Digging For Gold And Finding Coal
by Gavin Broom
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: It never rains in California, the Sunshine Village...
_____________________________________________________________________
WELCOME TO THE SUNSHINE VILLAGE has been scrawled across the road in yellow emulsion, right in line with the official Falkirk Council sign that dryly offers by contrast: California -- Please Drive Carefully. It's probably meant to be dead bright -- the graffiti on the road -- but under the low, rain-heavy sky, it strikes me as more mustard than canary. The writing's so big and brash that after the first four words, it starts to run out of tarmac and the last few letters have been crammed in tight to fit. Through the car's windscreen, it looks as though the slogan is curled over the edge of the world.
“Well, that wasn't there when I left,” Jenny says with a chuckle from the passenger seat. And then, like she's not so sure after all, she asks, “Was it?”
“It's only been there from this mornin,” I tell her, a bit flatter than I'd intended.
“Are you sure you're okay, Jason?”
“Me? Aye, I keep tellin ye, I'm fine.”
"And yet you keep sounding like you're not that pleased to see your big sister."
“Well, I'm fine,” I insist. “I'm okay. Ye might want to do somethin about that English accent, though. Ye ken what he's like.”
I'm driving so I don't need to think of a reason not to look at her when I hear her sigh. I don't need to see her tanned skin, her bright clothes and blonde hair, her fancy earrings and stupid, inflated chest that practically dusted down the glove compartment when she slid in the car. All too soon, though, we draw up at the house and there's no excuse to avoid eye contact. When I turn to her, she's staring out of her window at the perfectly-coiffured garden and the pebble-dashed wall and the new front door that she paid for and any need I felt to address that sigh vanishes. So I don't tell her I'm pleased to see her and I don't welcome her home and I don't try to explain why bringing her home for the first time in a year makes me as sad and empty as it did to watch her leave.
My mam couldn't get something as specific as a Welcome Home banner from the wee shop and because she doesn't like riding the bus into Falkirk on her own, she had to settle for a sentiment they had in stock. The range, it seems, was pretty limited and the banner that's stretched across the living room wall, squint like a sarcastic smile, says Congratulations. Despite this, Jenny laughs when she sees it, which launches my mam into a director's cut version of the reasons why it doesn't say something more appropriate.
“It's fine, Mum,” Jenny says, still chuckling. “Happy Birthday would've been fine.”
"Ocht, it's so good to have ye back, hen."
"It's good to be back."
My mam clutches on to Jenny's hands and looks ready to burst. There's a tremble in her voice when she says, “I'll pop the kettle on, shall I?” and then she shuffles ben the kitchen.
“Where's Dad?” Jenny asks once the rush of tapwater is enough to drown her out.
By this point, I've planted myself down in the comfy chair and I'm toying with the remote while I wonder if it would be rude for me to turn the telly on. “He'll be out in his shed.”
“He was in his shed when I left. Does he only come out for special occasions? If he pokes his head out, do we get forty more days of winter?”
“What's this? Did ye get a sense of humour down in London? He likes it in his shed. Give him a break.”
She's still standing in the middle of the floor, awkward like one of those stacks of rock out in the Orkneys, and now that she gives the banner on the wall a bit more attention, she's not smiling any more. It's like she's worked out that the reason it's squint is because my mam put it up on her own.
“He'll come out tomorrow, won't he?” she asks. “There's no way Mum's fit enough to go out for their anniversary dinner herself.”
In the kitchen, the kettle's just starting its slow climb towards boiling and I decide that now is probably as good a time as any to switch the telly on. I concentrate as I flick through the channels so I don't see what Jenny does, but I feel it. I sense it. I feel her eyes plead to me. I feel her neck go that blotchy way it does when a beamer's in the post. I feel her shake her head. I feel the draught when she leaves the room, away out for a meeting in the hallowed shed. When the kettle clicks and the rumble dies, I realise I'm up to the documentary end of the channel list and when I see an advert with Jenny trying to sell me perfume, that's when I decide to switch the telly off.
