I found that old wedding photo we lost behind a doll in our daughter’s room. Russian, as it happens, the doll that is - I can read some significance in that: so full of themselves, they miss the bleeding obvious. I wiped the dust from off its surface, made you 21 again and placed us
on the bookshelf where P meets Q. I’d have liked it before your favourite author but her shelf’s too close to the ground. All my books are still in alphabetical order; I wake at 7 to clean and tidy, progressing in a clockwise direction, starting at the front door and ending in the bath.
I compare it to my parents’ wedding picture that’s hanging next to the dining room door: they’d a bigger cake, more friends and relations, dressed black and white, a formal occasion; contemplative, no eye for the camera. My mother’s fuller in the face than I remember and isn’t that an ashtray beside the cake?
I blow these pictures up out of proportion trying to discover germs of the future: leukaemia, cancer and emphysema buried within a forgotten Baboushka. How happy we appear! My Mum said never had I looked so handsome, like Richard Gere. Perhaps that’s the joke I’m laughing at.
Behind us I trace the faintest whisper of the tower blocks tumbled in ‘88. As we’re cutting the cake, your face burns with embarrassment or anticipation of the sauce to come. I can feel the grip that you have on my arm, as if I might be the first to depart.
When lights fade I think I can hear you breathing, but it’s central heating or a noise in the loft. I close the windows to keep your scent in and reach out to touch an amputation - I said we shouldn’t buy a bed this wide. You never see pictures taken at funerals unless somebody important has died.