Café au Lait

by L.P.

café au Lait

 

I watch the trees outside my window. Their branches spread to the sky, toward the sun. Their leaves flutter and dance with the wind, capturing bounties of precious nourishment. Cardinals, clothed in their brilliant red coats, dart about the trees. Somewhere above them, a Woodpecker drills for food.  

                  He suddenly appears—not from the sky—but from around the corner of my house. It startles me. He looks around as he approaches my back door. He can’t see through my windows, I know that; but he turns to face me anyway, with his dark and intense gaze, and peers into my soul. I push away from my desk. He turns away and knocks on the door. I scurry to answer it.

                  “Hi,” I say. 

He smiles. It’s nothing less than mesmerizing. His teeth are the brightest white, which pleasantly highlights his deep onyx skin. It absorbs the sunlight that peeks through the cracks in my porch’s ceiling. He wears the collared shirt and khaki shorts of a delivery man.

                  “Sorry. I knocked on the front door, but there was no answer. I decided to take a chance and go around back.”

                    I tear my gaze away from his body to meet his gaze. There is a tiny twinkle of amusement floating around in the dark depths of his mahogany eyes that tells me he knows just how mesmerizing his physique is.

                  “It’s fine. I’m sorry, I was brainstorming—and well, I tend not to pay so much attention to anything else.”

He just smiles; a warm and inviting smile. I shudder. 

                  “Just sign here,” he says, handing me an electronic writing pad. 

                 I take it, scribbling my name down. It’s a wonder signatures were ever required. I hardly ever made mine legible enough to make a difference. 

                  “So, brainstorming huh. About what?”

                  I shrug. “Just about writing.”

His eyes widen a bit and his eyebrows quirk toward his hairline. “You’re a writer?”

                    I nod and hand him back the device. He hands me the small package in return. 

                  “Don’t forget that.”

                 His eyes are endless pools of raw cathexis. I avert my eyes, aware that my eyebrows furrow in the slightest because of my confusion. 

                  “Oh,” I say, “I won’t.”

                  A light chuckle flows from my mouth. He shifts his weight to lean against my door frame, which draws my gaze back to him. He pins me to this spot with his unfathomable eyes; I glance away. 

                  “Have a nice a nice day. Remember to open the package,” he says with a wink. 

                 I nod, watching his giant figure recede from view. When his body disappears around the corner, I step back inside and shut the door. I sink to my knees with a sigh. The cracks in my linoleum floor have a chaotic pattern. They stretch from the bottom of the door and into the rest of my home; some branch off into the kitchen, forming an unbroken chain of hairline cracks.  

                  My cellphone rings. With a wistful sigh, I return to my desk. It sits in a corner, adjacent to the window. Papers are strewn everywhere. A blank word document glares from my laptop screen. My phone sits next to it. 

                  “Hello?”

                  “Katie, sweetie.” My mom’s smooth, vanilla voice fills my head. “How are you?”

                    A sharp pain burns my chest. I take a deep breath, and then another.  

                  “I’m ok. Doing well. How’s everything at home? How’s dad?”

                  “Good, darling. Have you been taking--”

                  “Yes. Mom. Don’t worry.”

                  “Ok. Well—” 

                  “I’m actually a little late for lunch with Molly.”

                  “With who?”

                  “A friend. Gotta go, though. I’ll see you for dinner?”

                  “Sounds good. Bye, sweetie.”

                  “Bye.”

                  A little ‘beep’ alerts me that she hung up. I frown at the phone. It takes a few moments to pack up my things and head toward Mike’s Cafe. The cafe’s sign stands out in a sea of other restaurant signs. At night, it glows with neon colors bright enough to blind anyone who drives past. Maybe they secretly hope people would crash, and then forlornly enter into the restaurant with the sole intent to buy food. Whatever the case, the sign is hard to miss, even during the day. I pull into the parking lot, eyeballing a space between two neatly parked cars. The white paint has long faded. No one cares anymore. 

Molly sits in the corner of the restaurant. The black booth swallows up her tiny, pale frame. She wears a wrinkled, black hoodie and pink shorts. The hood sits halfway way on her head, forgotten. 

                  “Hey.”

