My mother was a First Edition Pelican original. At nineteen she found herself shelved in Liverpool Central Library. Her cool cover and enigmatic blurb attracted unlikely readers who took her out on short-term loan. My father was a student, a dilettante, who borrowed her to read aloud in bars, since his own subject, quantum physics, did little for the Teddy Boy rebel image he wanted to cultivate. His muddy blonde quiff, the guitar case at the foot of a barstool and penchant for angry, avant-garde literature pulled in bee-hived beauties and my mother soon served as no more than a coaster, wearing his beer-stained rings across her bridal-blue cover.
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This is nothing new, but to read her diaries, words she’d scribbled in her margins —drunk again, the last to leave— to learn that she understood in the moment yet couldn’t escape; this is new.
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He got reminders. Of course he got reminders. The library contacted him to say she was overdue. And she wanted to go back, she really did. She wanted to be discovered by an aesthete, a collector, a writer with a pipe in his hand and paisley jacket. But my father kept on renewing her. That’s what he did. Took books out because he liked the cover, thought they made him like Kerouac or Camus, but never bothered to read them.
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My daughter sees I’m sad today, presses her face into my buckram skin, my own pages ripped and sellotaped back. I think of how stiff my mother’s cover was by the time she had me, how closed she had become. I fix the diary pages I find – tucked beneath cushions, paperclipped to photographs – inside my dust jacket, storying her struggles, her dreams, her strength; my daughter at my side, reading, listening.
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He finally abandoned my mother on a park bench at midnight, ran off to catch the last ferry across the Mersey. She landed in a second-hand bookstore, lumped on a rosewood trolley with other unglued paperbacks, spines undone.
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The phone rings: my father. And my daughter rolls her eyes like the Modern Virago she is.
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My father has a new wife now. My mother would’ve called her a beach read. I take my daughter’s hand and lead her to the car. Today we won’t visit him as planned. We’ll sit by the birch where my mother lies, score hearts on the papery curls we peel, and slip simple missives of solidarity into the soft cracks where the bark splits, ignoring the texts from my father, one after another after another, asking where we are.
Kathryn Aldridge-Morris is a flash fiction writer with work forthcoming or in Flash Frog, Emerge Journal, Janus Literary, Ellipsis Zine, The Phare and others. She lives in Bristol, UK and tweets @kazbarwrites.