Double take

What, he said to the girl, could be more perfect a headstone than piles of river-stones demarking a cairn? Much better than dates and names etcetera, or your body going up in smoke. To say time has worked through these bones…nothing more. Then, correcting himself, he shook his head. Man has made too many marks.

       She nodded, mentally rolling her eyes. Restless for cartwheels and sun; her friends called. There was mischief to get up to. She was going to write a boy’s name with hers in freshly lain cement. A stall was selling apricot ice-cream and the surf looked refreshingly cold. Anyway, she wouldn’t be arranging the old man’s eventual send off, her parents would when required. Why must he go rattling on and on? The longest day of summer and here he was sweating in his dirty old suit and overcoat, walking so slowly you’d think he’d put on a suit of armour. She watched his spit-flecked mouth and its murmurings. Out of puff, his words coming slow. As much as she loved him, an involuntary shudder passed through her. He’d be gone one day of course—no more Granddad’s caravan or holidays on the coast. Poor old codger. But all this pompous talk of his legacy, of what he wanted doing with his remains.

      Graves, he informed her, should be blank verses. A slate scraped for sums.

       He gave her a king’s ransom for ice-cream, fishing about in his heavy pockets. Parchment hands almost translucent; the veins thick blue cords. And then tender wet-eyed advice: It doesn’t matter if you forget me. Between us, there’ll still be an afterglow. Everything bloody death and drama. She smiled sweetly back at him trying to keep her face straight. The sun was so very high. He released her hand and she ran headlong away from him into the haze, singing as she went. When she remembered to look back, she could barely make him out. A shadow wading out into the water, a trick of the light.