The boy at the bus stop was three or four years old, scrawny with black, hedgehog hair, his face and limbs animated by a tantrum, which was raised to blackout intensity by his mother turning her back and the general ennui of the crowd, who were lifting up bags and finding bus passes in preparation for the arrival of the red London bus. Rachel was sitting at the front of the upper deck, looking down into the road below. The boy’s rage had a manic purity, and watching him Rachel felt like a rubbernecker at a crash site. He rolled off the pavement, and into the gutter. His limbs flailed over the tarmac, his small head now perfectly aligned with the advancing bus tyre. Rachel’s first thought was that if she shouted, the driver wouldn’t hear her anyway. So she did nothing. Stupid boy, what did he have to scream about, to misbehave for, to reject? She really didn’t want this to happen. Would she feel it? There was a cyclist, yellow Lycra, in front of the bus, who turned and raised a palm, the bus kept coming, the cyclist glanced over his shoulder again and pointed to the boy, still small and screaming by the kerb, and the bus halted, the brakes clamping with a thud. The moment punctured all the layers of Rachel’s psyche and made its way in. Then movement. People in the crowd had noticed, and the mother reached with both hands and pulled the boy up. There were glances between onlookers, shame on the mother, who led the boy away, him crying less violently, her mute with shock. Seven seconds the whole thing.

Two stops later Rachel was off the bus and pacing to the optician’s, questioning. It might have been fatigue that had stopped her from shouting out. It had been a long day, and she had been in travel mode, vaguely resting, no longer in her work persona or returned to her home self, her mind absent, leaving her body on autopilot. That wasn’t enough to explain it though. Her Dad’s passing, albeit awful in its manner, had been three months ago. So not that, either. She was a commercial litigator. Generally good at staying in the present, dealing with what was in front of her. She had to be; every so often she would catch the guarded glance of a partner – was she on it? Would she choke? And then the more direct but respectful probing of her mental state, which she understood. It didn’t matter if her bosses actually cared or were merely discharging a management responsibility. It was another thing to tolerate. At the age of thirteen she would have told them to ‘swivel’. But since then, sufficient sediment had accumulated to mute the impulse.

“Is it clearer green, or red? Green, or red?” The optician flicked the filters backwards and forwards.

“Red, I think. Maybe a little.”

“Okay.” He reached away, while she stared forward, chin on the chin rest, suspended, waiting.

She said, “You know, I damaged the retina of my right eye a little, when I was a teenager.”

“How did you do that?”

“At school. I was measuring the angle of the sun above the horizon, science experiment. I was using lots of plastic filters. But the UV got through.”

“Something always gets through.”

“Yeah…” Trailing off with a wobble.

He said, “I’ll have a look in a second.” He switched the room lights off.

She stared into the darkened room.

Her father’s suicide note had read, ‘I’m going to the garden shed. I may be some time.’ He had been found there by the carer, slumped in his chair, on a frozen December morning, the door open, wearing nothing but an old pair of Hawaiian print boxer shorts. He was a few months in to a Parkinson’s diagnosis. She remembered her first morning at his house, uprooted from the office, crying bitterly over the three drafts of the note, which were shaky beyond legibility, that her father had discarded on the kitchen floor. All he needed to write was ‘garden shed’, but he was determined to make a joke of it, to get the Captain Oates reference in, to deny vulnerability, to show that personality could triumph. She and her sister should have been there, by his bedside, to connect with him, or whatever would have been left of him.

The light was solid, dominant. Then she could see a reflection of her retina, the capillaries and veins.

He said, “There is some damage, but I doubt it will affect you. If you hadn’t said, I might not have, er, commented on it.”

Might not have seen it, she thought. There was negligence, or some kind of failing, everywhere. You nodded, uttered a commonplace, and got on with it.

He switched the lights on.

He said, “Thank you. You – you can sit back now. You can take your chin off now. Thanks.”

