The Trapeze Swinger

4.0

Autumn, 2014

Despite everything that had happened, the world was not a dead thing; I knew it within the marrow of my bones, the breath in my lungs.

Leaning against the countertop with my jaw resting propped up on my palm, I watched through the window as the bright noon sun turned the leaves of the trees outside to a brilliant vermillion. They shivered, red like blood as the ever-growing chill in the air pulled the life from them day by day.
              Beyond was a view of the beach, the waves glittering the same blue as the sky as they rolled gently onto the pebbled shoreline. I felt an age-old anxiety flutter through my system as I watched the water from the cafe counter, fingers clenching tight in the fabric of my apron.

Breathe. Breathe.

Straightening up, I turned my attention to a customer as they approached the till with a smile. They were a regular at The Coffee House, an old woman with flyaway white hair and a papery face that had been creased into a pattern of deep wrinkles. Her name was a firm and unchanging "Mrs Tillney", despite her husband passing away a few years ago, and she never failed to ask how I was. The calm returned as I found the receipt for her table number, reading her the total and focusing on her spindly hands as they shakily counted out a series of pound notes.

"How's that degree coming along?" Mrs Tillney asked in her no-nonsense clip, beaming at me as she added jokingly, "Surely you don't need that many qualifications to sit someone down in a chair and listen to them moan on about themselves?"

I laughed, shaking my head as I sorted the notes into the till with a lighthearted response, "I think they'd just like to make sure I can actually help someone before they give me a psychology degree."

"Helping people? Easy. Just make them one of your coffees; they always cheer me right up," The old woman chuckled, before dropping her change into the tip jar and turning with a wave, "Good luck with it, Sloane dear."

"Thank you, Mrs Tillney. See you later!"

The rest of the afternoon shift passed slowly, the sound of the sea drifting in through the door every time it opened with the customers' arrivals and departures. It usually wouldn't have brought me much discomfort, wouldn't have filtered past the feeling of my breath filling my lungs with each thud of my heart, yet today was not just any day.

It was a mourning day. A day for ghosts.

I could feel them in the air that played with the crimson foliage outside, that carried the sound of the ocean waves to me as I stood in wait for the final few patrons to leave the cafe so that I could close up for the day.

Since my return to Brighton all those years ago, I had become a girl without ghosts. I no longer carried them all on my shoulders, stacked high and heavy so that each step was a stumble; my ghosts had slowly faded away until it was me that had to go looking for them. In abandoned warehouses we once did deals in, in bus shelters and train stations, fish and chip shops, even Brighton pier with my arms wrapped tightly around the neck of a pastel-coloured carousel horse as it ran forever in circles. But they were never there, only whispers of memories I slowly found harder to remember the details of as I began to let go of all those tiny fragments I'd been trying to piece them back together with.

It had been months until I had ended up back at the Marina Pier, still with the hope, the miserable hope that one of them would be waiting for me. Birdie had been there to answer my prayers the first time, so why not the others? It was not to be; the first night I returned it had been empty of anything and anyone tangible, and again the night after and the one after that.

For those following weeks, every evening after work I would find myself down at the pier, looking out across the dark waves that stretched forever onwards to the untouchable horizon. Some nights Birdie would join me, and together we would walk along the tideline, but other nights it would just be me alone and the sea, waiting for everyone I'd lost to wash up against the shore. The water would turn red as the sun sank bleeding beneath the surface, the sky darkening until I could finally almost see the indistinct shapes under the waves.