He takes the birthday

without sentimentality,

the flashed wit a bit frail,

fluttering his logic - not mumbling,

dancing the phrases - rather as

he dance-shuffled the street,

refusing a white stick:

that way he felt ground and took

help just for crossing. We say,

as we always did,

how does he do it?

Because he's in his hideout,

the ledge, the cliff shadow, where he,

and she too, lie anchored,

two silvery black-eyed fish

waving transparent bodies 

against the tugs and tweaks of

the roving current, all that

such suspended beings

now and forever need.

Ahead  

My mother was walking ahead of me. We were walking one by one down the High Street. She passed the jewellers slowly, I noticed she was on one stick again, not two, and was surprised and pleased. She hadn't had her usual weekly set, I could see by her white hair, the curly ends a little lank and straying over the collar of her old red anorak-coat, the coat she wore in her big garden or for her few short walks to the village or to church. I was very pleased, thrilled really; she was moving so well, her balance astonishingly normal, firm, she was upright, her little shoulders hunched with age, but still she was walking almost more briskly than I could. She hadn't told me she was coming to my town. I couldn't understand it - Although I could in a moment: she was independent, had smart friends here who she must have driven over to lunch with. Now she was walking rapidly, despite the hunched red shoulders (the old coat was crimson, and padded and kept her warm in the depths of winter); she was making her way back, it must be, to the car park past Queen's Framers, past the Memorial. Well, she could have phoned me.

For a moment the thought came, went: give up, slow back - well, as usual it would be impossible to catch up with her, etc; I should have known. At that moment my body may have faltered, one nanosecond; I was not aware of it. Instantly my mother drew ahead, her stick seemed to twinkle as it whirled in and out of the shoppers, women old and young, some with heavy bags, some with kids, kids in push-chairs, babies clutched to their slim bodies in brightly coloured slings, and she was a little figure, a red anorak, calf length, old lady-bird legs, winter boots ankle-high, slipping in front of an older woman, then beyond a young girl behind a brown-haired child in a push-chair.

It came towards me, child sucking the two middle fingers of one hand, the forefinger stroking its cheek. Round and round. The toddler grimaced, then stretched lazily round to check for its mother. The push-chair was all huge comic daisies, blue and scarlet, the young girl, her fashionable tummy brown as a berry, her pink cotton top, her breasts - the swell of them brown, pushing against the pink top, pushing the pink-cheeked child, its forefinger busy stroking one plump cheek, the mother slim as a daisy, pink and white, brown from the summer sun, the gorgeous prolonged weather, she came towards me, I said hallo, and she passed with a stranger's smile, happy smile, the smile you can get and, if you like, give, here in this strange town.

[This prose extract is part of a work in progress entitled The Unreliable Diarist]