She nodded. She said, “Death is the black backing on the mirror that allows us to see anything at all.”

The optician was young, with a plain white shirt, an acne-scarred face, coarse peroxide hair neatly side-combed, and a clueless likeability.

She asked, “Who was it who said that?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure we see much, looking into mirrors.” Fingers steepled, tapping.

“Really? Most mornings, I’d prefer it if I was wearing a balaclava.”

He smiled. “I felt like that, for most of my teens. Are you okay?”

She laughed, somewhat dismissively, and stood up. “Yeah I’m, I’m fine.”

The weekend was billed as the final clear-out of her Dad’s house, before the clearance people came, and took what was too bulky or unwanted. She was there with her sister, Beth.

Beth asked, “You can’t seriously pretend you want to sell these?” Beth’s nose, lip and eyebrow piercings glinted in the low winter sun, as did her father’s collection of geodes, semiprecious gemstones and geological specimens.

“Why would I look at them again? I mean, we were shown them all when we were kids.”

“Because they’re beautiful?” Beth’s face was open, fringed by buzz-cut black hair, affecting a surprised honesty. Rachel picked up an amethyst geode, the crystals shifting from white through violet to deep purple in the centre. The light flared from them unpredictably, like a trampled disco ball.

Beth said, “Amethyst is a natural tranquiliser.” Rachel suppressed a lip curl and broke eye contact.

Beth said, “You can talk, you know. To me.”

“Alright then. Why did you have the shed demolished? You had no right.” It had been after her first visit, after the body had been taken away and she had returned, briefly, to the office.

“Because, you weren’t here, and it just seemed the only thing to do. The door kept blowing open. It was like looking into a coffin.” Beth’s voice became pinched.

“I would like to have had a look again, to see…”

“To see what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well then.”

“That’s the point though. I don’t know what I would have felt.” Rachel put the geode down. “You can have these or sell them.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“You want none of it?”

“Fine, I’ll take this.” She picked up a rose quartz brooch, like a pink boiled sweet surrounded by filigree gold petals, and stabbed the pin through her black roll neck jumper.

“Oh great. Good!”

“I suppose I should have something. It seems to be unavoidable.”

Beth sighed, “Okay… And what about the aeroplanes?” She meant the model aeroplanes, an artefact of her father’s childhood. “He kept them such a long time, they must have meant something to him.” Rachel picked one up. It was a piece of painted plastic, part of a boys’ culture that glorified war and national exceptionalism.

Rachel’s eyes were nervous. “Can you think of a time when – when you really should have acted, but you got stuck? Like you weren’t really there?”

“You’re not saying… Did you know something about Dad? About what he was planning?” Leaning back, eyes wide, disgust creeping around her mouth.

“No!” A Messerschmitt 109 went flying past Beth’s ear.

“Oh what was that for?”

“Not about Dad, no.”

“Okay, well then. I mean we all get distracted. Meditation can help bring you closer to the moment, to clean your mind and focus you,” said Beth.

“I thought it was about zoning out.”

“Sorry, but you don’t understand.”

“Hmmm. You know, I was thinking that I couldn’t connect with this place, with our childhood. It all seems so distant.”

“But…?”

“Nothing.” She could remember their fights. She had been bookish, shy but fierce when pressed; Beth had been easy-going, open, popular with boys.

“So what was it then? When do you think you should have acted?” Beth adopted a vocational tone.

“I don’t want to talk about it. It’s just – I feel that the real me is never present, any more. Except at work, in a small space surrounded by all the statute, case law, conventions, the rules of the firm, somewhere there’s a little cell like a piece of a spreadsheet, where I move around. Where I’m actually, engaged. You know, switched on.”

“Grief can make the world feel distant.”

“Shouldn’t grief burn? I don’t know if it’s even cut through yet.”

Beth nodded. Burnt up, burnt down, burnt out, thought Rachel, there should be movement, change. Disequilibrium.

