I’m still in Cape Cod for another week. I’ll put my next address at the end of this so you can send your next letter there. I’m presuming you’re intending on sending another letter – of course, you don’t have to, but I’d be very disappointed if you stopped.
I’ve decided I’ll DM you some photos I’m not postings on socials, but I’m not going to comment with them. I like the letter writing. It’s somewhat of a lost art, I guess, sending these monologues to another person and not expecting an instant response. Email and texts make it become a conversation and that means you don’t have chance to think a little more and let your thoughts run away with you. I suppose these letters have become more therapeutic.
My mother isn’t expected to last much longer than the next few days, but I’ll spend this Christmas with Betty and her kids. I think I’ll head to New York for New Year, and then I’m linking up with a team who are producing a wildlife documentary for the BBC who need a photographer as the guy they’d contracted can’t do the job – long story about a frog and a woman. By the time that’s done, I’ll be heading up to Alaska for the end of their winter and the end of twenty-four hour darkness.
Not going to lie. I’m not seeing Cape Cod at its most glorious right now. Mum’s basically in organ failure and she’s in and out of consciousness. When she is conscious, she’s not usually cognizant and she isn’t the person I knew as my mother. I feel like I’ve had to become hardened this year and turn my emotions off, which worries me but I know it’s self-preservation.
I miss my sister. If she could’ve been around for longer I wouldn’t have had to bury both our parents on my own, although I have had support from Betty – she’s been amazing. Not judgy either. No one’s asked why I let my mother get this way or whyI didn’t try to intervene. The truth is that she’s always had this tendency and we have tried. There have been glimmers through the years of her giving up the drink, but those glimmers were dimmed by the sparkle of alcohol.
Cape Cod is beautiful though. I’ve spent time driving around the area, taking photos of the scenery and the people. Candid photos which I’ve always loved taking against some amazing skies and buildings. I think you’d love it here. There are the lighthouses too. Yesterday I went to Nantucket Sound and the lighthouse there.
One of Betty’s kids is due to get married on Valentine’s Day and they’ve asked me to take the photos. It means heading back for a long weekend, but after everything they’ve done for Mum and me, it’s the least I can do. I don’t usually take wedding photos – it would’ve been a fun career to try, but I like the variety that I do now. Betty’s daughter – Britt – is a love too, and she’s happy for the photos to be my style and let me have free range. It’s been nice to be trusted.
I’d probably rate my childhood as being a seven out of ten. We were loved and looked after. We didn’t want for anything, but we had to meet our parents’ expectations. My dad was older than everyone else’s dad, and we thought he was a bit old fashioned. There were clothes that he didn’t want us to wear which caused loads of rows between him and Ivy, and he was determined that we had suitable careers. He wanted Ivy to be a nurse, which was ridiculous because she had no interest in any form of first aid even, and absolutely no sympathy if anyone was ill or injured. When she said she was studying politics and philosophy at university he almost had a heart attack. Our mother managed to calm him down and eventually he was at peace with it – it could’ve been worse, she could’ve refused to go, which is what would’ve happened. When she announced thatshe had a publishing contract – she didn’t even tell us she’d written a book before this – he nearly had another conniption.
He wanted me to be a schoolteacher. I think he fancied I’d find a job in a nice little parochial primary school, maybe somewhere like Puffin Bay, and I’d fall in love with the local vicar. Dad didn’t go to church and I think he regretted that, so he was hoping I’d make up for it.
Obviously, that didn’t happen. I chose to do a course in art, specialising in photography, which got me into university in London. By that time, he was becoming a different person. It was discreet at first, the changes, but they were there, especially when we looked back.
I don’t ever let myself feel guilty for not doing what he wanted. He was of his time and if I’d been a dutiful daughter, I wouldn’t be who I am now. I don’t think I would’ve been happy.
I’m not happy now. This year has been horrible. But I know I’ll be happy again. Maybe when the daylight starts back in Alaska, I’ll have some daylight too.
I guess you’ll receive this just after Christmas, so how was Christmas at Puffin Bay? Any nice presents?
Love,
Iris
Eleven Months After
Dear Iris,
Christmas was good. No one burned anything. We had a competition to see who could buy the most ridiculous present for each other – I, of course, won. Our mam was over too with her newish boyfriend who seems to be almost permanent now. We like him. Mam likes him. I think we’ll let him stay – not that wehave a say, because if any of us ever tried to tell Bernadette what to do, we’d find ourselves short of a tongue.
Bernadette was in heaven over Christmas because she effectively now has two daughters, which she made clear was all she ever wanted. Three sons were not on her wish list and as Rowan and I wrecked her reproductive parts (more information can be given on request but it’s recommended that you never, ever ask -- she doesn’t hold back) there was no chance of daughters.
This means she likes Ruby more than all of us put together and now Roe has managed to get a girl to actually tolerate him for more than his dick size, she has a potential daughter-in-law to be. So for the whole of Christmas she considered us chopped liver. Unless you like chopped liver. In which case, we were rotting mackerel fillets.
I received my usual assortment of presents: books, beers, socks, jumpers and chocolate because it is known that I have a sweet tooth. We had a good time and Ruby had a couple of drinks so maybe I won’t be an uncle again soon.
I heard about your mother and I’m sorry. I wish I could do something to make it easier for you, because you really have gone through the mire with everything last year. There are all of the things I can say, like at least she passed peacefully and she was at home – or kind of her home. I think you did the right thing, having her burial at Cape Cod in the place where she’d always loved to be.
I saw the photos from Yellowstone which looked amazing. There have been a few reports about you too in the papers. I read the interview in one of the broadsheets with you which felt weird, seeing that side where you’re not my pen pal.
Winter is dark on the island too. I like writing now, when the rest of the world is still trying to hibernate. At this time of year, we don’t have the tourists, just friends and relations ofthose who live here all year round. The sites where the lodges are based close between New Year and March, so Puffin Bay is residents only, almost. The days don’t seem to get light at all and the lighthouse can be seen constantly, unless you’re living it in like I am.
We’ve had a couple of call outs for the lifeboat. A fishing vessel capsized a few miles off the coast. Everyone was alright, but it was just as a storm was starting up. I didn’t realise until we were all in the Puffin Inn afterwards, celebrating being safely back with no casualties, how tense I’d been.
I knew why. The night was the same as the night Ivy died. The storm equal in its ferocity, the sea just as wild.
I stared at the door to the pub for about half an hour, waiting for someone to walk in and announce that there had been a fatality. That it was her.
That memory haunts me. It fades; every week it feels a little more distant, a little more like a scene from a film I saw months ago. But then on nights like that one, I remember everything again.
I phoned Ruby and Clover and Freya and Fleur and our mam to check they were okay, even though I knew they would be. It had been obvious that a storm was coming in when we got in the lifeboat, we took all the precautions we needed to.
Everyone was safe. The crew of the capsized boat were cold and wet but okay. The fires in the Puffin Inn didn’t go out.
