Vona Groarke

A joyrider rips up Lockland. It takes barely five minutes for a precinct helicopter to dip and swivel over lawns and two opposing lines of cars parked innocently snug to the sidewalk. They haven't found him yet. Every couple of minutes or so, my blind soaks in outrageous light and the helicopter hauls its drone and feud all over my backyard. There's a fan over my bed that says similar things in summer: adages, reproach and rhetoric. I talk too much; give far too much away. In mumbling my company, I reckon on a twofold payoff: some echo; being found out, consequence. I lie low. Minutes swell. He must be out there somewhere, lights switched off, crouched and bundled, foot within an inch of the get-go. I pull the comforter up over my ears, count to forty-two, then start over. I'm trying, trying hard, to hold my breath.

“Are they real?” We have pages of kitchen utensils and books and candlesticks and nibs, but the charcoal pencil and new sketchpad are squat as aubergines in her hands in front of this display. With bad weather forecast and light silting up in cramped windows, we are the only visitors. The year settles in a corner of the room, has removed its white gloves, tip by tip, and set to one side its summer purse of bibelots and sheen. Half-term of her final year, we are sightseers intent on moors. In the morning, her windcheater and red wellies will bestow the dust of summer festivals upon sullen, wind-soaked sheep. We will park, and walk ourselves into the final, cutting rain between pages of her favorite book. She wants to go all the way to Top Withens, or the house they say must have been Top Withens, given its loneliness and set. But now is artifacts and souvenirs: a perfume with too much musk in it, a jar of damson jam which we probably won’t open until past its sell-by date. We are buying the word “damson.” And we are buying time. “Are they real?” she asks me, and I watch her reckon the distance between what should and should never be seen. We have fallen short. She draws, and what she draws is rain falling slant inside the bedroom; the bed as a box of leaves and stones and, within the display case, she hangs from the clothes rail, little moons. On the mannequin, water lilies stand in for morning dress, and the backdrop is marbled in what looks to me like veins and arteries. But when I flick through the sketchpad in the B&B, all the pages, what is left of them, are clean. Next day, she leaves it in the car. When she moves away, she will leave it again, a sketchpad with no name on it and only the faintest traces of where she made skies of darned linen, and unfastened every stitch.