Having started life in the U.K., I’ve been spending most of the rest of it in the Netherlands and the Philippines. I’ve had nonfiction, fiction and poetry published in a number of small presses in a number of countries, and work with an NGO providing education for children living in Manila’s slum areas. www.youngfocus.org
Even if it’s for just a moment, have you ever had that sensation that you’re sliding up out of sleep and into awake-ness, like transferring up out one world into another?
WAKING
“Dreams fade with morning light, Never a morn for thee, Dreamer of dreams, goodnight.” – Roberto Bolaño
Breaching
surface
a mermaid reborn
to walk the earth.
Dripping
from scalp
from ocean pressed
ebony tresses–
seawater celestial blues
prismed through trans-
terrestrial matrix
of sentient
light.
Higher
she rises
faster falls
these dream
sapphires
of iridescence
into oblivion
of the
forgotten.
First published in The Amphibian Literary and Art Journal, March 2025; part of debut poetry collection ‘Dear Planet’ to be published by Fidessa Literary later this year.
Edged with peach-painted brickwork, all else in the street has the colour and sheen of plastic, accessorized with random coverings of metal, as in a toy town turned life-sized prototype. Under Greg’s gaze, utterly without meaning one moment, but the next, erupting into life. It’s the hint of a scent remembered; immediately the Italian promenade bursts into full emotive view. As it seizes hold of his senses, Greg struggles to unwrap its message, its layers of poignancy. Beneath the synthetic surface of tables, chairs and parasol poles, beyond the glint and shine of copper and glass, the scene aches with story and memory. But it’s that smell of coffee, burned sugar, city sweet that brings it all ablaze.
“This is why we came, isn’t it?”
Lori almost spills the cappuccino she’s holding. Setting down her cup gently, as if in the presence of an injured animal, she listens for more.
“It’s why you brought me here, Mum,” Greg continues. “You want me to remember.”
“And do you?”
The moment Lori speaks, she’s afraid. She must avoid confrontation at all costs, or risk the tap being turned tight shut again. Although Greg doesn’t reply straight away, at least his haggard features don’t harden, his grey eyes don’t glaze over.
When they first took their seats on the terrace, the two of them were the only morning customers, but now the café is slowly humming into life. The sanctuary of normality surrounds them in the muffled sounds of talk and laughter, scrape of chairs, chink of glass, spoon and cup. Lori waits.
“Hard to explain.” Greg looks up from his untouched coffee and stares over his mother’s silver hair, loosely caught up in a bun. ‘Hard’ is an unintended understatement. It’s impossible for him to explain. The trunk of pain has been latched and bolted for many months, his subconscious has only just retrieved the key.
“I remember some happiness here,” Greg offers instead.
Happiness? Lori hardly dares whisper the word in her thoughts, such is the hole it has left in their lives; as if she has just caught sight of a beloved bird, she doesn’t want to scare it off by calling its name. But this is astonishing progress, it makes Lori tremble. No need to push further. It is, after all, their very first true reconnection since that disastrous trip just over a year ago…
Greg missed the flight home with the rest of his colleagues. When he finally turns up, he’s in such a state Lori thinks it a miracle he even managed to board the plane. Quitting his job and his flat, Greg then moves back home but is a hermit in his childhood bedroom, where he eats, works and sleeps. Lori knows their neighbours assume it’s a great comfort for her to have her son back after the loss of Derek. But they cannot imagine the anguish. The withdrawn presence of one only underscores the absence of the other.
*
That evening, mother and son walk down the main cobbled pedestrian street to a simple but charming beachfront restaurant. They choose their place along the seaward edge of the wooden decking at one of the small square tables, each covered with a bright orange tablecloth. After enjoying a risotto meal, mostly in silence but for the calming wash of the waves cloaking the buzz of conversation around them, they turn their black plastic chairs towards the ocean and a gentle, salt-laced breeze, while the deep reds of the dying sun cast a warm blush over them. A thousand questions remain, but Lori is content to simply share the view. Greg turns to her.