Molly jerks at the sound. Her shoulders slouch at my approach.

                  “Hey Katie,” she mumbles.

I slip into the opposite side of the booth with about as much grace as a newborn calf. 

                  “Order anything?” I ask, flipping through a menu that sits on the table between us. 

                  “They have a five-dollar margarita special with loaded nachos. You should try it,” she replies. “Treat yourself.”

                  With a sigh, I wave a waitress over. It isn’t often that I allow myself to indulge and enjoying one five-dollar margarita is far from indulgence, anyway. The waitress skips toward the table with the brightest smile I’ve seen in a while. It’s strange that they give these cheery smiles in an attempt to make their customers feel more welcome, but the actual effect is the complete opposite. 

                  “What can I do for you, Katie?” she asks.

                  “I’d like a house margarita with nachos. Thanks.”

                  “No problem. Will get that in right away. Would you like anything else?”

I shake my head. 

                  “So, what’s wrong?” I ask. 

                  Molly’s face crumples. Her eyebrows point downward, and her nose scrunches. Her lips tighten against her teeth; and then it’s just me and Molly, standing toe-to-toe in an empty room with dull reflections everywhere. Her tightly shut eyes ooze gigantic streams of hot tears and her nose drips. She trembles and this time, I can see the tiny, hairline cracks that make up each individual piece of her. Some cracks are bigger, and others are barely noticeable. It’s only a matter of time before she shatters.

                  “It’s him,” she chokes out. 

               “But I thought you moved beyond this?” I whisper, “We locked him away. He can’t do anything anymore.”

                  “It doesn’t—that makes no difference, Katie!”  

                  Her fists are clenched, and her teeth are bared. Her breath comes out in quick, shallow bursts. Her rage pins me down. 

                  “I’m sorry,” I reply. 

                  She sneers. She paces, swinging her arms wildly back and forth. After a moment, she stops and pins me with her enraged glare. She wants to hurt him; she wants to dig her heel into his wounds until he hurts just as badly. But she can’t. She steps closer to me.   

                  “You should be,” she replies, “I mean, where were you anyway? I thought that you were the one who was supposed to have your head on right. I thought you knew how much to drink. I thought you knew how much to smoke. I thought you made sure you always stayed aware! Youfailedus.”

                  Molly’s face inflates until her enraged gaze is all I can see.  

                  “I’m sorry,” I whisper again. 

                  “Sorry can’t change what happened, Katie. Sorry just makeseverythingworse. You thought you knewhim. You thought you knew your limits. You were wrong.”

                  The sound of glass sliding against polished wood startles me. The waitress with the bright smile apologetically places my nachos in front of me. 

                  “Let me know if you need anything,” she says, before floating away. 

                  Molly is gone. It doesn’t surprise me, though. She’s elusive. I sit in contemplative silence, as I shovel the food into my mouth. The margarita and nachos hardly seem like a treat now. The nachos are stale, and the margarita, too sour. 

The sounds of nature are faint in the kitchen. The space in the kitchen is usually small, but today it’s bigger. The ceiling is miles above my body. I left all the lights off; and even though it’s day time, natural light doesn’t reach here. There are several tiny streams of light that filter in through the blinds in the living room. 

                  A knife lays flat on the counter in front of me, away from those of its kind. One stream of light touches it, which makes a part of it glitter and gleam. If knives had mating calls, then the glittering could be it. 

                  “Is today the day?” Molly’s voice rings clear through my head. 

                  “What are you doing here? You left me.”

                  She saunters over and stands in front of me. She still wears the same hoody, halfway over her head. Her clothes are wrinkled, but they always are. Her pink shorts are dirty and bloody. A stream of blood trickles down her leg. 

                  “What happened to you?” 

                  “You know.”

                  I lower my gaze, ashamed to look at her. I close my eyes and I see that night. The images are fuzzy and distorted now, with shadows and demonic faces infused in them. I see myself sprawled out on his sofa. I remember how heavy my limbs felt—like 5-ton weights. My eyes fluttered in pitiful attempts to remain open. The memory always fades to black after. 

                  “I can’t do this. Not anymore, Molly.”

                  “Then don’t,” she replies. 