For tea, my mam gives me twenty quid and sends me out to the chip van that stops at the end of the street. Fish supper each for my dad and my mam and a sausage supper for me. Jenny, despite telling me she was starving in the car, settles for a small poke of chips. The house feels darker when I come back and I'm sure it's not coincidence that my dad has been coaxed out into the open by the aroma of salt and vinegar and he sits impatiently in the comfy chair, waiting to be served. His face looks worn and etched, as though he's aged ten years over the space of an afternoon. The tatty brown cardigan doesn't help. I don't know what words he and Jenny shared out in the shed, but she came back in ages ago and sat in the kitchen with my mam. I lost count of the number of times the kettle boiled.
We sit with our unwrapped suppers balanced on our knees and watch the football scores come in on Ceefax. My dad keeps his bookie's slip on the arm of the comfy chair but with only half the results in, he stops bothering to check it.
“That all yer eatin?” he mutters to Jenny, further evidence that the summit in the shed hasn't put an end to his personal Cold War.
Jenny looks down at her chips and shrugs. To be fair, it's not really a question that can be answered without sounding like a smartarse so she just nods and makes a yummy noise. My mam must sense the tension and brightly starts yapping away about Angela Binnie, a lassie who was in Jenny's classes at school and who's opened up an award-winning hairdresser's down the Braes in Grangemouth. A bit of a local success story, by all accounts.
“It's a bitty further than I like to travel,” she says, “and a wee student from the college comes in to do my hair, so I can't comment personally. She's called it Angel Hair or somethin like that. It's a nice enough name, but I can't help thinkin the A's dropped off the sign.”
"It's a type of pasta," Jenny says. "Maybe that's what she was going for.”
"Pasta." My dad says it like it's a sweary word. "There'll be no pasta tomorrow night, don't worry yerselves about that. It'll be traditional eatin, just like we had twenty-five year ago at that top table. Food you were all raised oan, mind. No curry. No pizza. None of this pasta rubbish."
"Jack," my mam hisses. "Nobody's arguin with ye."
For a wee second, Jenny looks taken aback but quickly collects herself and sounds soft and friendly when she says, “We're talking about a hairdresser's, Dad.”
Ignoring them, he shovels a forkload of chips into his mouth. He chews angrily, glaring at the telly while he stews. Then, before he's even swallowed, he pushes himself out of the comfy chair, holding his fish supper up in the palm of a hand like a waiter in the world's worst fancy restaurant and without another word, he storms off. When I look down at my sausage supper, I understand how Jenny managed to lose her appetite.
After Jenny left last year, I kept finding newspapers and magazines with shapes cut out. I quickly sussed that these were photos and articles featuring my model sister that were being turned into keepsakes. I didn't ever see my mam take her scissors to the paper or what she did with the clippings afterwards, but part of me thought she had them pinned up in Jenny's old room and when me and my dad were out, she'd sit in there and chat to the pictures over a cup of tea, pretend Jenny hadn't left after all. I've never been able to bring myself to go into the room to check. I always thought that was because I didn't want to be proved right. Now, I'm starting to think it was because I didn't want to be proved wrong.
Either way, when Jenny joins me the next morning, outside at the iron summer seat, she doesn't mention anything about sleeping in a creepy wee shrine to herself, which I suppose doesn't prove a thing.
“I've missed the smell of the country,” she says. “I used to hate it, but it's good. It's nice.”
"Aye?"
"Yeah. There's a petting zoo in Battersea Park and the smell always makes me think of home."
"I thought ye'd be more likely to complain about how quiet it is. I've never quite got my head round that, but is that not what folk say? That it's too quiet to sleep in the country?"
She pauses for a bit. "They do, but I didn't want to bring that up."
"Eh? How not?"
