The Right Thing to Say

The cogs were turning, that was for sure. She’d serrated the edges of her doodled flowers and had begun to fill in the gaps in between. One great black swirl of ink after another. The words would come soon. They always did. And this time they simply had to…

Trust me, trust the method…

Okay, so that was a start, the kick up the butt Gertrude felt she needed scrawled diagonally across the lines of the facing page. But what next? Swirl round some more, add a spear-headed arrow…

Can’t get over this… but it’s not about me… It’s Sandra who’s lost her son… What to say, what to say…? No longer close as we were… Wouldn’t even have known if I hadn’t randomly checked her Facebook… Happened a week ago… Oh jeez…

Words scattered out of sequence, she darkened the arrow, added half a dozen more… Jagged lines. Too heavy. Crisscross…

A poem. She’d write a poem. Send it off in a sympathy card. Sandra, a bit of a bard on the quiet, liked the lyrical…

Turn the page. Find a different pen. Not black. Colour the leaves in. Like the ones her friend had described the night before it happened... 'The shades of autumn in freefall nonchalance from the trees, their branches playfully jousting ahead of the coming storm when the birch would surely whip-crack the sun from the sky...' She’d written about how she’d sat, glass of wine in hand on the white veranda her son had recently helped to build, just taking in the scene as if there was no tomorrow…

Beautiful words... Gertrude sometimes liked to dabble, pop a rhyme or two in her seldom-kept diary, but she couldn’t match those. And again, she had to check… Had they really been written on the date they were posted, one day ahead of Sandra’s tragic shock announcement…? Like somehow she’d predicted what was about to happen…

Didn’t suffer though, she’d said that later. His collapse while mountaineering was entirely unexpected, a bolt from the blue. No reviving. Instant death…

Skip back a page… Take comfort in that… The green she’d eventually chosen for the leaves because she couldn't find any gold or brown, and which she wrote with now, stood out amidst all the black, but not enough… Skip forward again…

What time was it now...? 03:23 according to her phone. Oh lord, she’d been up and down all night… Back and forward, notebook and pen in hand. The coffees wouldn’t help nor would the pacing. As for the snacks, what had she even had? She’d been good this year, watching her weight, restricting her intake of sugar. Only bought cakes and biscuits in for her daughters and grandkids, and her thirty-six-year-old ever-sweet-toothed son…. Same age as…

Oh, Sandra… How must she be feeling now? Gertrude simply couldn’t imagine. And although she hadn’t known the lad, she couldn’t just not say anything, but what if she said the wrong thing? Something that might upset her old friend even more? And was the sympathy card really such a good idea? She remembered what her neighbour, Tanya Sutherland had said about those when her first husband, John had dropped down dead at his work back in the nineties… All those people who hardly knew her, and had barely grunted a hello in passing, or who gossiped behind her and John’s backs just because he happened to be a bit older, were suddenly oh-so-concerned that they ‘simply couldn’t settle’ until they’d signed their names to some idiotic generic verse surreptitiously dropped through her letterbox… Our thoughts are with you at this tragic time, love Bob and Maisie and Chi-Chi, the dog… One had even knocked on and brought her a cake, asked why she hadn’t put ‘all her lovely cards’ up on the mantle…

No, on second thoughts, forget the card. She could write the poem and post it on her own social media. She didn’t use it much. Only had it to keep track of friends and family… Well, family really, which was probably why Sandra’s update hadn’t come through in her newsfeed. And how many months had it been since they’d texted? But a post like this, providing she worded it right, that would help. Then her friend would know just how deep and genuine her sympathies were…

Start again… Forget the green, and the falling leaves, the wind-whipped sky behind the branches… Circle round the designs. Make clockwork… Back to black… Paint it…

The words were so crossed over now, she could hardly make them out. God forbid her kids should ever attempt to read this; they’d think their mother had finally lost the plot and start making appointments for her at the doctor's. And what the hell did Amy Winehouse have to do with it anyway…? Or The Rolling Stones…? Her method had never failed her before. Doodle it out, jot down the key phrases, add the arrows, and the words would eventually flow, but then her parents’ eulogies and speeches for her children’s weddings had come a whole lot easier. She’d been there for both her Mum and Dad at the end, had cared for her ailing mother for years, and as a stay-at-home mum, had always been extremely hands-on with her children - grandkids too when they came along - taking an active interest in all of their lives. Friends, although she had them, just weren’t quite as important. Like she knew they were there, but on the outer circle somehow. Like on that spidery shape she’d just drawn which kind of resembled a dartboard, that bull-like spot in the middle looking most distinct, almost three dimensional. As for her ex-husband, the father of her children, he didn’t even figure. Nor did any of the men she’d dated in her younger years. All dots way off the board on a door long-since glossed over where a series of misthrown darts had once stuck… Sandra, on the other hand, had been widowed. And she’d only had the one son. Gay, she remembered her telling her that, so no grandkids… Had they been texting when Sandra’s husband had died? She couldn’t remember, but then there had been all sorts going on in her own life, and Sandra did have the boy…

Didn’t suffer… That’s the main thing… Okay, no more doodling, work from that…

For those who are left behind when the dark, unseen tornado strikes at speeds beyond both sound and light/ to leave the landscape bare, stripped/ take comfort in the absent ones not knowing/ the loss of their smile, and the freshness of the earth and air surrounding/ the paths they trod with pride/ for they shall always remain…

Schmaltz. Complete and utter dustbin-drivel schmaltz. And with this, her final contemptuous word on the matter, spelt out in block capitals across the entire page, Gertrude threw down her pen. No way would she be posting this for the world to see. Like some pathetic attention-seeking child, making it all about herself in her friend’s time of grief…

5am… Her middle daughter was due at nine once she’d dropped the kids at school. Lindsay always came on a Friday as this was the school’s half-day. Not worth her going home when Grandma’s house was so much closer. Sleep, she needed to sleep, or she’d be in no fit state, and even though they did call and text throughout the week, and she always made a point of following all her children’s social media, Gertrude did so look forward to their regular catch-ups. She’d have to tell Lindsay about Sandra’s son as well, even though her daughter probably wouldn’t have much of a clue who she meant. It was news, after all. News she hadn’t yet heard.

But before she turned out the light, Gertrude picked up her phone and opened her Facebook app. She may have sadly neglected her, but when all was said and done, Sandra was still her friend, and there was the tick at the top of her page to prove it. She scrolled down through her week's worth of updates, clicked the ‘care’ reaction on that terrible heart-wrenching post, and at the end of an extremely long list of near-identical comments, added the only words she could think of which now felt in any way appropriate… Sandra, I am so, so sorry. You know where I am if you ever feel the need to talk…