                  A flash of light catches my eye. The package sits off to the side, about a foot away from the knife. I reach for the package. It’s a small cardboard box with clear tape keeping it sealed. I tear at it with the knife, and peer into it. In it, is just a small card with an address and a name: 

Grant Johnson     
4564 Kindlewood Drive
Jennings, MO 63136

On the back of the card is one word:

Justice.
 

 

A Stone is Just a Stone

Richard Hillesley 

cafe au lait  

 

Gwynfor stood with his back to the sky, a field away from where we were. The wind rose from the valley and bit into his side. His eyes were a dark line under his brow. The gun in his hands glinted in the sunlight. Behind him the house and a stream that fell straight from the clouds.

    We saw him when we came over the hill, legs apart, hair and clothes blown sideways by the wind. He lifted the gun to his shoulder and fired. The sound followed after the smoke, and Rachel fell in the grass, her hand and her skirt rising through the sky as she fell, and I ran towards her, thinking she had been hit. 

     'Why did he do that?' she said. 

       'To scare us',I said. 

He moved in gestures through the wind as he came towards us, his massive face beneath his cap, dark eyes beneath the crevice of his brow. He stopped by the wall to pick something up.

        'Rabbit',he said, and his lips stretched across his mouth in the shape of a smile.

The past repeats itself through the seasons, in the wind and the rain and the rush and chuckle of the streams. Clouds hanging over the mountains, fields obscured by mist, a landscape that is harsh and soft, cold and indifferent. At Bryn Hyfrid, on a corner by his land past the ruins of the quarrymens' cottages, there are the remains of a bronze age hut circle in a field, set at angles. Further to the east there is a line of stones and one at the end of the row, standing on its own and taller than the rest. 

    Not that it mattered, because nobody knew or cared except the walkers and Gwynfor himself, but when we told him we were going to see the circle and the stones, he said 'A stone is just a stone', as if that was all there was to say. 

    And when we were up there among the stones we could see him across the valley herding his sheep from inside his Land Rover, perched on the diagonal tracks between the gate posts and the irregular walls, watching us and whistling to his dogs on the opposite slope. The sheep swarmed in circles. The shadows of clouds left pools of light across the fields. And Gwynfor leant against the door of his Land Rover, his body like a landslip on the Berwyns, looking up at us. 

    I waved to him but he made no response. And when we left the stones he started up the Land Rover. We could hear the noise and bang of the gears as he pushed the vehicle down the tracks. He sat at the wheel, his arm out the window, slapping the door as he passed us, and accelerated loudly as he pulled away, shouting at us inaudibly. And when we passed him a few minutes later, he was back there with his gun and his dogs. 

    When we told them in the village, they laughed and said,'Well, what did you expect?'

    Gwynfor was part of the landscape, a chip off the mountain, at home in the fields. He moved like the seasons, slowly and deliberately, merging into the landscape, a simple farmer, circumscribed by the hills, the drystone walls and the clouds. And we were incomers. What did we expect? He didn't like us and he didn't like the stones. The stones had a mystery and a purpose of their own and belonged in a way that he never could.  He wanted us to leave him alone and the stones to go away.

That evening we saw him in the pub, standing at the bar in his boots and his work clothes. He had the rabbit in a bag in his hand and slapped it on the bar. 

     'Something for the pot',he said to the landlord, and turned to look at us.'Rabbit', he said, throwing a note of dissonance into the air. He was pleased with himself, and wanted us to know it. He had few words but he coughed and scraped and threw us glances just to let us know he was there. And when he left the bar to go to the toilet he came past us and whispered in Rachel's ear,'Shut up, you ',though she had said nothing. She pushed him away, and though she hadn't meant it, he fell to the floor among the coats and chairs, unbalanced by her indignation. I tried to help him to his feet but he wouldn't let me.

    He put one hand on the floor and one on a chair and lifted himself up and shook his head as he walked away to the toilets in the yard, leaving us to deal with the silence and the stares around the room. The only one hurt was me, kicked on the shin by her when I tried to come between them. A few minutes later he came back into the room with another rabbit in his bag and threw it on the table in front of us.'Rabbit',he said and bared his teeth, barely a grin, and left a threat hanging in the air 'You'll see',he said, and left us staring at the rabbit.

