Wine, Pork Pies and Bananas by Janet Sillett
Joan is doing a dance – her slim hands with their purple veins are raised elegantly as she hums to Cole Porter. Joan never forgets a song. But she has forgotten to get dressed. Or doesn’t feel the need to. Her bare feet tapping on the green-marbled lino.
‘Aren’t you cold, Joan?’
‘No, don’t be silly, it’s August’ (it’s February). ‘Alice, am I invisible?’
‘Of course, you’re not. I’m looking at you right now and your penguin slippers.”
I suppose she has a point. I’m 50 and beginning to think I disappear more each day.
So here we are, my friend Joan, who I met when she wasn’t yet quite old. A fierce feminist, but a lover of men. Several men. And me? My daughter has ‘cancelled’ me, I am between jobs and ‘between homes’ – a year now living in this tiny house…
And Stefan, a large Pole, a bit clumsy, fixed Joan’s plumbing and somehow stayed, cooking us pierogis and teaching me laughter. He makes Joan smile by just coming into the room.
‘We have to go to the sea’ Joan commands. Joan, though not always sure what month it is, is always sure about what she wants.
She gets dressed – red shoes with a bow. She twirls around in a flouncy skirt. And waves a gaudy silk scarf in front of my face.
‘Alice – don’t forget the wine, pork pies and bananas.’
The sea is grey but that is how it always is, even on sunny days. But there are endless skies and we are interrupted only from time to time by inquisitive dogs, sniffing the pork pies, pulled away by their owners. We must look strange, us three, sitting in a huddle on a tartan blanket on a cool Norfolk beach.
A small dog runs up to us, then shook herself, wet from the sea. Two children catch up with her, breathless.
‘What’s her name’ tickling her plump tummy.
‘Emerald’
Joan, ‘Has he got emerald eyes?’
‘No, don’t be daft and she’s a girl.’
‘Then why call her Emerald?’
‘Cos my mum wanted me to be called Emerald but my dad said no and so we called her that instead.’
Joan loses interest, shuts her eyes.
The boy stares at us, ‘Is she very very old your mum, she looks like my gran, though my gran wouldn’t wear odd socks, ever.’
I start to say – she’s not my mum, but instead ‘She’s ancient, but you should see her dance.’ They run off shouting against the wind.
Joan opens her eyes. She finds small children exhausting.
Stefan plays some music on his phone and Joan and I get up and spin around, doing our Isadora Duncan dance. Stefan smiles indulgently. Maybe he thinks all older single English women turn into eccentrics. We’ll have to get a cat.
It is cooler now, the sky darkening.
‘Come on sweetie’ I punch Joan lightly on her arm. ‘It’s time to go home.’
Janet Sillett started writing poetry and flash fiction during lockdown. She’s recently retired from a think tank where she managed to sneak in poetry quotes in briefings about local government. She has had some writing published in various journals and online.
Read more work by Janet…
CONCENTRIC CIRCLES – in www.litromagazine.com
Here are some links to her published poems online..
Why I ended up (for a while) in Hull – www.spillingcocoa.com
Never eat shellfish – www.spillingcocoa.com
The politics of envy – www.spillingcocoa.com
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Fresh and evocative. A significant and potentially perilous condition described wirh a light touch.