The Horseman's Only Daughter

        This land is ancient, wreathed in folklore as much as it is in mist. As you look out over gorse and heather and the granite outcrops you are confronted with a mysterious raw beauty, then, just as quickly, the picture disappears.
        So it was long ago with the horseman’s only daughter. She sculled across the loch in the coble, against her father's wishes, hoping for a haul of wee fish for the supper she wished to cook for him.
       “There is a storm coming” he said, “and you’ll lose your way back in the haar.”
         But she was a headstrong girl, filled with the invincibility of youth.
        “Och, I’ll be fine Da, besides, who’s going to miss one woman in a storm?” and so saying she headed out across the grey waters.
         The horseman had lived by that loch all his life and could read its moods better than he could read and write. The haar descended just as he had predicted making loch, glen and munro gradually fade from view. The world morphed from colour to whitewash and shadow quicker than he could shoe a horse.
         The horseman stood straining into the bleached air trying to make out the shape of his daughter but the balance of colour was skewed and she had been swallowed into nothing. He stood on the bank of the loch and translated his prayer for her safe return into the ring of bells and in this way his daughter was able to find her way to the shore.
        Ever since that day, on a certain loch in the highlands, it has been tradition to ring the bell every time the sea haar swallows the shore to breathe hope into every heart.

Wedding Feast

It is a crowd of strangers who mill about on the lawn outside the pub. Bob’s work colleagues mostly, a few university chums, even fewer family. 

Izzy had lost touch with her few school friends and she didn’t have any family. 

She’d never been easy with strangers and her skin prickles with the nearness of them. She concentrates hard on maintaining what she hopes is a bridal smile. This is meant to be her day. She should be empowered, imbued with the beauty of angels. She stands awkwardly, marooned on the pub's small lawn, feeling frumpy rather than angelic. She balances the double edged sword of her needs: she wants to be the centre of attention but she would rather no one was looking at her. She does not feel good in her skin and the dress does nothing to hide the fat that has grown to camouflage her insecurity, her shame.

Izzy hears Bob’s laughter bouncing off the walls of the beer garden. She should go to him. She feels stronger in his shadow. The crowd is broken into groups, an archipelago of well-wishers. She should take a deep breath and approach an island, moor up for a while but how can she choose which one will offer a safe harbour? She’s never been very good at reading people. What’s the worst that can happen she asks herself gamely,  only she knows the answer to that.

Why doesn’t Bob come and rescue her? He should be showing her off shouldn’t he? Insecurity twists like a knife: he doesn’t want to. Tall thin Bob and his dumpy wife. Still, she feels safer with his slim solid comfort by her side. Jack Sprat. Her other half. Without him, her nerves are her enemy causing her to tremble and hesitate.

The answer of course is written at the fringe of the longest shadow: the hospitality tent. Food galore presented on beautiful silver salvers. A hundred different morsels, each conveniently sized to pop into your mouth with no need for a plate. Maybe she could taste  just a few, for dutch courage, to make her feel braver, quash the butterflies turning summersaults in her belly. Food always appreciates her company. It's mutual. But that's cowardly she argues, besides, she can already hear the judging voices: look at the bride scoffing her face: she’s so fat. There’s no secret what she loves most. 

But this internal dialogue is familiar. She has her tried and tested counter-arguments at the ready: If I go to the buffet table I might be able to introduce myself to someone, follow them back to their group. I'll be alright once I'm there. She knew how to spin things to her own tune.

But greed is a blindfold. Once she is in front of the long buffet table, a choice of delicacies too great to narrow down, drown out any option but appetite. The question becomes one of logistics: is there room to do this food justice inside her ridiculous bodice? 

The lady at the bridal showroom had assured her it wouldn’t matter that the dress had become a little tight.

“Nobody ever eats at their own wedding,” she’d said. “Nerves will slim you down a bit in the week before the big day.” 

Bollocks to that Izzy thought. That skinny bitch obviously knew nothing. 

