In a Seven Year Old Anxiety Can Present as Boredom, by Barry Tench

2B were doing ‘My Father’s Job’ that week. I recall that the lilac trees in the school playground were heavy with flower and that the purple dripped with April rain.  I searched the grey sky behind the roofs of the terraced houses opposite for some sign of the sun that would mean holidays weren’t far away. My desk lid was scored by the pointed ends of countless protractors, initials and dates scarred the soft wood. What if I made my dad sound interesting, and by implication insurance? Would I be forced to follow in his footsteps, to become an insurance salesman for the rest of my life?

I had watched him return home in the evening, stand in the frame of the back door and blow cigarette smoke out into the garden; walk through the house into the living room, did he ever speak? I don’t remember. He would turn on the television, open the evening paper, light another cigarette. The kettle would whistle in the kitchen but he wouldn’t turn his head to see if someone was going to take it off the stove.

I went to his office once; he’d forgotten to collect me from the dentist and I walked through town to his office. I wasn’t sure which way to go, I traced my steps back, took another street. I asked a woman if she knew where my dad’s office was. I didn’t know the name of the building but said, he is an insurance man. She pointed me up the bank to a tall grey building.

“There are offices in there young man”. 

I used to have dreams of a Tyrannosaurs Rex hunting me, crashing through the rooms of our house to where I was hiding behind a jar of pickles on the top shelf in the pantry.

I stumbled in through the glass door. The lobby of the office block smelled of damp paper, cigarettes and feet. The walls, the windows, the beige linoleum on the floor, everything looked like it was coated with a thin film of grime. I sat next to his desk as he joked with colleagues about forgetting to collect me from the dentist, he smoked another cigarette.

I faced 2B. I wanted to say my dad was a teacher, a bus driver, a shop keeper but I didn’t have time to consider the details. Miss made those ‘go-on’ eyes at me. I looked at the faces of my classmates. Is he going to cry? Is he going to piss himself?

“John what does your father do?”

“Nothing.”

“Yes he does. What job does he do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where does he go in the morning?”

“He’s dead.”

“Sit down John. I’ll speak to you later”.

I walked back to my desk past Brian Evans whose father had been killed last summer when his motorbike had hit a tree. I still can’t decide if he was smiling. 

Seamus Heaney, Vaguely, by Barry Tench

I only ever close my kitchen window when it’s really windy. The frame is so ill-fitting there seems little point, so it rests at ninety percent rattling on its metal arm. Occasionally a pigeon will land on the sill and look in over the ceramic white sink. I live in the centre of town, so garden birds are rare. This morning I come face to beak with a crow sheltering from the 8.00am drizzle. It doesn’t fly off or even flinch as I enter the kitchen barefoot. It tilts its head and shifts its weight leg to leg.

Mid-morning I’m sitting on the 41 as it rumbles up the Wyle Cop over the cobbles. The November grey is dense enough for the shop lights to be on. The 41 comes to a halt on the High Street and lit and quivering it waits as passengers alight. The bus pulls away leaving a man standing in front of HSBC in a crumpled grey suit; he looks like Seamus Heaney, vaguely.  I cross the road to the coffee shop, order tea and think about a young Chinese woman I met at an interview for catering college in 1974. There is an advert for willow pattern china in the glossy newspaper supplement. I project her onto the blue bridge that arced across a plate. I want to fall in love with her all over again, even though I only knew her for three minutes thirty years ago. 

I wipe the case of a CD I had just bought – Otis Span, just for the track “Country Boy Blues”. I flick through the pages of a translation of the poems of Sappho that I’d bought at a second hand book shop as I sip my Earl Grey.

The doors of the coffee shop bang open. In flows a pink mother and a buggy steered by an enthusiastic five year old, his sister clutching the sides of the buggy as he hits the door frame for the third time. The father follows, bearded, directing the traffic. The Heaney-man has bought breakfast tea and sits puffing a macaroon on the table in the window.

I think about bridges, bridges over rivers, over roads, over valleys. We constantly cross over bridges. I plot a route from home into town avoiding crossing a single bridge.

Afternoon I’m looking through an anthology of Greek verse. I listen for the rhythm, dig for half remembered lines from grammar school days. The washing up seems to wobble having reached its limit of haphazard stacking. The Greek poets parade across my brown and beige linoleum. I search the classics for love but find only academic dust. One hour is linked to another. The clock ticks on. Is there a bridge between the minutes? Time is continuous but each second separate from the next. The phone rings in the flat above.

As the sun sets behind the multi-storey car park I perch precariously on my window seat.