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My eye catches a scurrying movement on the lean-to across the lane…
A squirrel?
No — sinuous, russet, a white bib, tail tagged with black.
It leaps, it pounces silently, with no tang of tin,
but there’s no prey, no mouse in the runnels.
It curvets, it prances, draws squiggling Ss — I’m running out of words to describe what it does.
Nor are words the thing or motives such as practice, predation…
Here is the world unfurling itself in joy —
stoat on a tin roof dancing dancing
O wickedness! Those teetering dolls with skittle-shaped bodies that we cut our teeth on. Exotic bickiepegs — I can still remember how poisonous they tasted.
And the mother dolls with their screw-on bellies, each hatching an identical daughter, smaller and smaller — except the youngest was always mysteriously missing, stuffed furtively up various orifices.
Clearest of all is the old peasant bravely struggling up the mountain (my father’s special treasure), his knotted kerchief, wooden sandals, back bent beneath the load of a wicker basket, cleverly fashioned from half a peanut shell. One day we happened to discover the original peanut was inside — withered, age-blackened, still, we had it out, and ate it.
We watched our father read books from the end to the beginning — a habit full of possibilities.
The woodcutter, for example, rushed urgently back to the forest to stack his axe safely against the woodpile.
The grandmother, waking from a dream of indigestion, got up and squinted at the visitor dodging away from her through the trees.
The little girl’s mother undid the strings of her hood and unpacked her basket, replacing the cakes and honey on the shelf, like a good housekeeper.
And the wolf? Once he was out of sight the wolf dropped to all fours, leaving the pages riffling over his head, and went loping out of that world — hungry (true), but unbothered by speech.
The windscreen’s nutty with flies. Stranded on hot leather seamed with palm-prints, we churn the cranky handles round and round, or slot open the burning ashtrays to spit in a pink slug of gum.
We’ve been here for ever and ever, victims of the unknowable ways of grown-ups — sometimes lulled with buttery ice-creams spooling on our knees, more often left to endless games of I-Spy: Burp. (Can’t see it…) Baby! Blister. Bum.
At last they come back, excuses floating off them — ‘We weren’t gone long. We weren’t gone long at all.’ Slaps are dealt out unfairly. I inspect the trim black quills on the back of my father’s neck. And we drive home. And time starts up again.
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