.

That voice, still gentle and sympathetic, was getting annoying. It never got out of second gear; he was trying to confirm that her friend’s baby shower was down on Second Street in Santa Monica. But the drawl was almost tidal in its relentlessness, so he tried hard not to show his exasperation and to be conversational in an eh-huh, ok, uhmmhmm, sort of way. And now they’re facing another navigational challenge, cruising within spitting distance of the 7B on ramp at Washington Boulevard, but her directions take them not onto the 10 but to Venice Boulevard running parallel to the freeway. Again. Her concentration on her ’phone meant momentary suspension of her droning voice; he could finally tell her, “listen, I haven’t been quite on it with you. I told you I’m not from LA. True. But I have lived here over 10 years. I can tell you we need to get on the 10, so I’ll take it from here. Okay?”. Those big baby blues turned on him as she slowly twisted in her seat and lowered her sunglasses from the top of her head to the well-sculpted bridge of her nose. She said nothing as he took the Culver Junction and got them back onto the 10 heading finally at a decent clip in the direction of Santa Monica and the now questionable joys of her friend’s party. A baby shower? Really? What was he thinking?

They crossed the 405 in silence and when he asked if she was sure about Olympic she said nothing. He took the exit and made a U turn at 14th to pull up in front of Tacos Por Favor. He knew Mexican was a fave food and he knew he’d gotten them back on track. He knew too that her calculations for how long the journey would take were wildly inaccurate. From where they were on Olympic would take them about fifteen minutes max to get to the party. They had almost an hour to spare. “We’ll be there way early. I need to eat. I think you’ll like this place.” She said nothing, wrestling instead with Google and its confusing maps. “So are we staying on Olympic,” she ventured, not moving. He was standing in the sharp sunshine, doing his best to keep focused on why he was bothering with this vague and annoying woman. But there was something in her winsomeness, her trial and error approach to getting somewhere. The Santa Ana wind was starting to pick up and he fancied he could already smell the hint of smokey air from distant fires. She was out of the car and looking at him with an equivocating expression; sunglasses up, brow slightly wrinkled, eyebrows raised, the mouth a quizzical pout. He melted a little. “Let’s go inside, let’s order; and I can explain.”

I can’t…

Laurel Lindström 2 Comments

I can remember George Lewis and how the room smelled of smoke and beer and sweat. Breathing deep I can remember being up so very high and seeing the top of my Dad’s head. I can’t remember why I was on George Lewis’s shoulders when I was two years old, only the persistent rumbling noise; shapes, shadows dancing random across my eyes. Maybe the pictures were real, maybe not.

I can remember later in the street feeding the rag and bone man’s piebald horse. The horse couldn’t see me unless I stood front of him and my mother wouldn’t let me do that. She didn’t understand that the blinkers blocked the view or how the scent and heat of his shining black and white coat embraced me. I stared up not down, breathing deep. I never saw what Dad helped the toothless rag and bone man load up onto his cart. I can remember too the meandering echoes of Billie Holiday and New Orleans jazz. 

I can remember much later standing on the corner of Cambridge Circus and Shaftesbury Avenue waiting for you. Looking. Would I know you now that you are old, would you know me now that I am nineteen? And then there you were, I saw you. I watched you looking furtive and anxious and guilty. But for whom the guilt? Maybe for all of us. Then we sat awkward and afraid of each other, no mention of sitting on a man’s shoulders or wanting to look a piebald horse in the eye. It was just uncomfortable words passing as conversation between a lonely daughter and her estranged father. The girl was unacknowledged. The man was unknown. They were anonymous, cloaked a hidden shared yearning, wanted none of this to be true, wanted that none of it had happened.

But it had; it could only keep on happening unless the pattern changed. She wanted it but he didn’t. “It was a long time ago.” Denial, hiding, blocking, rejection. Rejection again, but that wasn’t true either, just the thing he knew he had to do. There were other considerations, other truths, other hearts he must not let break.  