One evening not long after, when the sun was sinking through a low wet mist,  stirrings of a storm in the clouds, John Evans saw Gwynfor on the side of the hill, his Land Rover perched at an angle through the wind, stretching a rope between the Land Rover and one of the stones. John said to him,'I wouldn't do that',

   and Gwynfor said,'You don't believe that stuff',though he wasn't sure himself. There were stories about the stones that had been passed down through the generations and left a doubt lingering in the air. 

    'But I do',said John.

     'I don't believe you',said Gwynfor, and tied the rope around the stone and twisted the other end around the tow-bar. The stone seemed to give a fraction, but the rope was old and weak and snapped as he pulled the vehicle forward. 

     John, leaning on his stick, said nothing. And Gwynfor threw his Land Rover down the hill shouting at John above the noise of the engine as he went, harsh words lost in the storm of evening.

After that we went out of our way to watch the stones just to be sure. One day we saw Gwynfor high in the trees over the top field, watching us, a wisp of smoke rising behind him from a fire he had made, his gun in his arms. He lifted it to his shoulder and pointed it in our direction, making as if to shoot. But he didn't. And the stones stood still and silent, streaked with moss and lichen, aching through the mist.

    At times like this it was easy to believe the myths, to feel something in the wind, but we knew that the stones were only stones and the mists were only mists. A line of stones on the side of a hill like pieces in a children's game, a stone dropped here, a stone dropped there, and the ancient field boundaries mapped out like the squares on a children's gaming board, F sharp minors and stunted fifths, walking at angles and leaning on the wind. I would pull my scarf more tightly round my face and stamp my feet hard on the ground just to feel the earth beneath. 

Gwynfor moved the stones early one morning when no-one was about, when the stars were out and the sun was just a shadow of itself, when his breath made shapes in the air and the grass flopped with dew. Two of the stones were pulled from the ground and discarded there. Another he towed across the fields with his tractor and left among the gorseclumps just above his house, to pave his yard. 

    That night we met at John's to do something about it though we didn't know what we could do. The rain had begun to fall, splattering through the leaves and drains, rushing over the pebbles and moss, lifting the river over its banks. We walked over the hill towards the stones, six or seven of us, torches in our hands, stumbling on the rough ground, to put the stones back where they belonged. Two of the stones lay on their side, where Gwynfor had left them. We pushed and pulled by the light of our torches and we were lucky and they fell back into place. 

    The rain had stopped and the moon shone through a gap in the clouds as we went down the hill to Gwynfor's place to move the other stone. But it wouldn't move. The stone was too big and we were too few. And Gwynfor, disturbed by our noise, came out and watched us as we walked away, the last stone still lying there among the clumps of gorse. He had won, or so we thought until two weeks later when Gwynfor came visiting. 

I saw him first from our upstairs window, pale in the gloom of the smoke from the bonfire that Rachel had lit in the garden. His jacket hung from his body limp as washing in the wind, and a confusion of submission and defiance made war with his body and his clothes. He wouldn't come in but something was on his mind. Rachel moved towards him and I followed her. He cocked his head to one side, cap in hand, scratched his scalp, and said,'You did it, didn't you?'

    The stone had been taken the previous night and was nowhere to be seen.

    'It was you that did it, wasn't it?'he said, his voice suddenly thin and cold, like the wind in the winter trees. We hadn't seen the stone since last we saw him and our car couldn't have made it up to his farm. But he didn't believe us, because if it wasn't us it must have been magic.'It must have been you',he said, and left us, his face plumbed of feeling. He walked up the lane and became a shadow on the distant hill. 

We went to Bryn Hyfrid one morning not long after, when spring was flushing out the trees and the heavy streams and the soft sunlight touched the grass on the mountains with warmth, and the stones were all in place, even the one that we had left in the gorse. It had found its way back to its place in the row.

    Gwynfor watched us from the line of trees by the top field, his shotgun cradled in his arms. He walked towards us, his dogs running behind him, and we stood by the stones, and watched him as he came.

    'It was you that did it, wasn't it?'he said, and we told him it wasn't. We really didn't know how it had happened. So he knew it was magic and it left him pale and empty, as if his life had spilled into the stones. His instinct was to lift his gun to his shoulder, and to twist his body around to take aim at the trees and us and the stones.