"You're not daft, Jason," she says sadly. "And besides, his sensors would pick that up and he'd be out here in a flash, ready to bite off whatever bit of my head you'd left behind."
I don't protest. For a start, there's no point. Mostly, though, I'm too ashamed that she's noticed the cold shoulder I've been jabbing into her since I picked her up at the airport.
“Speak of the devil,” she says and the kitchen door's flung open and my dad, in a familiar stomp, marches down the garden path. My mam stands on the back step, upset or flustered, but she doesn't set foot out of the house. Instead, she watches him reach his sanctuary and then turns back into her own, letting the door quietly click shut behind her.
The street starts to fill up and the doorbell starts to ring from about five in the afternoon, even though the table's not booked until eight. The invites suggested an early start for drinks at the house and most people have taken up the offer. My folks' silver wedding anniversary dinner feels like the biggest thing to happen in California for months.
“That was one of the saddest things about ye movin out,” my mam tells Jenny, out of my dad's earshot. “Yer pal's stopped comin round. The phone stopped ringin. The house got awfully quiet after ye left. It's nice to have it busy again.”
I'm about to remind her that I was still in the house but none of my pals are the phoning type and I think I'm probably more of a fixture in another mother's house.
As the living room continues to fill and chairs have to be drafted in from other rooms, an uneasy vibration starts in my belly. At first, I blame the sausage supper from last night, but it increases as more and more faces and memories pour in until it reaches the point where conversations are happening around me and I start to feel lonely. I realise it's ridiculous and I try to shrug it off, but the feeling sticks. It's not for shifting.
When the next door neighbours stick their heads round the living room door -- because they're not staying and they don't want to interrupt and no, they don't want a Buck's Fizz and of course they're not fishing for an invite and oh, what a lovely surprise to see Jenny again and please don't mind them because they only came round to pass on their best wishes for the night -- it hits me. Everyone's from somewhere else: London, Perth, Glasgow, Edinburgh, some from Stirling, a few scattered round Falkirk. Mostly, I'm in a room full of people that I used to see at least once a week but who've moved on. The room is full of the past. It's full of ghosts. Apart from the nosey neighbours, the only folk still from the village are me, my mam and my dad. Even though I'm still only twenty-two, I feel my life's slipping through my fingers and I don't really feel like going out for my tea tonight after all.
Jenny and I sit in the back seat of my dad's car and we wait. Inside, my mam's having some crisis or another about leaving the house and my dad's trying to talk her down from high doh. While we wait, other folk in other cars pull away, heading down the Braes to the restaurant that me and Jenny but mostly Jenny have paid for.
"It's an exodus," I say.
"Wagons roll, eh? Into the sunset."
Someone toots their horn and that's the cue for them all to join in, a modern equivalent of firing pistols into the sky, as the wagon train leaves the street. Jenny seems to relax a bit after this. If anything, I tighten up.
She's still smiling when she strokes the battered fake leather that covers the back seat. “Dad really needs to trade in this bucket of bolts for something more practical for him and Mum. God, I remember falling asleep here when I was a little girl coming home from Granny's. I'd pretend to be asleep when he'd carry me up to bed. He knew I was awake, I'm sure.”
"Maybe that's why he keeps it."
She pauses, like the memory is painful. I expect her to change the subject, but she doesn't. “I do miss home, you know.”
"I don't know why."
She laughs. "You'll know when you leave."
“What makes ye so sure I'll leave?”
“There's folk who can't leave and there's folk who won't and then there's everyone else. I'd say you're part of the everyone else. Everyone else leaves, Jason. No matter if you leave for Sydney or for two doors down. You'll miss home. Sooner or later.”
Before I get a chance to think about this or to respond, my mam comes staggering down the path like she's tanned a bottle of vodka while we've waited.
“For God's sake,” I mutter and get out of the car to help. I reach her and offer an arm and ask, “Where's my dad? I thought he was helping you get ready.”