After lunch Rachel was folded onto a park bench, struggling to find the past in a dark mirror of a lake rippled by squabbling ducks. There was, surely, no continuity between herself and a little girl who had been here forty years earlier. And if there was no continuity, there must have been a rupture. It could have been a decade ago, when their mother, slowly disintegrating with Alzheimer’s, started walking into doors, shutting her hands in cupboards, and on one occasion burning her face over the toaster. She’d had a creeping fear that not all of the injuries were innocent. The fear came without hard evidence, yet without evidence there was nothing to interrogate, only suffering without anyone to blame. Had she always needed someone to blame, had she always been that unwise, needing a repository for her anger? At work she prided herself on seeing clearly, on making fine distinctions, on finding fault. Anger was a fog that one avoided, and here she was, veiled in it.

Perhaps the rose quartz brooch had been bought for her mother by her father. She wanted to believe that. Rather than her, shopping on eBay late at night, or him, in an antique store, pleased with the quality of the stone, putting it straight in his magpie’s nest.

With a patter of feet the dog was upon her, a drool-laced tongue and furry ears spraying slow-mo dewdrops in the sunlight, her hands fending off a soggy nose, the nails of insistent paws catching in her leggings, then smearing a line of mud on her jacket like a baptism. It was some kind of spaniel, irrepressible to the point of maelstrom.

“Hey! Hello! Yeah, hey, get down!” Her head turning over her shoulder, an over-wide smile, help me! in semaphore.

“Bucket! Bucket, down!” A forty-something woman in Barbour gilet and floral wellies. “Bucket, down, so sorry, he’s a big baby, socialised but a slow one, aren’t you?” She grabbed the dog’s collar and pulled him back, clipping the lead on.

“He’s a handful!” Rachel patted the dog’s flank. “How old is he?”

“Seven months. Sorry, was that him?” Pointing at the smear of brown on Rachel’s green wool jacket.

Rachel shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. He was just having fun.”

“Incapable of doing anything else. Lovely brooch, by the way.”

“Thanks. My Dad bought it for my Mum. I think.”

“Lucky her! Bucket won’t be buying me any brooches, will you? Always good to wear the old stuff, I think, don’t let it moulder away. Now then. Oh, we’re off! Bub-bye!”

“Bye! Bye Bucket!” Rachel waved.

It was just a brooch, a stone, it wasn’t a symbol. It was pretty. That was all that mattered, really. The dog was happy, the brooch was pretty, the sunlight was that wintry yellow that makes you feel like you’re swimming in egg yolk. To be fully in the present was a tonic. Speculation about the past, on the other hand, was a labyrinth. Perhaps her Mum had picked up those injuries by herself. Or not. It was like a scratch on a record that would always skip in one place: her record of their life together. She had to accept the omission, and play other records.

She left the bench, and started back with purpose. Hair of the dog, she thought, and let out a short, bitter laugh.

Between the park and the Tube station there was a coffee van, a sort of motorised rickshaw or three wheeled Vespa, chromed and polished and chic in a way that struck Rachel as amusingly self-conscious. She briefly imagined life as a 1970s Italian film star, and it seemed as remote as living on Pluto. But as she stood at the back of the queue, watching the maybe twenty-year-old guy with explosively curly hair go with enthusiasm about the percussive business of emptying filter baskets, blasting hot milk to a foam, and obliterating beans into grounds, she smiled. Smiled and looked around. There was a boy on a bike approaching, at speed along the pavement, on a vector that took him straight to the man in front of her, wearing sunglasses and a camel overcoat, who was engrossed in a phone call, the phone loosely held on the street side, away from the coffee van. The boy’s grey top had the hood up, Rachel just got a glint of eye-white. For a split second she viewed it as a cliché, a tableau of modern life, with herself sketched in a corner. But then she shouted, “Your phone!” and thrust out an arm. 

online fiction short fiction