CATERINA AND THE WAVES (1)

Sometimes trying to create a character can take you by surprise.  I’d been thinking about trying to write about someone with a lot of internal emotional turmoil, and sitting down to write about her – however inadequately - seemed as good a way as any of finding her, but when Caterina first sits down on her bench, I only had the last line as my own lighthouse to tell me where I was heading. Sara, Geoff, Brian and Jeremy - and even the Alderman - all arrived rather unexpectedly later on, and suddenly I’ve got a back-story to play with. This also explores similar ground (once again) to a couple of previous pieces I’ve done recently, but as the man said, “we all have just a few beans in our tin”. I haven’t yet got the foggiest where this will end up going, if it goes anywhere at all. Whilst this isn’t a “fun” piece, it was fun meeting them all.

CATERINA AND THE WAVES (1)

Caterina shivered slightly and pulled the woollen cardigan more tightly around her shoulders. She hadn’t felt at all cold when the night sky had been pitch black, just a few short minutes earlier. Now though, the first fingers of daylight were feeling their way tentatively across the early morning sky, and soft greys and purples were beginning to seep into the black silhouettes of the headland to give them a depth and a form and a substance that they hadn’t had even just moments ago, and she felt a sudden, unexpected chill. She started to wonder quite what she was doing out here keeping the Alderman company on what had all the air of becoming such a very drab day.

The bench was usually her favourite spot, overlooking the bay as it did with a direct line of sight to where the reassuring blink of the lighthouse on the headland slowly ticked the night away. Its regular hypnotic and fleeting flashes of light picked her out every few seconds before returning her to the shadows and her thoughts. A loving someone had paid to have the bench placed there quite some years ago and carved into its robust woodwork was a dedication to the memory of the Alderman, a Mr. John Pennington, a man whom she’d never met but in whose company she now chose to regularly spend her time, quietly admiring the view. Sometimes she would talk to him, and she found his comfortable, unresponsive silence reassuring. If the Alderman ever did start talking to her, then she’d know she was really in trouble.

Below her, the waves lapped comfortingly against the rocky shoreline where the first sounds of the seabirds awakening started to disturb the stillness of the morning. She found the sound of the waves calming and soothing and they helped to distract her from the chaos of thought which had kept her awake for much of the night and which had eventually brought her up here, stumbling along the dark and rocky pathway at some ridiculously early hour, to try and make some sense of it all.

Things had not been going well lately. She had struggled for years with her own sense of self-loathing and lack of self-worth. It was nobody else’s fault, she felt, it was just the way she’d been put together, like somehow there was a piece missing. It was very like that time when they’d somehow ended up with a part left over after they’d finished putting their wardrobe together. They had never really got to the bottom of where it was supposed to go. They’d carefully set that extra little piece aside but after a while, they’d forgotten all about it, and the wardrobe managed to hold itself together for years quite successfully without it. It was only when they’d been having a clearout that they’d found it again and wondered once more what it was for.

“A piece missing…” “Holding itself together…” Christ! She’d sunk so low that she was relating to flat-pack furniture now.

She sniffed the air. It looked like it was going to turn out to be a crisp, autumnal morning. In the normal scheme of things this would have lifted her spirits and she would have felt good, but today it did nothing for her. She knew it should have made her feel better, and it troubled her that it didn’t.

She sighed. She’d been really trying recently, really making an effort, and yet she still felt that she always got it slightly wrong. Every time she got enthused or encouraged about something, or tried to lift herself up with some positive thinking by trying to convince herself that something pleasant might be just around the corner, life had a nasty habit of putting her back in her place, or pulling the rug from under her and sending her crashing back down to where her inner voices told her she really belonged.

Three weeks ago Caterina had just happened to meet Sara again as she was walking across the supermarket car park. She’d been just returning her empty trolley before heading back to her car – Sara just would have to be able to drive - and it had been Sara who had recognised her, not the other way around. After her years of self-imposed isolation, Caterina had been fairly surprised that anyone should greet her in such a way and with such obvious enthusiasm. Sara had been in a hurry that day, something to do with the school run or some other excuse, but they’d exchanged phone numbers and promised to try to meet up soon, and Caterina had got on the bus with her shopping bags half an hour or so later feeling quite optimistic for once at the prospect of reacquainting herself with an old friend when she knew she had so few of them anyway.

She’d phoned Sara that same evening and a man who said he was called Geoff had answered and said something about a parent’s evening but that he’d tell Sara she’d called. Caterina had wondered why Geoff wasn’t at the parent’s evening himself, but decided that too many years had gone by since she’d last met Sara for that to really be any of her business.

She’d tried again the following night, and Geoff had said much the same again about telling Sara she’d rung, so she decided she’d better leave it until Sara called her back and, rather disappointingly, she never had.

Finally, last night, she’d decided to swallow her pride and rang up again, despite having totally convinced herself that it was completely the wrong thing to do and that Sara had obviously just been being polite and actually didn’t really want to have anything at all to do with someone so very wretched as she so obviously was.

This time Geoff had been quite brusque with her. He’d told her that Sara didn’t live there any more. Told her that if she wanted to talk to Sara she’d better ring “That bloody so-and-so Jeremy!” and put the phone down on her. Well, after that she could hardly call him back and ask for Jeremy’s number now, could she?

On top of that, of course, Brian had then pitched in, wondering why she kept ringing up this Geoff “bloke” as he’d called him, and nothing she could say or do for the rest of the evening seemed to be able to calm him down. He’d taken a couple of bottles of beer out of the fridge, drunk them angrily and eventually gone to bed without her.

She looked out across the water and sighed again. “Waves” she thought “everything just comes in waves…” How on Earth had things come to this? She wasn’t a stupid person. At school they’d considered her to be one of the brighter ones and assumed that she was bound to do well for herself. Somehow things had never quite worked out like that. Dreams had become nightmares, hopes had turned to ashes and then, well, she’d met Brian and she’d fallen into a kind of isolated domesticity that she’d never really planned for, and after all that somehow she felt… What? What was it that she felt?

She glanced again at the vast, wide-open, empty expanse of the ocean in front of her.

“Empty” she thought. That’s the word for it. “I feel empty”.