The land of might have been can be paved with regrets and lost opportunities, of choices made and their consequences.
On the other hand, it can be a place dreamers and ditherers inhabit and never be forced to face reality or make a final decision.
For those procrastinators their story is one of adventure and impulse that may or may have a happy conclusion. The Land of Might Have Been offers a cocktail of tales: wistful and humorous but always entertaining.
READ the openings to the swimmer and the swing
THE SWIMMER
After all this time she still had the nightmare, woke with the same feeling of distress but also guilt.
The sea looked angry, whipped up by the wind. The 12 children, one by one, slipped into the water as a loudspeaker announced their names. She saw again how small they seemed battling their way across the bay and back again, sometimes almost lost beneath the choppy surface. She heard the voices of the other mothers shouting encouragement as their offspring returned, making their way for the jetty. One by one they hauled themselves up to be enveloped by relative-held towels, one by one…
Often she woke at this point as if her subconscious self could not support the finale, as if her heart might falter and fail.
She already knew it too well: 12 children entered the water, only 11 came out.
She’d lie staring into the darkness, recalling the collective pleasure that turned to apprehension on the onlookers faces, including her own. But that was where the solidarity ended. For while it seemed the other mothers got on with their lives, even, if the truth were known, in celebration that it was not their child who had perished, she suffered the guilt of the survivor that had never left her.
Her anger towards this, as she saw it, indifference was mixed with envy that they could carry on as if nothing had happened.
‘You must put it out of your mind,’ her husband had advised. ‘No good dwelling on it, there is nothing you can do. These things happen.’
How could she? How ever forget that knot of fear then relief then guilt as she had watched her child battle with the sea and scramble to safety? This was the child she had striven so hard to bring into the world, after so many miscarriages and a mother trying to console by saying: ‘Darling, maybe you are not meant to be a mother.’ And her husband: ‘Can’t we just stop all this? It is taking over our lives, you’re not yourself anymore.’ How different her life might have been, if she had listened to them.
But the longing was too great to set aside, it consumed her. She would come home from seeing babies in prams and weep but, fearful of her husband’s anger, by the time he came home she had washed her face and was smiling to greet him. As time went by she began to resent him, the ease it seemed with which he could make her pregnant and consider that was his part in procreation done, while she must face a time of joy mingled with fear.
THE SWING
I might have called her Florence, my mother’s second name, or Flora. In the end I chose Fleur with maybe a nod to the headstrong daughter in John Galsworthy’s Forsythe saga. Dark haired with blue eyes - a striking combination - and restless as I am, like anyone born under a mercurial sign.
I see a child on a swing shrieking with laughter as she urges ‘higher higher’ on her way up, up to the trees. Watching, time melts. I am back in my own childhood. Throughout time there have always been little girls shamelessly and gleefully exposing their frilly knickers to the sky.
‘Mummeeeee!’
I see myself walk towards the sun-dappled figure, lift Fleur and sit on the swing with her on my knee. We swing together gently.
‘Faster!’ I seem to hear my now brave daughter.
I laugh, beginning to work the swing so we sway towards the trees. Oh, the old carefree sense of flying.
‘Lovely, lovely,’ Fleur murmurs, squirming with pleasure. She swings her long dark hair with its child’s shine, chuckles until her face is rosy pink. Slowly the swing slackens, a gentle sway again.
Fleur: the little girlness of her, eyes smoking naughtily, flickering thought running in her face, her freckled cheeks like little trout. Fleur! I hold her round the waist, keeling the subtle skeleton. Seven years’ satisfactions are bound up in this wriggling child.