The sounds and chaos of emotions grown and slowly settled over many years, over many sad walks around Cambridge Circus, over many times in the 100 Club and the Pizza Express in Soho. The tears in the dark, the heaving gulping sobs, the weeping and slow tears for what was so long gone, were ceased. The laughter came back, the joy of hearing him play, of seeing faces smiling from the past. “It should never have happened” Monty said. And then Dad died. And no it never should have happened but it did and out of destruction he had build much more. He had given something to share, something of love remembered.

A new CD with tracks from 1959. Dad on drums and George Lewis on clarinet. Listen to it? Absolutely. But not just yet. I can’t …

A prison visit

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The women were gathered around the steps in the creeping cold of a November Saturday, waiting for a heavy black door to open. The shadowed air was damp and clinging. False lashes were wilting, tight blonde pony tails were limp. A handful of long black spirals, laquered and permed had lost their spring. Only the botoxed lips and the fingernail claws were holding up. Some of the women were holding small children, some had slightly less small children in pushchairs. Some women were pregnant, a desolate cast to their faces. Jolly grandmas with lots of missing teeth were making jokes and smoking. Grim faced male friends and brothers kept their faces tight and unnavigable. They waited at the foot of the stone steps, slightly apart from the women and fidgetting from foot to foot.

In front of them all the high flintstone walls of the prison tipped forwards against the sky, looming and threatening to fall and engulf them at any moment. Somewhere inside their men were waiting, some keen and impatient, anxious to discuss what would change when they got out. Some were bored and unrepentant, disinterested. Some were annoyed that visiting hours, the visiting 90 minutes, coincided with the footie on the telly.

Behind the thick locked door the black and white uniforms, faces carved, colourless and set were waiting. And the keys on long chains, the security cameras, the registration forms, the sniffer dogs, weapons and id scanners. The curious atmosphere of routine boredom and habitual watchfulness. And time, flaccid and loose, moves patiently along the confining walls and corridors, leans lazy against hidden ceilings, hides in corners and under the furniture. It distorts the days and nights to create a new continuum.

The loneliness of the women, their patience and confusion, their anger and fear keeps company with time’s distortion. Inside in the waiting rooms, it is too warm, too close. The hovering testosterone of angry young men blisters the air and pock marks our sights and conversations. The slow tango that happens most Saturdays is not a scene we want to see, to share. It’s not a scene we can truly share with the regular visitors, or with their children. But we try to do it anyway.

We all go through the complicated security, sadly simple for the women who do it every week. We all put our stuff in lockers and throw tissues and chewing gum in the bin as instructed, because they are not allowed. We all go through the scanners and let the sniffer dogs do their thing. We all listen to the stern warden who tells us that smuggling drugs into the prison will get us a long prison term. Her voice is strict but also bored and as she calls the names of the women who can go through to the next stage, she jokes about not needing to repeat her other reminders. They try to laugh politely except the granny who guffaws and declares,  “alright darlin’ we got it first time around”. Except that the man they are visiting, did not get it the first time around and now here they all were coming to see him again as he waits out his fourth term in prison. Petty thefts and drugs and some violence. He didn’t get it in goes one to four, so five when it comes may be his chance to make a change. All a mistake, granny says.

A little boy of four or five smiles through all this and plays on the floor with the toy farm and its plastic animals. He asks his patient mother endless questions and she answers soft and indulgent, makes him sit beside her and holds his hand tight. He asks me where I live and I tell him and I ask him where he lives. He asks his mum and she tells him and he tells me with a proud smile, rolling the name of his town around his mouth for the first time and then again as he laughs through the word. He repeats it and repeats it and I laugh and his mum tries to laugh too. Tries hard to crack her golden face and stop the welling eyes from overflowing. She reaches for her little boy and folds him tight against her shoulder and he laughs and laughs as her tickling fingers caress him. He has no idea that he’s all there is to keep her from screaming her fear, her loneliness and her shattered belief that it wasn’t meant to be like this. And it wasn’t. It never is.

