By Georgia May
Father takes me out on the fishing boat every year, for one weekend in June. I don’t know why father does this. He doesn’t speak to me the entire time. Or any other time. He is usually away. Far, far away, on business, and comes home ghost-like, scurrying off to the study like a mouse peeping out before running through the kitchen so no one will kill it. Nobody is trying to kill father. He scurries because he thinks we will talk to him. He lifts his words like heavy beams, and I wonder if his words are this heavy at work, too. Does he sit through meetings, answering each question like a man struggling through his last breath, or do they flow out naturally, like ebbs of the water we fish on? What father doesn’t know is that he doesn’t have to scurry. We wouldn’t try to talk to him, anyhow. Not anymore. We would not place weights on his shoulders, one by one, with each kindly syllable. Each well intentioned how are you? I’ve spent my whole life listening to his belly-grunt replies, coming out from deep within, like how I imagine the centre of a rock sounds. Tired, deep, raw, fighting against the layers of hardened stone to burst out, having laboured through its half-life and arriving as nothing more than a rumble. I know better than to ask questions. So instead, we sit on the boat and listen to the wood creaking, sometimes knocking against rocks (the ones I know are trying to talk to us, but they can’t get the sound out. The trees talk to us too; they wave as the wind passes through their leaves. I don’t say this to father. I know better than to say such fanciful things to father) like the clonk of mama’s heels on the tiles in court.
Mama makes us cucumber sandwiches for the trip. Sometimes she even makes her own lemonade. Pours it in a glass jar that settles and clouds like the yellow sky during a particularly golden dusk. I like it when mama does this, as it feels like she is there with me. She wears yellow dresses with white polka dots on, and they look like the sky and the dusk and the cloudy lemonade. Because I can’t wave at the trees with father here, I wink at them instead, so they know I’m listening, and between them and the lemonade I am not alone. It is not just me and father on a lake with no one else. My heart sinks when mama forgets the lemonade. Then it’s just me and father and the silence. The trees are there but they can’t hear me. I wonder if father has always found words exhausting, or something happened to give them weight, or it just comes with age. Mama is ten years younger than father, but I can’t imagine her never asking how my day was. I overheard her tell auntie once that she regrets marrying father. Auntie asked mama why she won’t leave him, and she said because it would be the scandal of the town—an embarrassment to the family. Auntie said mama has never cared what people think before, and then mama got real quiet, as if she knew I was listening, but I hadn’t made any noise, and she hadn’t looked up to see me, so she can’t have. I’m very quiet and still and good at listening from staircases. Mama said she can’t leave father because of what happened. I don’t know what this means, but it’s what made me think something turned his world heavy, and he wasn’t always this way.
Before I leave with father, I ask mama why we never go fishing in the ocean. The ocean is my favourite—the calm blue wholeness of it, like floating on the sky. Sometimes it is angry, like me, and it throws tantrums, unlike me. I know better than to throw my anger around where people can see it. But the ocean heaves great slews of salt and foam and fury, crashing the way I imagine God does when releasing his wrath in the Bible. I go to church every Sunday, in my starchy purple dress that sometimes makes me feel pretty and other times like I can’t move—a paper mâché of stiff cardboard and gluey cracks I’m scared everyone can see through. I’m scared they can see that I don’t believe in God the way I’m supposed to—the way mama does, and father does too, apparently, though he never comes to church on Sundays. I worship the sky and the bugs, and I wink at the trees through stained glass windows, through the eye of saints that I’m scared will judge me for the wink, for the wink that is a wave that is a worship—is a prayer. Judge me for seeing right through them. But I forget all about the saints and the fear when I’m standing beside the ocean, sinking my toes into the sand, into the hands of God, and watching the tides pull back slowly over time. I stand there all afternoon sometimes, until the thought of mama comes tugging at my collar and pulls me back for dinner.
Mama says a fishing boat like ours will get lost in the ocean. It could get swallowed whole or flung into no mans land, never to be found. I think this is silly. God wouldn’t lose me like that. But then I remember I’m with father, too, and perhaps if mama’s God is the right one, he will use his sea as wrath against my father for not coming to church on Sundays. We don’t catch that many fish when we go fishing every June. We catch enough for dinner, and have the sandwiches for lunch. We sleep in the car that shudders through the night, even though it’s hot and sticky in June, the glue melting from between the cracks. I’m scared father can see them—can see all the ways I’m not like him. His silence feels like disappointment, and all the water around us cannot wash away this dead air between us; cannot fill the chasm between my soul and his. The priest says sometimes people’s souls can get lost at sea, but through faith they can find their way back into the light. This makes me think perhaps we should go fishing in the ocean, after all, and sleep on the sand with the cool fresh breeze wafting over us, rather than this tacky heat. That way father might find his soul again, might find his voice and his worship and his love for me and mama. But mama says the priest was talking metaphorically. I noted how she didn’t deny father had lost his soul, but I didn’t dare ask why.
Nia’s father reads her storybooks at night. He sings in the choir at church, all white teeth smiles and clapping hands, and he picks her up and swings her around at church picnics. This makes me jealous, but then I remember Samantha doesn’t even have a father, and Caleb doesn’t have one after 3pm, because it takes him one morning and half an afternoon to get drunk and slip away from the world, as he does every single day, either violently or quietly, but always by 3pm. Therefore, I am lucky to have a father that takes me fishing every year, for one weekend in June. I am lucky to have a father that suffers through meetings to buy me purple dresses, and never shouts, and does the food shop for mama every Friday after work. When I was younger, he used to leave me little origami around the house. I never saw him do it, and he never said anything, but I used to find them in all my favourite spots—in the cubby hole, behind the sofa, on the porch. I’ve kept every single one of them in a shoebox under my bed, along with my first pair of earrings, rocks that I’ve found, a photo of my grandma and mama when she was a little girl, and my baby teeth. The origami are my favourite. He doesn’t leave them for me anymore. I can’t remember exactly when he stopped because I was never really looking for them. They’d just appear out of the blue. But I remember feeling the emptiness they left behind. The volume of his silence got turned up, the distance grew wider, my purple dress itchier. It’s too tight now, but we don’t have enough money for a new one. Sometimes I open the lid of my shoe box under my bed and think that I am blessed to have pieces of love left for me around the house. On the fishing boat in a humid late June, when mama forgot to pack the lemonade, I thought about saying out loud to him: but that love is not enough.
Georgia May is a Portsmouth-based film journalist with a handful of poetry publications, both in print and online. Several of her scripts and experimental short films have also been Officially Selected by over a dozen film festivals around the globe.
Academy of the Heart And Mind 