“Ocht, he's a wee bit busy just now,” she says, like she doesn't want to make a big fuss.
“Busy? Busy how? Busy where?”
We stop at the car and she looks at me with eyes that look too tired to cry. “Where d'ye think?”
The sun's going down on the other side of the house and the shed is in shadow, alone at the far end of the lawn. I'm careful to walk slowly towards it, determined to keep a lid on my temper but with each step I seem to find another angry word, another word guaranteed to make things worse. By the time I reach the end of the path, my head is a noise and when I push the shed door open without knocking and see him sitting on a battered old kitchen stool at his workbench, my mouth and my face are pinched in with fury. When he looks at me with eyes I've already seen in my mum and I see an open scrapbook and a few articles with straight edges and right angles that have been carefully positioned inside and even before I let my gaze leave the book, my expression has softened and my throat tightened and I need to wait a minute before I can speak.
“Come on, Dad,” I say. “Let's go eat.”
On the way out of the Sunshine Village, apart from the upside down welcome on the road, there's no sign to tell you you're leaving. There's nothing that says Haste Ye Back, nothing to wish you a safe onward journey, nothing to ask you to switch off all the lights if you're the last one out. There's not even a sign to thank you for driving as carefully as the inward sign requested. Houses give way to fields and that's the only marker to let you know that you used to be part of something and now you're not. As my dad's car and its hungry cargo drift from one state into the other, I can't think why this should be the case. Do they not expect folk to leave? Once you're in, are you in forever? Is that what it's about? Does the village ignore the evidence or does it truly not see it? In the end, when the itch in my feet gets to the stage where I need to do something about it, I just hope a wee laddie goes out with his tin of yellow paint and writes the other half of his message, to remind me to come back once I go.
In the back seat, Jenny looks ready to fall asleep when she pats my knee and says in a year old accent, "I love comin home."
In the front seat, my dad tries not to smile.
Swearwords: None.
Description: It never rains in California, the Sunshine Village...
_____________________________________________________________________
WELCOME TO THE SUNSHINE VILLAGE has been scrawled across the road in yellow emulsion, right in line with the official Falkirk Council sign that dryly offers by contrast: California -- Please Drive Carefully. It's probably meant to be dead bright -- the graffiti on the road -- but under the low, rain-heavy sky, it strikes me as more mustard than canary. The writing's so big and brash that after the first four words, it starts to run out of tarmac and the last few letters have been crammed in tight to fit. Through the car's windscreen, it looks as though the slogan is curled over the edge of the world.
“Well, that wasn't there when I left,” Jenny says with a chuckle from the passenger seat. And then, like she's not so sure after all, she asks, “Was it?”
“It's only been there from this mornin,” I tell her, a bit flatter than I'd intended.
“Are you sure you're okay, Jason?”
“Me? Aye, I keep tellin ye, I'm fine.”
"And yet you keep sounding like you're not that pleased to see your big sister."
“Well, I'm fine,” I insist. “I'm okay. Ye might want to do somethin about that English accent, though. Ye ken what he's like.”
I'm driving so I don't need to think of a reason not to look at her when I hear her sigh. I don't need to see her tanned skin, her bright clothes and blonde hair, her fancy earrings and stupid, inflated chest that practically dusted down the glove compartment when she slid in the car. All too soon, though, we draw up at the house and there's no excuse to avoid eye contact. When I turn to her, she's staring out of her window at the perfectly-coiffured garden and the pebble-dashed wall and the new front door that she paid for and any need I felt to address that sigh vanishes. So I don't tell her I'm pleased to see her and I don't welcome her home and I don't try to explain why bringing her home for the first time in a year makes me as sad and empty as it did to watch her leave.
