My kids were young when I separated from their mum.
I didn’t go very far away. That’s what adults would have
said, ‘it’s only round the corner, they’ll hardly notice.’
It was a nice new townhouse with two bedrooms. They were
still young enough to share a bedroom and it would be a few years before I had
to think about the fact that they needed their own spaces. They were with me
lots of the time because of my work, four days on, four off. I made the place
as welcoming as I could as I moved in, a new bed each and their books and toys
between the beds in their room.
I had a sofa a friend gave me, and a small table the tele
could sit on for now.
I picked them up from school and we went and rode the bikes at
the local park, just as we often did before. We got something each from the bakery
on the way past towards the new home.
I had some bits and pieces in the kitchen and we had a drink
and the pink buns or whatever we had chosen sitting on the couch.
After dinner and showers, they were on the couch watching Simpsons,
and I sat down at the trestle table to do some of the paper work you always do with
changing addresses. My daughter was always drawing. I would buy a pad of printer
paper and she, and he, would go through it in a week. She had a big cook book
on her lap on the couch and was doodling away while I filled in forms.
The next day I dropped them back to their mums after school,
before I went to work for the night. I went back home to get a few things for
the shift.
There was a picture sitting on my trestle dining table,
placed neatly at the end where my folding chair was. It had a couple of highlighters
on top to make sure it didn’t blow away with the open window behind.
It was a picture of me. Just me, sitting at a long table on
my own with a pen in my hand and papers on the table. Nothing else. Except
there was a little framed picture on the wall, just behind my head. There had
been one picture hook in the wall when I moved in, you never know about such
things with renting. I had taken a picture of the two of them at the park the
week before, on their bikes, and had it printed with a few others. I had a
frame or two in my things when I moved in, and put the picture up once I had
moved the few pieces of furniture in.
I looked up at that little picture then with my dinner and a
change of clothes in my hands. They were smiling, really smiling the way kids
can. I looked at her simple picture, there hadn’t really been room for more
than stick figures in the picture with the scale. Both stick kids had massive
smiles on their faces, arcing around to touch the start of their ears.
I had a big smile on my face in the picture, I don’t think I
would have smiled once filling out dreary forms. I was looking straight ahead
to where the couch would have been if the picture was a little wider, to where
I would have met their eyes.
When I first saw that figure at the long, long table it was
as if my heart had been torn away.
I looked at those smiles, and she had put it back again.