“It happened at a restaurant not far from here.”
Lori feels her heart might stop as she watches a portcullis being raised. Emotions she cannot identify flicker across her son’s face.
“It’d been such a great time. We were having one last meal together before going home. And – you remember Jane – I’d finally told her how I felt about her. I was so in love.”
Greg trails off, scarcely believing his own words.
“I guess I was quite drunk by the time we were leaving. On our way out, we passed a family, and I heard the man talking.”
There’s a pause. Lori holds her breath.
“He sounded like Dad. I had to stop and check. It’s not that I could recognize anyone at that table, but something just got triggered in me and I completely lost it. I was yelling, ‘What are you doing here? I thought you were dead! Why did you leave us?’ I went on and on. Totally flipped. It was a nightmare, Mum. The young kids at the table were crying. The waiters were shoving me outside.”
There’s another pause, a longer one. Lori remains silent, sensing Greg has more to say.
“That’s about it. Jane wouldn’t speak to me anymore. I’d wrecked everything.”
“Oh, Greg dear,” murmurs Lori. So, it is after all what she first suspected: the source of her son’s suffering is a broken heart.
“Thanks for getting me talking.” He smiles the faintest of smiles, made uneasy by the nagging guilt of a truth untold.
Greg turns from his mother to focus on the moonlight reflecting along the liquid horizon. He can speak no further at this point but lets the memories play on. The movie is unravelling, unfurling, and he watches for the first time unafraid.
He doesn’t join the others when they walk back to the hotel. The intensity of rage has made him stone-cold sober. He waits hidden in an alley next to the restaurant and follows the family back to their hotel. Because it is his father. He might be disguised in a moustache and beard and unfamiliar clothes. But it is his father. Leaving a note for Jane, Greg moves to a hostel near the second hotel. He has to understand why his father went to such lengths to fake his death. Why the deception of the car accident in Tunisia? Why the abandonment? Greg eventually corners him alone in a souvenir shop. The scene plays out, drowning in humiliation: surrounded by the tourist bric-a-brac and nonsensicality of mugs, masks, dishes, dolls and postcards; shelves of silent witnesses to his father’s refusal to answer his questions, his refusal even to take off his sunglasses and look Greg in the eye. Then his father’s final sentence, a guillotine blade, slicing away any lifeline: ‘I AM dead to you because you’re dead to me.’
The lid of the trunk has been thrown back. Greg clenches his fists, squeezes his eyes shut, the fury as raw as if it happened yesterday; the betrayal exposed, in all its cowardice.
Recovering himself, minutes later, after quickly checking his mother’s gaze out to sea is unchanged, he refocuses on the skyline. Now it is bewilderment that hits him: the depths of his subliminal refusal to face facts was so effective in burying those facts out of sight from his own consciousness. Glancing again at Lori, he decides there will have to come a point when he respects her with the whole truth, rather than protect her from it. He promises himself, the father’s secret won’t be the son’s forever. No more burying.
Lori sighs at the white traces of cresting waves, barely visible. When will Greg be ready? The absurd theatrics of her husband’s deceit three years ago must not stay her secret much longer. Derek’s unfaithfulness through the years left behind a wife unable to shake off a suspicion, that suspicion finally confirmed by a private detective six months earlier: Derek is ‘back from the dead’, living in Colombia with a second family.
Unseen in the dark the ocean laps and strokes the sand, its swell and breath rekindling hope within two hearts. And from its depths, the sea’s distant roar, rising and falling, sings to them.
Lori listens and smiles. The drawbridge is down, and she is going to walk right back into her son’s heart if it’s the last thing she does. Turning to him, she takes hold of both his hands in hers. Their eyes meet, his tears rise, and she knows it’s safe to cross.
