108: Lens

“We should see his boat setting out soon.” My father and I are sitting on the bench at the dock, overlooking the jetty where the boats from the other side moor. Dad’s resting a bulging hessian bag on his lap from which he draws crumbling Mini Milks at regular intervals, passing them on to me, or occasionally admitting one into his own mouth, where it rolls around on his tongue, sopping up spittle before the intermittent crunching commences. “I wish he would swim across, like I taught him. Boats are daft and attract witches,” he mutters after an ostentatious gulp of mulch. “But don’t let a thought like that cross your mind; all thoughts are a dereliction of duty”, he puffs into the breeze as my fringe bows in front of my eyes, rising up briefly before dropping above my brow, finally settling somewhere out of sight. “We’re looking at a dismantled body.” He pats my knee. “You know I hate your brother going away like this. Flittering your mother’s inheritance away on these pointless boat-rides to the other shore, just to sit there and stare at us through binoculars.” “But, Dad…” I muster. “Hssshh”, he retorts, pointedly jamming 4 fingers into his mouth and tapping his thumb against his nose, before spritzing me with doughy pap as he draws a fist up over his right eye and peers through it, out across the water. “The whole other side’s a set of binoculars”, he muses, pushing me back into the bench with his free elbow, “a device for looking back, comparing, weighing up merits… Everyone on that side comes back over here all puffed up, snooty…” He gestures towards the water, drawing his hand down in a wide arc. “There’s an eighty foot lens in the river, our side looks tiny from the other bank; we’re like ants. They’ll sure-to-hell eat us all up some God-forsaken day.” We sit in relative silence for the next forty minutes or so, watching the sun vanish into its reflection on the horizon, dad flipping biscuits into the air the whole time; me, snatching them mid-flight with decreasing urgency, eventually letting them drop and pounding them with my heel into the dry grasses beneath us. “That could be his boat leaving just now”, he whispers excitedly, still squinting through his fist. “But, Dad…?”, I attempt, very softly this time. “I’m an only child, Dad… your only son.” “Enough”, he snarls, raising with a start, scrunching up the hessian and launching it into the air, knocking a seagull off course. Then, stripping down to his waist, bellowing “I hear you! I’m coming, son!”, he gracelessly cannon-balls into the water and swims, spluttering, towards the darkening horizon. With a sigh, I pick up the sack of crumbs and take out my phone to call the coastguard. Again.