  And I yelled,'No',at the top of my voice, thinking that he would do something crazy, but he turned slowly, lifted the gun towards the clouds, and fired at the empty sky above us.

 

About the author  

Richard is a former editor of LinuxUser magazine, and has written features, poems and short stories for a wide variety of publications, most recently Storgy, Prole and The Angry Manifesto.

Cut to the End

Cut to the End

Charlie Britten

Cafe Au Lait

Earphones are an effective device for blotting out the rest of the world. My mother stands in my room, opening and shutting her mouth like a goldfish. ‘Switch that thing off,’ she says, and I wonder how I know that. Can I do telepathy now?  With my mum?  This is scary, so much so I switch off my iPod, even though I am in the middle of ‘Neutron Star Collision’ by Muse, which is truly amazing.

‘We’re on holiday, Matthew. In France. You can listen to your music at home. Now, are you ready?’ 

‘I told you. I'm not going.’

‘Come on, love. We’re all ready to set off. Dad and Steph are waiting. We’re going to have a nice family day out.’

‘At a museum?’

‘You’ll like it when you get there.’

‘Why would I want to go to a D-Day museum?  Why do you, Mum?’

‘It’ll be very interesting.’  She sits down on my unmade bed and then stands up again. ‘Come on. You can't stay here by yourself.’

‘I'm all right.’ 

‘No.’ She draws in her breath and blows it out again. ‘It’s so stuffy in here. You never open windows, do you?’  Her face has become flushed, droplets of water forming on her forehead.

The sun pours through the dusty casement; a river of sweat trickles down the cleft of my spine, making my black t-shirt cling like a damp cloth to my back and to the sticky patch on my wrist.

‘Change into something cooler, Matthew. Black absorbs the heat. I packed you a couple of light-coloured Ts.’ 

I wince at the word ‘Ts’; is that what they call them in M&S?  Anyway, black is what I wear: black T-shirts, black jeans, black hoody, black hair dye. ‘I'm all right,’ I say again.

We both hear Dad shouting outside, something about a bottle having leaked and ‘made a mess’ in the car. Mum goes out to speak to him, but my sister Steph appears in her place, as if the two are working shifts. ‘Move it, Matthew. Now. They’re waiting.’

‘You don’t want to go to this museum.’

‘I do, actually.’

‘Why?  You’re not Dad. You’re not into war films and all that death and glory stuff. I'm joining CND.’

‘Can you afford the membership fee?  You owe Mum £5 for the last gig you went to. Just get your arse into Dad’s car.’  She reaches for my hand, pushing back the cuff of my black T-shirt.

‘Leave me alone.’  Snatching my hand back, I pull my sleeve down over my wrist.

‘What have you done?’ 

Her eyes scan my room, but my safety pin lies deep in my jeans pocket.

‘I scratched myself on the brambles in the yard.’

‘Yeah, right.’  She looks straight at me but I turn away.

‘If you insist on not going and spoiling everybody’s day, I'm staying with you.’

I suppose I always knew I'd have to give in eventually. I rummage around under my bed for my trainers. ‘I don't know why you come on a family holiday. You’re a student.’

‘I haven't got any money, have I?  And Mum and Dad offered to pay for me.’

‘When I'm nineteen, I'll be on the road with my metal band.’

‘Right.’

I bump my head on the kitchen door lintel as I walk outside. It hurts. Being tall is annoying.

‘Would you like to sit in the front with me, Matthew?’ asks Dad, as he attempts to fold up the map, but the gentlest of breezes flaps it around his hands like a duvet-cover on a rotary-drier. Taking it from him, Mum smoothes it out in a few firm movements, all the time talking to Steph about how many calories there might be in pain au chocolat.

‘I don’t mind.’  I sit in the back with Steph.

‘All aboard for Arromanches and the D-Day Museum,’ says Dad as he starts the engine.

I cringe. So does Steph.