19th Wedding Anniversary

Laurel Lindström Leave a comment

This is how it started. On that day nineteen years ago I jumped out of bed frantic talking, talking, talking all the way out of the house and along the track to the feed store. “I’m late already. I’m already late. I don’t believe this. What happened to early? It’s already after six and I’m already late. Where’s the sun? Why’s it still so dark? Oh, shit look at the sky, look at the bloody sky. And it’s really raining. It’s raining on our wedding day.

And I’m taking too long doing this, why are all the feed bins empty now, why didn’t I think of this yesterday when they were already nearly empty. And why is it raining so very hard?”

Scuttling along in too-big clogs, falling off their wooden edges unbalanced on the uneven ground and carrying the manger I kept up a persistent muttery mumble, trying to calm matters down and to ignore the rain: “It’s fine, it’s not that late, I can still get showered and have my hair in curlers in plenty of time for my hair to dry by eleven” and scurrying up to the gate she hooked the manger onto it, and gave the Grey Horse a sudden and unexpected pat. Much alarm and headshaking, and a suspicion that she really was quite as mad as he had always believed, the Grey Horse stood back from his breakfast. I sighed, “oh don’t be so silly” before reaching out once again but this time much more slowly, to gently pat the Grey Horse his good morning. Kissing his chaff dusted nose I said: “enjoy your breakfast”.

Back indoors the peace and calm one might expect so early on a Saturday morning was completely absent. Instead there were a dozen or so Swedish relations, long lost friends and teenagers, munching their various ways noisily through a host of breakfast stuff: teas, juices, coffee and the rest. The scene of formless mess only added to the surreal and thunderstruck sense of the day. I couldn’t imagine how the day had suddenly turned into chaos so very soon. Tea at least was already made, so grabbing a mug I hurried upstairs to the shower, barely noticed.

At least the shower was hot. The battle for the hairdryer was about to commence between Hannah and Matilda, both of whom had already showered while I was getting drenched in the rain. When I got out of the shower, only mildly less hysterical, the plan had been to put my hair in curlers and to set the hairdryer on them. I had had in mind a cascade of blondish reddish curls. “We’re nearly finishing Mummy. We won’t be long. Your hair dries quicker than ours”. Gorgeous girls 13 and 14 years old, bubbling over with youth, beauty and innocence still, and in a moment so precious still ours, still our lovely little girls.

So OK. OK. I gave give up on the idea of leisurely drying and cascading glory and concentrated on the dressing bit of the morning. Suddenly everything, even the simplest part of getting ready seemed too complicated to manage. No room. No space, just a blind, fearful panic, wondering where Paul was and whether it was all as mad for him, tangled up with the business of breakfast and all those visiting Swedes. Unlikely somehow and I imagined him serene and slightly excited on the outside, cool, calm and in control and probably quite oblivious to the raging skies beyond the kitchen windows.

Outside the weather was worsening with each passing moment. Lights on indoors in July in the morning? Whatever was happening. The thunder rolled, the girls kept squeaking and fidgeting and I sat down in the corner still in my dressing gown and wondered what to do next. Fortunately someone else was there to egg me gently on to the day’s next steps. I was not alone and true to the traditions of brides and maids of honour, Joanne serene, calm and moving slowly into the room gave me a sudden and loving hug. “It’s the day! Today’s the day. Are you alright? Have you had anything to eat? There’s still toast and tea. Paul’s taking care of the rabble downstairs. All you’ve got to do is have your tea and relax and get dressed. Isn’t it fantastic!” I held her hand tightly and said in  a tiny voice: “Why’s it raining? What’s with the thunder? What’s happening?” And Joanne laughing “all of nature’s getting up and getting ready, so come on, what are you doing?” And with a brusque and bossy “Get your mother another cup of tea and a biscuit”, Joanne pushed the morning machine into gear, sat me down and started getting to work on my hair.

It’s been 19 years and they’re all hovering around my head still. The joys, the less-than joys, the amazing experience of seeing our children grow into such wonderful people. Thank you to everyone who made that day so memorable and thank you to Paul, Hannah, Morgan and Matilda for giving me such a fabulous, joyful and loving family.