My mam couldn't get something as specific as a Welcome Home banner from the wee shop and because she doesn't like riding the bus into Falkirk on her own, she had to settle for a sentiment they had in stock. The range, it seems, was pretty limited and the banner that's stretched across the living room wall, squint like a sarcastic smile, says Congratulations. Despite this, Jenny laughs when she sees it, which launches my mam into a director's cut version of the reasons why it doesn't say something more appropriate.
“It's fine, Mum,” Jenny says, still chuckling. “Happy Birthday would've been fine.”
"Ocht, it's so good to have ye back, hen."
"It's good to be back."
My mam clutches on to Jenny's hands and looks ready to burst. There's a tremble in her voice when she says, “I'll pop the kettle on, shall I?” and then she shuffles ben the kitchen.
“Where's Dad?” Jenny asks once the rush of tapwater is enough to drown her out.
By this point, I've planted myself down in the comfy chair and I'm toying with the remote while I wonder if it would be rude for me to turn the telly on. “He'll be out in his shed.”
“He was in his shed when I left. Does he only come out for special occasions? If he pokes his head out, do we get forty more days of winter?”
“What's this? Did ye get a sense of humour down in London? He likes it in his shed. Give him a break.”
She's still standing in the middle of the floor, awkward like one of those stacks of rock out in the Orkneys, and now that she gives the banner on the wall a bit more attention, she's not smiling any more. It's like she's worked out that the reason it's squint is because my mam put it up on her own.
“He'll come out tomorrow, won't he?” she asks. “There's no way Mum's fit enough to go out for their anniversary dinner herself.”
In the kitchen, the kettle's just starting its slow climb towards boiling and I decide that now is probably as good a time as any to switch the telly on. I concentrate as I flick through the channels so I don't see what Jenny does, but I feel it. I sense it. I feel her eyes plead to me. I feel her neck go that blotchy way it does when a beamer's in the post. I feel her shake her head. I feel the draught when she leaves the room, away out for a meeting in the hallowed shed. When the kettle clicks and the rumble dies, I realise I'm up to the documentary end of the channel list and when I see an advert with Jenny trying to sell me perfume, that's when I decide to switch the telly off.
For tea, my mam gives me twenty quid and sends me out to the chip van that stops at the end of the street. Fish supper each for my dad and my mam and a sausage supper for me. Jenny, despite telling me she was starving in the car, settles for a small poke of chips. The house feels darker when I come back and I'm sure it's not coincidence that my dad has been coaxed out into the open by the aroma of salt and vinegar and he sits impatiently in the comfy chair, waiting to be served. His face looks worn and etched, as though he's aged ten years over the space of an afternoon. The tatty brown cardigan doesn't help. I don't know what words he and Jenny shared out in the shed, but she came back in ages ago and sat in the kitchen with my mam. I lost count of the number of times the kettle boiled.
We sit with our unwrapped suppers balanced on our knees and watch the football scores come in on Ceefax. My dad keeps his bookie's slip on the arm of the comfy chair but with only half the results in, he stops bothering to check it.
“That all yer eatin?” he mutters to Jenny, further evidence that the summit in the shed hasn't put an end to his personal Cold War.
Jenny looks down at her chips and shrugs. To be fair, it's not really a question that can be answered without sounding like a smartarse so she just nods and makes a yummy noise. My mam must sense the tension and brightly starts yapping away about Angela Binnie, a lassie who was in Jenny's classes at school and who's opened up an award-winning hairdresser's down the Braes in Grangemouth. A bit of a local success story, by all accounts.
“It's a bitty further than I like to travel,” she says, “and a wee student from the college comes in to do my hair, so I can't comment personally. She's called it Angel Hair or somethin like that. It's a nice enough name, but I can't help thinkin the A's dropped off the sign.”
"It's a type of pasta," Jenny says. "Maybe that's what she was going for.”
"Pasta." My dad says it like it's a sweary word. "There'll be no pasta tomorrow night, don't worry yerselves about that. It'll be traditional eatin, just like we had twenty-five year ago at that top table. Food you were all raised oan, mind. No curry. No pizza. None of this pasta rubbish."
