Extract from "The Loopholes of Retreat," by Candia McWilliam. Forthcoming in The Book of Iona: an Anthology, edited by Robert Crawford. (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2016)
We knew the veil was thinning for Nana Effie after the drookit handbag in the Post Office.
Peggy who took a shift at the busy times called me down from the old house where I was spreading seaweed on the lazy-beds we’d made Nana agree to. I was over from my place of work to bide awhile with my mother’s mother who had mostly raised me, as far as ever I did grow.
It was odd having the dulse in slippy limpet-buttoned armfuls not in leaves like dried-out summer salty handkerchiefs off the washing line. I’ve grown used to those where I live now.
It turned out Nana’d put her milk-thermos for the morning cup she had now to take alone into the depths of her good handbag. She only found out the thermos- top was loose when she’d had to pull forth in the Post Office, some days later, from out the soor dook in her bag, the sticky banknotes, with that thin line of metal through them a vein now of cheesy green. She’s took them out from the soggy pastry of her wallet.
Coin was unaffected.
There’s the swollen up clam of compact. She thought of that powder puff as a teacher might of the board-duster. This was clear to any who had chummed Nana forth the island. By the time she was at any destination but the first her face would be sifted with powder white as a morning roll.
She was postcarding me, Peggy insisted, though there I was, staying with her in the house where she’d lived with all us children and our mother and sometimes our father till he wasn’t and Granda Niall till he went.
She was looking for the money to pay for the stamp to reach the place where I was not, for I was with her, in that house that had held the clutch of us, but that now felt right tight for just two, even though it was distance I’d filled up on in my life, not space; my next island being crammed as a sack of roe. She was looking for the money to exchange for the stamp that would ensure the flight of words so they might reach me, all those miles away, where I was not. The unposted picture postcard, showing a blushing sky and the old cross against it read on the reverse, under the instruction “Correspondence”, “I wish you were here.”
It had clearly been written some time before. Most likely the words were those she thought most suited for the open craft of a postcard. I had received several such cards from her over the years and thought of it as not much more than one half of the antiphonal affection we held for one another.
I looked at the address. All was as it should have been, the effective exact numbers, too big to grasp, and the concrete nouns, Sago, Marina Fort , all pre-written-out by me on my last visit to spare her trouble. Where my name was, though, she had overwritten, “to GOD”.
Peggy who took a shift at the busy times called me down from the old house where I was spreading seaweed on the lazy-beds we’d made Nana agree to. I was over from my place of work to bide awhile with my mother’s mother who had mostly raised me, as far as ever I did grow.
It was odd having the dulse in slippy limpet-buttoned armfuls not in leaves like dried-out summer salty handkerchiefs off the washing line. I’ve grown used to those where I live now.
It turned out Nana’d put her milk-thermos for the morning cup she had now to take alone into the depths of her good handbag. She only found out the thermos- top was loose when she’d had to pull forth in the Post Office, some days later, from out the soor dook in her bag, the sticky banknotes, with that thin line of metal through them a vein now of cheesy green. She’s took them out from the soggy pastry of her wallet.
Coin was unaffected.
There’s the swollen up clam of compact. She thought of that powder puff as a teacher might of the board-duster. This was clear to any who had chummed Nana forth the island. By the time she was at any destination but the first her face would be sifted with powder white as a morning roll.
She was postcarding me, Peggy insisted, though there I was, staying with her in the house where she’d lived with all us children and our mother and sometimes our father till he wasn’t and Granda Niall till he went.
She was looking for the money to pay for the stamp to reach the place where I was not, for I was with her, in that house that had held the clutch of us, but that now felt right tight for just two, even though it was distance I’d filled up on in my life, not space; my next island being crammed as a sack of roe. She was looking for the money to exchange for the stamp that would ensure the flight of words so they might reach me, all those miles away, where I was not. The unposted picture postcard, showing a blushing sky and the old cross against it read on the reverse, under the instruction “Correspondence”, “I wish you were here.”
It had clearly been written some time before. Most likely the words were those she thought most suited for the open craft of a postcard. I had received several such cards from her over the years and thought of it as not much more than one half of the antiphonal affection we held for one another.
I looked at the address. All was as it should have been, the effective exact numbers, too big to grasp, and the concrete nouns, Sago, Marina Fort , all pre-written-out by me on my last visit to spare her trouble. Where my name was, though, she had overwritten, “to GOD”.