We drive along straight French roads, through pine forest, families sitting at picnic tables, children running around amongst the trees and scrambling over stumps and logs, as Steph and I used to do in England. For a moment, I feel the springy bracken under my feet, bits of bark in my shoe and dusty mud between my toes. Afterwards we would eat squashed, peanut butter sandwiches, clammy and glue-y, washed down with a little box of Sainsbury’s pure orange juice.

Having parked in one of the many car parks at Arromanches, we walk along the promenade, gulls ‘caw-caw-ing’ above our heads. Then Dad stops dead, thrusting his arm out in front of him, almost knocking off Steph’s sunglasses. ‘Look. Look. Mulberry Platforms.’  He turns to me. ‘You do realise how significant these were, don't you?’  Before I can even draw breath, he tells me - again - about Hugh Iorys Hughes building portable landing platforms so that the Allies could invade France. Blah, blah, blah.

It’s like a demolition site, lumps of rusting metal and concrete on the beach and in the sea. French families swim around them, using them as diving platforms and spreading their beach towels over them. It’s a hot day.

‘Hugh Iorys Hughes was Welsh by the way.’  Dad’s mother is from the Valleys. He bigs this up, has done ever since the World War Two craze took him over.

We have to wait in a queue to enter The D-Day Museum, alongside wall-displays of uniforms stiff with age, yellowed wartime notices in blotchy typescript, gas masks, photographs of men with round, horn-rimmed glasses and brylcremed hair, standing behind bulky pieces of equipment. ‘Fascinating, fascinating,’ says Dad, pushing his glasses down his nose. I move my weight from one foot to the other. It’s all so old, a miasma of Dad-ness. My wrist throbs under new scars. I notice that my cuff sticks to newly dried blood.

Mum and Steph stand together chatting, pointing at things and laughing. They have this joke about generals in war films moving canes over maps and saying in cut-glass accents, ‘We’re-ah here-ah. The enemy’s there-ah. And we’re going to obliterate the blight-ahs.’  It was funny the first time.

Inside the museum at last, a bald-headed Frenchman talks through the events of D-Day, pointing with a ruler at a papier-mache model of Arromanches. ‘Nous sommes ici, ici, et ici, et les Nazis, voila!’  Mum and Steph dissolve into giggles; every so often they press their lips together and look serious, but seconds later their mouths pucker again. Whose side are they on?  

I glance at Dad, but he’s so caught up in it all that he doesn't notice, which is perhaps as well. For a while I'm really pissed off with them. We’re doing this for Dad, aren’t we? It’s his thing, isn't it? But the museum goes on and on, more and more rooms and exhibits, another storey, yet another video. Dad has to see everything.

At last, lunch, open air and sunshine, cafe table legs scraping against the pavement. The waitress furrows her brow as Dad orders in English; he gets cross when she brings tiny cups of espresso, instead of what he calls ‘proper coffee’. I tighten my knuckles under the table. Mum leans across the table murmuring, ‘Grand’, but Dad shakes his head at her. ‘Bigger.’ He draws his hands apart as if he were playing the accordion. ‘And... With.... Milk.’

‘Cafe au lait,’ I say to my feet.

‘What’s that, Matthew?’ Dad turns on me, raising his eyebrows.

‘Nothing.’

‘Better not be.’  As we finish eating, he takes another brochure out of his pocket and opens it out on the table. ‘Now, the ‘Arromanches 360 Cinema’. It says here that ‘This circular theatre with nine screens shows the film ‘The Price of Freedom’, which mixes contemporary news-reel images from war correspondents with pictures from the present day. There is no spoken commentary, just the sounds and noise of D-Day.’’

I don’t say anything. All I do is curl my lip about a millimetre.

Dad leaps out of his chair and storms out the cafe, leaving Mum to pay. In the car park, he shouts at me, ‘What’s the matter with you?  What were you going to do this morning that was so much more interesting?’ 

Silence.

Dad’s furious eyes bore a hole into my face. ‘Well?’

‘I don’t know.’ 

‘Why are you like this?  What do you want?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know!  You don’t know anything!’  I jerk my head backwards; it’s what I always do when I'm told off, even though it’s uncomfortable. ‘Get into the car!  You will see this!’

In dreadful silence we drive about a mile, to a bunker-like building half-submerged in cliff top. I wander away from the others, across the grass area which slopes down to the sea, grateful for the offshore breeze blowing on to my face. An elderly couple smile at me and say something in French. They must think I'm normal, but my wrist still smarts. I touch the safety pin in my pocket.