"Jack," my mam hisses. "Nobody's arguin with ye."
For a wee second, Jenny looks taken aback but quickly collects herself and sounds soft and friendly when she says, “We're talking about a hairdresser's, Dad.”
Ignoring them, he shovels a forkload of chips into his mouth. He chews angrily, glaring at the telly while he stews. Then, before he's even swallowed, he pushes himself out of the comfy chair, holding his fish supper up in the palm of a hand like a waiter in the world's worst fancy restaurant and without another word, he storms off. When I look down at my sausage supper, I understand how Jenny managed to lose her appetite.
After Jenny left last year, I kept finding newspapers and magazines with shapes cut out. I quickly sussed that these were photos and articles featuring my model sister that were being turned into keepsakes. I didn't ever see my mam take her scissors to the paper or what she did with the clippings afterwards, but part of me thought she had them pinned up in Jenny's old room and when me and my dad were out, she'd sit in there and chat to the pictures over a cup of tea, pretend Jenny hadn't left after all. I've never been able to bring myself to go into the room to check. I always thought that was because I didn't want to be proved right. Now, I'm starting to think it was because I didn't want to be proved wrong.
Either way, when Jenny joins me the next morning, outside at the iron summer seat, she doesn't mention anything about sleeping in a creepy wee shrine to herself, which I suppose doesn't prove a thing.
“I've missed the smell of the country,” she says. “I used to hate it, but it's good. It's nice.”
"Aye?"
"Yeah. There's a petting zoo in Battersea Park and the smell always makes me think of home."
"I thought ye'd be more likely to complain about how quiet it is. I've never quite got my head round that, but is that not what folk say? That it's too quiet to sleep in the country?"
She pauses for a bit. "They do, but I didn't want to bring that up."
"Eh? How not?"
"You're not daft, Jason," she says sadly. "And besides, his sensors would pick that up and he'd be out here in a flash, ready to bite off whatever bit of my head you'd left behind."
I don't protest. For a start, there's no point. Mostly, though, I'm too ashamed that she's noticed the cold shoulder I've been jabbing into her since I picked her up at the airport.
“Speak of the devil,” she says and the kitchen door's flung open and my dad, in a familiar stomp, marches down the garden path. My mam stands on the back step, upset or flustered, but she doesn't set foot out of the house. Instead, she watches him reach his sanctuary and then turns back into her own, letting the door quietly click shut behind her.
The street starts to fill up and the doorbell starts to ring from about five in the afternoon, even though the table's not booked until eight. The invites suggested an early start for drinks at the house and most people have taken up the offer. My folks' silver wedding anniversary dinner feels like the biggest thing to happen in California for months.
“That was one of the saddest things about ye movin out,” my mam tells Jenny, out of my dad's earshot. “Yer pal's stopped comin round. The phone stopped ringin. The house got awfully quiet after ye left. It's nice to have it busy again.”
I'm about to remind her that I was still in the house but none of my pals are the phoning type and I think I'm probably more of a fixture in another mother's house.
As the living room continues to fill and chairs have to be drafted in from other rooms, an uneasy vibration starts in my belly. At first, I blame the sausage supper from last night, but it increases as more and more faces and memories pour in until it reaches the point where conversations are happening around me and I start to feel lonely. I realise it's ridiculous and I try to shrug it off, but the feeling sticks. It's not for shifting.
When the next door neighbours stick their heads round the living room door -- because they're not staying and they don't want to interrupt and no, they don't want a Buck's Fizz and of course they're not fishing for an invite and oh, what a lovely surprise to see Jenny again and please don't mind them because they only came round to pass on their best wishes for the night -- it hits me. Everyone's from somewhere else: London, Perth, Glasgow, Edinburgh, some from Stirling, a few scattered round Falkirk. Mostly, I'm in a room full of people that I used to see at least once a week but who've moved on. The room is full of the past. It's full of ghosts. Apart from the nosey neighbours, the only folk still from the village are me, my mam and my dad. Even though I'm still only twenty-two, I feel my life's slipping through my fingers and I don't really feel like going out for my tea tonight after all.
