These Arms
Briony Collins
They were forget-me-nots. She knew that from sitting on her father’s lap as a young girl and reading those outdoor magazines he loved.
“Pretty,” she said.
“Just like you, princess.”
“Blue.”
“Just like me.”
Six decades on, the faintest smile flickered in Joan’s eyes as she stroked the tiny petals between her fingers and thought about pulling them up. They were weeds after all. Was it enough to let something live just for being beautiful?
“They’re called forget-me-nots,” he once said, pulling her against his chest.
“Why?”
“Whenever you see them, it means a person who isn’t around anymore is telling you how much they love you.”
“From Heaven?”
“Sure, princess.”
Joan let the flowers go. They could stay a little longer.
It was a hot day for Anglesey. The end of summer hovered above the island as thick, invisible dome. As Joan peeled off her gardening gloves, she noticed how clammy her palms were and how her fingers slipped past each other, barely touching. Her father used to knit his huge hands into hers and spin her round, dancing in the living room together with his favourite song on the record player.
“These arms of miiiiiiiiine,” he crooned, swirling her around and pulling Joan into a hug that completely enveloped her.
The gloves fell from Joan’s hands onto the lawn. She didn’t pick them up, only stepped around them on her way back into the house. Inside, Ffiona was standing at the kitchen sink, filling the kettle with water.
“Fancy a panad?” she asked.
“Sure, ta.”
Joan watched her daughter fix two cups of tea in silence. The kettle rumbled away in the corner, steaming and adding to the sweltering humidity in the room. Ffiona’s yellow dress swished against her calves. A blackbird’s song came in through the open window, over the low hum of the boiling water. Joan wiped her eyes on her shirt sleeve before Ffiona turned back around.
“Here you go, mam,” she said, handing Joan’s drink to her. “Shall we sit outside?”
“Good idea,” Joan replied, following Ffiona into the garden across from where she just was, to the table and chairs underneath the rowan tree.
“Lovely day.”
“Too bloody hot for me.”
“I know, mam, but in winter it’s too bloody cold, in spring it’s too bloody wet, and in autumn it’s too bloody mercurial,” Ffiona laughed, “I’ll take the heat any day.”
“You weren’t made for this climate. You must have been Spanish or Italian in another life.”
“You always say that, mam.”
“Consistency is key,” Joan said, taking a sip from her mug. “Much like this. You always make a good cuppa.”
A brief breeze tangled itself in the branches of the tree and a few red berries dropped down onto the grass around them. They sat in silence. Joan’s eyes drifted along the flowerbed to her gloves. If it rained they
would be ruined. It didn’t matter.
“These arms of miiiiiiiiine, they are lonely, lonely and feeling bluuuuue,” her father sang, lifting Joan up onto his feet so that when he moved she was in time with him.
“Daddy!” she shrieked and they giggled together.
“Mam?” Ffiona said, pulling Joan back to the garden. “Are you okay?”
“Aye, sorry. I was just thinking.”
“About?”
“I have some forget-me-nots blooming over there. You see them? The little blue ones sprawling about between the pansies.”
“I see them.”
Ffiona frowned. Joan hated when she crumpled her face up in that sad, confused way. A blackbird swooped down and courageously ventured over to nibble at the fallen berries. Was this the same one who was singing before? It was unlikely. There were so many of them and they were all the same. It was always that song too. Joan could barely stand to be in the garden anymore.
She moved into this house when her husband left her a couple of years ago. She never knew rage like she did that day. In the evening, Ffiona came over. Even then, Joan felt awful that Ffiona decided to see her and not Gordon. It was a stupid thing to feel guilty over, but this was never the life she wanted to give her daughter. There was supposed to be a sense of security that settled in with being married for forty years. Where was the stability? The eternity?
Ffiona was kind enough to turn up with a bottle of Merlot.
Joan stared down at her red reflection floating in the top of her wine. This wasn’t her body. When she pictured herself in her mind, she never looked the way she did now. She imagined herself with her then-body – the softness of her wedding night with those peaks and valleys she could share with the blissful denial of mortality. She thought of how Gordon had loved her, brokered the give and take of their tide that night. But forty years came like a current and drowned them. Who was she now?
She could torch the house down, and why the fuck shouldn’t she? After all, it was only her left. Ffiona encouraged her to move.
“Mam, you know a lovely place by the beach would suit you better. Sunshine, waves, the salt air… it would be ace,” Ffiona said, as if Joan wanted to be another old biddy by the sea.
She supposed to herself that she’d need a new home if she set this one alight. The thought of erasing all evidence of their marriage – and Gordon’s betrayal – in a blaze changed her mind. Maybe she could do something else. Breast implants were a thing women got, right? She could get a perfect pair of new tits shoved into this stranger’s body. Or perhaps she could take an extended holiday and fuck off to Bali like Julia Roberts did in that film once…what was it called? She could burn Gordon’s house down AND fuck off to Bali. With new tits. And a hunk called Pedro.
“Mam?” Ffiona said. “Are you listening?”
“Sorry. Yes. I’ll think about it.”
Ffiona raised her eyebrows and pulled out a powder compact, staring into the mirror on the inside of the lid, primping and pouting. Joan looked at her own reflection again before throwing the rest of the drink down her throat and swallowing hard. While she poured another glass she fantasised about what Pedro might look like and how exactly she would go about meeting someone like him. If Gordon could at his age, surely Joan could too. But she already knew it wasn’t the same. The compact snapped shut as Ffiona sighed and reached her hand across to Joan’s knee.