Inside the ‘Arromanches 360 Cinema’, it’s standing-room only, with metal crash barriers, like an old fashioned football ground, but our family and that elderly French couple make up the whole audience. The screen extends almost all round the auditorium, so when the lights go out, images of D-Day bear down upon us from everywhere, truly 360 degrees, soldiers in khaki and the tat-tat-tat of gunfire, buildings dissolving in smoke and fire, the view from an aircraft with the ground rising up and down. Makes you dizzy. I reach out for the metal crash barrier. Dad jerks his head round to stare at me.

They ride through a field, which changes into a modern town. Germans in grey uniforms surrender to teenage Allied soldiers, watched by ragged French villagers, who cheer and cry at the same time. In the auditorium, I hear a gulp: the elderly French couple are sobbing, easy tears flowing down their cheeks unchecked. She taps me on the arm and points to her chest, saying in stilted English, ‘Me, I... was... here.’

I nod, my father also; he draws in his breath to say something in reply but doesn't.

More images of Allied soldiers now, scared faces under their round metal helmets, dirty and exhausted. For a moment I think I recognise one of the sixth-formers at school. Seventy years ago, this is what sixth-formers looked forward to. This would have been me if I had lived in the 1940s.

My father is still watching me, but I don't care. It’s all too much, in the same way that listening to ‘The End’ by ‘The Doors’ blows your mind, because you know you can never create anything as big, never do what they do, only glimpse at something massive. With my finger, I trace the outline of that safety pin, the loop at the bottom, the rounded catch at the top. The soldiers’ faces have scratches on their faces, but they didn't do it to themselves, because they were bored, or because their family weren’t cool.

We leave the ‘Arromanches 360 Cinema’ in silence, Dad walking on ahead of us, his shoulders sagging, his head cast down. I quicken my pace, about to join him, but he doesn't look at me.

‘Let's have another coffee,’ says Mum, forcing a smile.

‘No,’ mutters Steph, ‘not that again.’ 

Nevertheless we follow her across the road to the nearest cafe. Leaving them hovering outside, I walk into the gloomy interior, pushing past wooden chairs with tired paint and bare tables with just ashtrays on them. A waiter polishes glasses behind the bar, his eyes intent on the television in the corner, watching a games show with lots of canned laughter.

‘Café du lait, s’il vous plait,’ I say. ‘Quatre.’ 

Nodding, he reaches over to the coffee machine. ‘A la table?’

‘Merci bien.’

I rejoin my family outside. Dad peruses one of the leaflets we picked up today, pages rustling as he turns them. Mum and Steph have stopped chattering; I wish they’d say something. Anything. The sound of my heart pumping blood around my body is deafening, throbbing through the scratches on my wrist, which have reached the smarting, sore stage. I pull down my sleeve.

Then Dad raises his head. Simultaneously Mum, Steph and I draw in our breath and hold it.

‘You’ve ordered?’ Dad says.

‘Yeah,’ I reply, exhaling again.

‘In French?’

‘Obviously.’

‘Well done.’  He smiles. ‘You’re a good linguist, you are.’  He holds the smile until his face muscles must've ached. He looks down at what he had been reading, then at me again. ‘What did you...? How did you...?’  He taps the brochure.

‘It was okay.’

Still smiling, he nods. ‘Yes. It was okay. Wasn't it?’

On the way back to the car, I throw the safety pin into the gutter.

Author Bio

Charlie Britten has contributed to ‘FictionAtWork’, ‘The Short Humour Site’, ‘Mslexia’, ‘Linnet’s Wings’, CafeLit, ‘Radgepacket’.  She writes because she loves doing it and belongs to two British online writing communities.

All Charlie’s work is based in reality, with a strong human interest element.  Although much of her work is humorous, she has also written serious fiction, about the 7/7 Bombings in London and attitudes to education before the Second World War. 

Charlie Britten lives in southern England with her husband and cat.  In real life, she is an IT lecturer at a college of further education.

Charlie’s blog, ‘Write On’, is at http://charliebritten.wordpress.com/