Jenny and I sit in the back seat of my dad's car and we wait. Inside, my mam's having some crisis or another about leaving the house and my dad's trying to talk her down from high doh. While we wait, other folk in other cars pull away, heading down the Braes to the restaurant that me and Jenny but mostly Jenny have paid for.
"It's an exodus," I say.
"Wagons roll, eh? Into the sunset."
Someone toots their horn and that's the cue for them all to join in, a modern equivalent of firing pistols into the sky, as the wagon train leaves the street. Jenny seems to relax a bit after this. If anything, I tighten up.
She's still smiling when she strokes the battered fake leather that covers the back seat. “Dad really needs to trade in this bucket of bolts for something more practical for him and Mum. God, I remember falling asleep here when I was a little girl coming home from Granny's. I'd pretend to be asleep when he'd carry me up to bed. He knew I was awake, I'm sure.”
"Maybe that's why he keeps it."
She pauses, like the memory is painful. I expect her to change the subject, but she doesn't. “I do miss home, you know.”
"I don't know why."
She laughs. "You'll know when you leave."
“What makes ye so sure I'll leave?”
“There's folk who can't leave and there's folk who won't and then there's everyone else. I'd say you're part of the everyone else. Everyone else leaves, Jason. No matter if you leave for Sydney or for two doors down. You'll miss home. Sooner or later.”
Before I get a chance to think about this or to respond, my mam comes staggering down the path like she's tanned a bottle of vodka while we've waited.
“For God's sake,” I mutter and get out of the car to help. I reach her and offer an arm and ask, “Where's my dad? I thought he was helping you get ready.”
“Ocht, he's a wee bit busy just now,” she says, like she doesn't want to make a big fuss.
“Busy? Busy how? Busy where?”
We stop at the car and she looks at me with eyes that look too tired to cry. “Where d'ye think?”
The sun's going down on the other side of the house and the shed is in shadow, alone at the far end of the lawn. I'm careful to walk slowly towards it, determined to keep a lid on my temper but with each step I seem to find another angry word, another word guaranteed to make things worse. By the time I reach the end of the path, my head is a noise and when I push the shed door open without knocking and see him sitting on a battered old kitchen stool at his workbench, my mouth and my face are pinched in with fury. When he looks at me with eyes I've already seen in my mum and I see an open scrapbook and a few articles with straight edges and right angles that have been carefully positioned inside and even before I let my gaze leave the book, my expression has softened and my throat tightened and I need to wait a minute before I can speak.
“Come on, Dad,” I say. “Let's go eat.”
On the way out of the Sunshine Village, apart from the upside down welcome on the road, there's no sign to tell you you're leaving. There's nothing that says Haste Ye Back, nothing to wish you a safe onward journey, nothing to ask you to switch off all the lights if you're the last one out. There's not even a sign to thank you for driving as carefully as the inward sign requested. Houses give way to fields and that's the only marker to let you know that you used to be part of something and now you're not. As my dad's car and its hungry cargo drift from one state into the other, I can't think why this should be the case. Do they not expect folk to leave? Once you're in, are you in forever? Is that what it's about? Does the village ignore the evidence or does it truly not see it? In the end, when the itch in my feet gets to the stage where I need to do something about it, I just hope a wee laddie goes out with his tin of yellow paint and writes the other half of his message, to remind me to come back once I go.
In the back seat, Jenny looks ready to fall asleep when she pats my knee and says in a year old accent, "I love comin home."
In the front seat, my dad tries not to smile.
About the Author
Born in Falkirk, Gavin Broom now lives in Stirling. For now. He's been published over fifty times online and in print, and he edits fiction for The Waterhouse Review.