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It might be June. Gusts of fine summer rain blow down the beach road of a small town, somewhere on the south coast, and settle on the windows of a thirties bungalow where Irene sleeps, alone and naked, in an unmade bed. Her Egyptian cotton sheets lie crumpled on the parquet floor. Above her head, a ceiling fan turns like a prayer wheel in the quiet wind as Irene dreams of the men she’s loved – husbands, boyfriends, an architect called Harry in a Birmingham hotel room, once – stumbling ashore in the wet dawn. Some lean against the breakwater and press their faces to the cool wood. Some lie down at the sea’s edge and stare at the sky.
So grey, so nearly drowned, these stranded men, Irene feels something kick at her heart: dancing with Paddy all night at the Alhambra; that time George swerved the Mercedes through Brighton in a black August thunder, smashing through puddles; the way Duncan stood, shy and silent, at the kitchen window as a late December snow melted on the buddleia leaves.
She twitches then, and would go down to the rainy beach, and kiss salt-hard lips and say you’re here, you’re home at last -. anything to stir their tired blood, to make them touch her face. To say her name.
But Irene is the last woman in England. If she dreams, she dreams alone. Her sleep is deep and the only sound in all the land is the whisper of summer rain. Only the rain.
About Chris Powici
Chris Powici writes poetry and occasional flash fictions. He teaches for the Open University and Stirling University, and edits the Scottish literary magazine Northwords Now. Chris Lives in rural Perthshire. His latest collection of poems, This Weight of Light, is published by Red Squirrel Press (August 2015).
