Time flown

Friday Fragment #28

Are you still awake? ‘I’ve been trying to sleep. But it’s hard to sleep.’ Her eyes flower from little slits. I kneel down to her bedside and rest my head almost beside hers on the pillow, but for my hand, which I place between us to cushion her cheek from the hedgehog stab of her father’s. Her hand comes up as echo, under her cheek, and our shielding fingers find and share each other. She smiles and tries to stifle a small laugh; her cheeks inflate in the same way that a balloon responds to a first gentle, bellows-like demand of the lungs. Do you think you might be able to get to sleep soon? ‘You could stay for a while? Then I could get to sleep.’ I pause. Downstairs, a house waits to be put back into order. Her sister’s toy glockenspiel is underneath the sofa. The wooden beater lies underneath a jotting pad. Her liquid-glitter wand, the one that has usurped beater as the implement with which to thrash at her glockenspiel, was flailed too and now sits flush to the skirting board beneath the window. I picture them strewn and want to tend to them; I’m impatient to arrange things back into place. I correct two awkwardly stray tendrils of hair that have fallen to obscure her face, using my free hand to sweep two fingers across her brow and stitch each curl back behind her ear. ‘Is Mummy back yet?’ Soon. She’ll be in her car now. ‘Can you stay until Mummy gets back… please…?’ She holds melodiously onto that last syllable. Six of the glockenspiel’s eight steel bars produce the most soothing chimes, whether struck by wooden beater or its plastic surrogate. The other two bars dink flatly, a silly annoyance I’ve lamented each day since it appeared from its stocking almost a week ago. Here, despite the late hour and the distracted and busy mind of her father, here she creates harmony; here, she never fails to override all of my other concerns. Here, she makes every choice easy. Okay, yes, but you need to get to sleep though. ‘Okay.’ And I let my weight give fully into the mattress. I lift my head, cup hers and kiss her right temple through a web of hair: a meshed embrace to tell her silently that she has won, but she hears only that she is safe. I love you. And then a second kiss, with pursed lips, to spare her from the spiky halo that surrounds. This one lands lightly, with snowflake serendipity, on the soft of her nose, this one to set her to sleep, this one to describe that for which words will always fail to find adequate form, but she will hear those silent and undiscovered words too. Goodnight, my darling. ‘Goodnight.’¹

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1. She was six, perhaps seven, when I wrote this. She will read it for this first time now that she is eighteen, away from home, but still capable of hearing all of our words – including those that we whisper and those that we don’t always know how to shape, sound or find.