Quickly she snaffled a mini pork pie and two mini roast-beef and horseradish cream Yorkshire puddings. Oh, but there they go again the alarm bells of shame and judgement.  Time to crush them beneath a profiterole or ten.

In darkness there is light

       The musicians enter the courtyard. Acoustics amplify a tumble of voices and chords of vibrant praise echo off the walls. There is cool breeze and warm spice and I am transported to another world surrounded by gods of knowledge-unknown. My throat burns with ignorance, and my head with longing.

        I am a foreigner in a foreign land and have never felt further from home. Everything is strange to me, uncatalogued. I feel the presence of others, a oneness with like-minded spirits. They are talking, smoking, clapping along to the intrepid beat, allowing it to transport them from their cares.

People come together over a bowl of food, share in a communal feast.

       The music winds up to a dizzying finale, conjuring the whirl of a dervish. Skirted jackets spin in my mind, floating on currents of sound. There is heat, smoke, coffee, aniseed in the sugared fennel at the centre of the table. I am lost on a journey in my mind.

      What I thought was a finale expands into a new act, the rise and fall of new characters- a circus top.Bring on the dancing horses, a mad monkey in a fez beats a drum, the ring master flicks his whip and its tassle scurries on the sand behind the heals of the horses.

      The hustlers come. They are ready with their upturned tambourine, instrument-become-begging-bowl, to collect coins from the onlookers. Where are the gods now? Clink, chink, the coins add their erratic beat to the drummer’s story, he is faster now. There is an urgency to his ending.

Baby, Mine

           Life was not meant to be this way. The carriage I was travelling in was full of colour, exuberant noise, parties. 

           Then everything changed. I was not in the carefree young adult carriage anymore but stuck on a side line in a carriage of my own making. A carriage that I could not permit anyone else into. 

            It was an isolation of my own making. Social pariah, outcast. I had derailed my life all on my own. I consoled myself that it was temporary.  I believed it too.

    

       I was still a child. Sweet if not entirely innocent. Nobody in my position had the right to call themselves innocent. Naïve perhaps, but not innocent. I thought I was ready for adult life believing it would be kind of warm and kind of nice, a more independent version of my childhood. But it wasn’t like that.

          The child that was at first a delicious secret held in my dark internal spaces, a promise of love ever after, became a terrifying reality and as she grew so did the shame that was forced upon me. It was impossible to imagine anything but giving her up. The words seemed so easy, like chocolate at Lent, disconnected from the heart breaking reality. Walking away was like tearing myself in two. 
I will never be whole again.

         I live with the secret and conjur memories of a life I imagine Emily to be having, the life I could have shared with her. The protective mother in me was born simultaneously as she drew her first independent breath. I imagine the rosy glow of chubby cheeks as she blows out birthday candles, bumps and bruises that I kiss better, the hand I  hold as we walk across the road, the lullaby I sing to keep the demons at bay. What kind of love is this? The kind that haunts my every quiet moment.

         There is a persistent knowledge of something missing in the fabric of my life- a quilt with no stuffing. I am alone. Alone in my carriage, still in the siding, while everyone else has moved on.

        If I look closely enough, I think, maybe I will see her. I study the faces of children at the park, in the shoe shop, at the school gate. I wonder if I see her will there be a lightning bolt, a moment of undeniable recognition? Then I hope that our paths don’t cross: to rock her world like that, destroy the reality she believes in, would be cruel. I have no right. I gave up my right. But I send love into the world like a crown of steam on a cup of tea and hope it will blanket her with protective warmth.

         One day. Maybe one day I will hold her again.

         I know I should be grateful that she found a good home, that she filled the gap in someone else’s family jigsaw. The down I stroked on her head has long since become curls but they reside in someone else’s locket; the scuffed shoes will be polished by someone other than me; the frown I imagine on her sweet head will be smoothed by her not-quite-mother’s hand. We are united she and I, united by pretence, complicit in the same falsehood. We are both not-quite-mothers, by blood and by choice. Maybe I am not alone. Maybe she thinks of me too.