“You need to take care of yourself, mam. You know I’m always here for you, of course, but you need to be here for yourself most of all.”
She nodded and drank. When Ffiona left and she was alone again, Joan drew a bath. There were two bath bombs left over from the Christmas present Ffiona gave her. One was elderflower and jasmine. The other was spiced apple. Joan stared at them – one in each hand – turning them over. Was elderflower or apple better for a soon-to-be divorcee to marinate in? Screw it, Joan thought, and flung them into the water together. Let them both go.
After a couple of weeks, the anger drained away into grief, and then the distant echoes of sadness. Soon it was only a small cry, reverberating in her bones. If she tuned into it, tears would come almost immediately. Instead, Joan ignored it, continuing her days aware that it was there, but no longer acknowledging it. That was hard to do now. It was only in the understanding that Joan would never see him again that she felt strong enough to let him into her thoughts.
“We haven’t talked about it,” Ffiona said, following her mother’s mind effortlessly as they sat together in the garden.
“No.”
“Should we?”
“We could. If it would help you.”
“And what about you? Would it help you?”
“I’m not sure.”
Ffiona nodded and lowered her head. The look of a child who wanted something they couldn’t have never faded as the years shaped them. It was a universal expression.
“Look, Fee, I’ve not been sure about your dad in a long time. He did that. Planted the uncertainty in my heart. In this family. But this is… this is something else. I don’t know how to live without my hurt. How can I let it go to feel another?”
“This isn’t about you, mam,” Ffiona said gently. “I’m sorry. You know I value your pain. Even though I loved dad so much, I will always share that sadness with you. But there is room in a heart for more than one crack.”
“Lonely and feeling bluuuuue…” her father spun around inside her head.
Joan always remembered her dad fondly, even when he was gruff or distant. Eventually, distance became intrinsic to his entire existence and that searching look in his eyes was constant. Throughout her life, she never came close to understanding where he went when nobody was looking. Every day was a funeral for him, a procession and a speech, the long walk between graves until he arrived at the one he wanted, and said goodbye. Life was only a condition to him; a state to wait out until he got what he truly desired.
Losing her mother was worse for him. She always understood that. Joan was still young and a stranger to the world. She would love and be loved in all ways. He would never love like that again. There was never a day when his wife was far from his thoughts and he could conjure her back into his vision within seconds. In a single day he became a medium, always drifting in the lingering haze between worlds. When he eventually passed away too, some thirty years later, he smiled like a young boy returning home again after a long summer away.
“What do you want to say?” Ffiona prompted.
“I was sorry for your dad.”
“Do you mean that?”
“I did love him once, didn’t I? Maybe I still do, in some recess, some ventricle. I was sorry for him.”
Ffiona stared ahead and smoothed her dress out on her legs. They finished their teas and waited, not sure if they could leave or not. Who could ever be sure about leaving? Ffiona was the first to move in the end, rising and collecting the mugs, before going back into the kitchen. The subtle wind brought down more rowan berries like sharp, red hail. They rolled down the slight slope in the lawn towards the flowerbed and Joan’s eyes tracked them back to the forget-me-nots.
“Dad?” she said, before blushing and looking to make sure Ffiona hadn’t heard.
It wasn’t the same, of course. How could it be? Her father had loved her mother more than anything in this world, perhaps more than he loved Joan, in a way. Joan didn’t feel that way about Gordon. He would have needed the diagnosis five years ago to elicit a similar reaction to that of her father. Yet she couldn’t help but feel her soul shudder a little when she got the phone call. Her bones felt heavier.
“Jo?” Gordon said on the line.
“What?”
“Not even going to say hello?”
“The closest to ‘hello’ you’ll get out of me is ‘hell.’”
“Jo…I have to tell you something.”
“Yeah?”
“I have cancer.”
“…”
“Jo?”
“…”
“Joan?”
“Are you getting treatment?”
“The doctor says the best it’ll do is prolong the inevitable.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“No. No, I’m not getting treatment.”
“What about Fee?”
“I’m going to tell her tonight.”
When Ffiona rang the doorbell at nine that night, Joan wrapped her daughter in her arms and rocked her. They moved together, shifting their weight from foot to foot and heaving tears. From afar, it looked like they were dancing.
In her chair in the garden, Joan watched Ffiona through the kitchen window washing their mugs. She got up and picked a few of the forget-me-nots. Bringing them inside, she set them down in the sink in front of her daughter. Then Joan took her hand. It was covered in soap and the heat of the water made her skin red. They stood there, watching the heads of the flowers float and circle each other in the ripples caused by the touch of Joan’s fingers.
“When you see them, it means someone who isn’t here is telling you that they love you,” Joan said.
“Who is saying it?”
Joan pulled Ffiona into her arms and together they swayed to an invisible rhythm with the flowers. Neither spoke, not daring to venture an answer to the question that still hung in the air, but each certain of their own private reply.
Briony Collins is a poet, novelist, and playwright. She won the 2016 Exeter Novel Prize and has several prominent publications. Her debut poetry chapbook, BLAME IT ON ME, is forthcoming with Broken Sleep Books in August 2021. She is co-founder and co-editor of Cape Magazine. Briony is currently represented by DHH Literary Agency. She can be found on Twitter (@ri_collins) and Instagram (@ri_collins96).
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