“Greg dearest, there’s something I need to tell you…”
Last night I dreamed of oceans unboundaried by horizons. I saw landmasses likewise in all their luminous verdancy, length, and breadth. But it was the waters captivating me in aqua hues, light scattering diamantine, undulating surfaces, their expanses exhaling, inhaling, exhaling. In my dream I saw their vastness completely, not in the sense of how far, how wide, no measurements, no delineations of map, but omniscient-like knowing of being, a fusion of interconnection and personhood, making me blush now as one harried ant in the presence of angels.
Chaos. Wrenching at her. It will sweep her away if it can. Clari’s left hand grips the gummy steering wheel, her right the stubborn gear stick. Catapulting her way through Manila traffic, she jostles for position with this gargantuan herd of metallic water buffalo. The old SUV’s air-conditioning battles the city’s fume-ridden oven heat; Clari’s brow drips liquid salt into her eyes. She wipes away the worst, then swipes hard at the car horn. A young woman is striding across the road in front of her. This is routine pedestrian behaviour; ignoring everyone on wheels, presuming they will slow down or swerve around. When a pedestrian, Clari herself adopts the same strategy of nonchalance, though with less bravado than this Filipina, who, now that she is safely across, acknowledges Clari’s existence with a look of mild annoyance.
Sounding her horn has simply exposed Clari’s identity as a foreigner: out of sync and so completely in the wrong gear. All cultural readjustment skills have apparently abandoned her. She is straining to see the kaleidoscope frenzy of heat-shimmering streets, vehicles, humanity with the eyes that once welcomed these sights as friendly, familiar, even appealing. Exhaling sharply, she gasps a prayer: a single, “Help,” with a single tear mingling its saltiness with the sweat on her cheek.
Anguish is the currency for leaving. And returning. The first few days back are an inevitable pit of teeth grinding, disorientating, limbo-like lostness. She will find her feet again, and all will be well. Only not quite yet.
Now she is fighting a rising desperation to reach the NGO headquarters before she crumbles. Simply being on site with colleagues, with the kids, will rebalance her emotions, reset her being. And remind her why she first came to this country, why she keeps coming back.
#
Tap, tap, tap.
Her son’s fingers on the glass garden table, drumming his disapproval. Clari is making a last-ditch attempt to relish the fresh brightness of a Devon spring. They sit together out on the cobbled terrace amidst the grandeur of Eddie and Susan’s immaculate shrubbery. To no avail. He cannot keep silent.
“Mother, don’t you think…” Eddie shifts uncomfortably in his bamboo chair. “Well, don’t you think that…”
He seems exasperated at his loss for words, but his mother is not about to help him out. She gazes at him with mixture of love, patience, a touch of sadness.
“It’s just that, at your age,” Eddie persists, “don’t you want to be thinking about, well, preparing for retirement? Here. In England.”
Clari’s smile only serves to frustrate him further.
“Instead of gallivanting, mother, around the world. And always back to the Philippines! Of all places!”
“Of all places, Eddie, the Philippines is a pretty darned good place to gallivant!”
Clari immediately regrets her half-hearted attempt at humour. Her dear, handsome son’s face twists momentarily; that furrowed brow, that pursing of lips, a sharp reminder of his childhood expression of disappointment.
#
Tap, tap, tap.
Clari has stopped at a red light. A scrawny boy of around eight years old is reaching up to her window and knocking, his other hand shading his eyes so he can peer through the tinted glass of her aircon bubble and make eye contact.
His arms are spindle thin. Dried snot streaked across his face from nose to ear, edged black, as are all his features, with the soot and grime belched from a thousand exhaust pipes.
He cups one hand.
“Ma’am, ma’am,” his voice barely makes it through the locked steel and glass.
Clari instinctively gives one sharp tap back on the window. The understood signal, the definitive ‘NO’.
The boy is gone in an instant. But not before imprinting on her, as a lightning slash, that automaton expression of despondency.
Clari groans, and wills the red to green so she can flee the scene.
It has her, the partially irrational, wholly familiar fury. Furious with the lost boys. Furious with herself. Furious with the systems that keep these little ones enslaved.
Finally green to go. But she needs to take this fury with her, not leave it behind.
A few hours later Clari is squelching her way over Tondo’s garbage dump with Gail, her colleague. A torrential downpour has turned the ground into a dark toxic mix of degraded waste, redeemed only by a random smatter of genuine mud. The atmosphere is heavy with the humidity of overlapping hot and rainy seasons. It is a sauna laced with the stench of decay. Fat flies atop every millimeter of wire, alongside and crisscrossing overhead the alleyways.
They follow a zigzagging path among the hundreds of shacks crammed together in this startlingly vibrant community. In the midst of squalour, Clari also knows the embrace of gracious welcome.
She finds herself enacting a manic form of breaststroke: First, and for most of the time, head up, catching people’s eyes, returning their smiles and greetings; then for an instant, head ducked and eyes lowered as she wrestles away the clashing of senses. Clari does everything to hide those moments, lest misery expose misery.
But who’s fooling anyone, she murmurs.
Gail reaches out to steady Clari’s arm as they step gingerly, one after the other, on a slimy plank bridging a narrow ditch of grey bubbling goo. Clari sees in her friend’s face a steadiness, a warmth that make her grin back with gratitude. Whether Gail understands an Englishwoman’s state of shellshock, it matters not, at this moment.
They are on their way to visit one of the sponsored students, and once they have located the right dwelling, Gail goes in alone to talk with the mother. Clari does not want her presence as a foreigner to complicate the situation; Gail needs to get to the bottom of a delicate matter with the parents. The signs are that their ten-year-old son has dropped out of school because of bullying, but, so far, neither the boy nor the parents have been willing to talk about it.
Clari finds a rough bench made of scrap wood. She hopes it will hold her weight, but she will risk it; it is too tempting to resist, situated as it is in an oasis of shadow. The moment she is sitting two children join her. The little girl jumps up to sit next to her, an even younger boy, even more raggedly dressed, stands shyly close by.
“Whats-sha-name?” asks the girl, grinning from ear to ear, her grime smudged nose wrinkled and her eyes dancing with an urgent curiosity.
“Ako si Clari. Ikaw, ate, anong pangalan mo?” Clari replies in Tagalog. I’m Clari, little sister, what’s your name?
“Grace, po.” Grace, ma’am.
“Ikaw, kuya?” Clari turns to the little boy who is edging even closer to them.
“Darren, po,” his voice is husky, Clari guesses it is from the acrid air of the nearby charcoal burning area.
Clari returns to simple English to find out if they are brother and sister. But they are not related. Grace tells her that Darren was a neighbour. But now “walang tatay, walang nanay”. No papa, no mama. So, he is living with Grace and her mother, her father, and three brothers.
One little extra body to squeeze in when they lay out their sleeping mats at night.
Clari pats her lap. “Let’s sing, Darren!” The little ragamuffin of a boy lets out a croak of excitement and leaps up, all shyness evaporating. Clari is now determined that, as soon as Gail reappears, she will ask for her help to find out from Grace’s parents if Grace and Darren are both going to school. If not, they will be invited to apply for student sponsorship. In the meantime, let the singing begin.
Clari is about to launch into her favourite children’s action song, Ikot, ikot, ikot (‘Turning, turning, turning’)when she feels a:
Tap, tap, tap.
Darren has just discovered her phone: he is knocking on the pocket of her jeans.
“Pitchure-pleese, po!”
With both Grace and Darren now on her lap, with one arm she holds them close, her other arm stretched up and out for a glorious selfie. The three crane their necks forward, all in one joyous accord, smiling triumphantly upwards as if to say,
For this moment
we belong
together.
And, anchored by these children, Clari’s heart aches a little less.
CrackedCeiling 