Short Story: Return of the Green
Mar
“Dad! It’s come back!”
Megan noticed it first, the way she always noticed things before anyone else in the family; before her father, certainly, who had spent the better part of March with his eyes fixed somewhere slightly below the horizon, and before her brother Tomos, who was eleven and had decided that spring was boring now that he was too old to catch tadpoles.
She pressed her nose against the cold glass of the living room window and watched the blossom of the cherry tree gently flutter in the early April light, pale pink against a sky the colour of old pewter. Roath Park was coming alive.
“Come see!”
From the kitchen came the sound of the low scrape of a chair. Her father appeared in the doorway, tea in hand, wearing the grey cardigan her mother had bought him three Christmases ago. From the window, he looked at the tree for a long moment without speaking.
“So it is,” he said finally.
Megan’s mother had passed in October. The leaves had still been on the trees then, copper and rust and a stubborn, burning amber, and Megan had thought, in the strange, sideways manner that grief allows, that it was almost too beautiful. The world had no right to be so lovely on a day like that, she thought.
She was fifteen and she understood that this thought was not quite rational, but grief, she was learning, was not a rational thing.
They had scattered her ashes in the Taff on a grey November morning, just the three of them, Megan and Tomos and their father, standing by the river with their coats pulled tight against the approaching winter.
Her father had muttered a few words that none of them could quite hear over the wind coming off the water. Tomos had sobbed silently and Megan had put her arm around him. She had looked up at the bare trees and thought ‘she would have had something to say about all of this. She would have known what to do with us.’
Winter had passed the way winters do, not dramatically, not in great white silences, but in a long grey diminishment. There was rain that seemed personal in its persistence. The streetlights had glittered in the wet pavement; her father had cooked the same four dinners in rotation: spaghetti bolognese on Mondays, chicken on Wednesdays, fish on Fridays, and on Sundays a roast that was never quite right, though none of them said so.
It was her Auntie Charlotte who suggested they take a walk.
She arrived on a Saturday morning with a tin of Welsh cakes and an air of cheerful determination that her father could not quite deflect. Charlotte was her mother’s younger sister, and the resemblance in the way she moved through the kitchen as though she owned it, was still capable of catching Megan off guard. She found herself staring sometimes, then looking away.
“Come on then,” Charlotte said, pulling on her coat. “Roath Park. Non-negotiable.”
“Roath Park?”
“Gareth. Put your shoes on. We’re all going.”
They parked up and walked the long way round, past the lake where the swans were already nesting on their ragged thrones of reeds, past the café where a small queue had formed of people in too-light jackets, stubbornly optimistic in the weak spring sunshine. Daffodils blazed along the path in extravagant yellow. The grass had that fresh, almost luminous quality it only ever has in April, as though lit from below.
Tomos ran ahead, the way he sometimes still did when he forgot to be too old for things. He disappeared around a bend and came back shouting.
“The boats are out! Dad, the rowing boats are out!”
Her father looked up. Something shifted in his face.
“Are they?” he said.
Her mother had loved the rowing boats.
Megan remembered being perhaps six or seven, sitting in the bow while her mother rowed with easy strokes, her dark hair loose around her shoulders.
‘Look at the reflections, cariad,’ she had said. Megan had remembered the way the oars had shattered the mirrored sky into fragments and then let it reassemble, whole again, behind them. She had been afraid of the dark water and her mother had known this without being told, and had kept up a steady, gentle commentary.
‘That’s a coot. See the white beak? Those are her babies following behind.’ Megan’s fear had loosened its grip the more she listened.
Mum had taught Megan to row that same afternoon, sitting behind her and guiding her arms. Megan had felt the resistance of the water through the oar handles, had felt, in a small way, the principle of it: that you must push against something in order to move forward. It was heavier than she had imagined.
Now she watched her father look at the boathouse. She watched him calculate something private and difficult, some sum whose terms she could only partially see.
“Shall we?” Charlotte said, quietly.
Her father was quiet for a moment. The lake shimmered. A pair of coots threaded between the moored boats.
“Aye,” he said at last. “Why not?”
They took two boats, Charlotte and Tomos in one, listing spectacularly as Tomos lurched for the oars, and Megan and her father in the other. Her father rowed with the steady, unpractised effort of a man who had not done this in a long time, and Megan trailed her fingers in the water, which was very cold.
For a while they didn’t speak. The sounds of the park moved around them: the distant laughter, a dog barking, the mild creak of the oarlocks. Charlotte was attempting to teach Tomos to steer but failing noisily. A pair of mallards observed them with indifference from the bank. They’d seen it all before.
“She used to sing,” her father said.
Megan looked up.
“When we’d come here. Before you were born, even. She’d row and sing and I’d tell her to stop because people were looking.” He paused. “I was an idiot.”
“You weren’t.”
“I was. I was embarrassed.” He shook his head slowly, not with self-condemnation but with something more like wonder. “She didn’t care. She never cared about things like that. That was the thing about her.”
Megan felt the grief rise in her the way it sometimes did, without warning, a sudden swell. She let it come. She had learned, in the dark winter months, that it was better not to resist.
“What did she sing?” she asked.
Her father thought about it.
“Calon Lân, sometimes. Hymns. She knew all the old ones.” He smiled at something she couldn’t see.
And once, we were here on a Saturday in July and she sang Dancing Queen at the top of her voice and a man in the next boat actually applauded.”
Megan laughed. It came out of her before she could contain it, real and unguarded, and she felt the surprise of it, the strange permission of it.
Her father laughed too. Not much, and with a kind of grief still in it, but it was there.
They stayed on the water for an hour. By the time they returned the boats and walked back toward the park gates, the sun had burned through properly, that tentative spring sun that always seems faintly apologetic, as though it knows it can’t be trusted to last. The cherry tree near the boathouse was in full blossom, its petals drifting onto the path in the light wind.
Tomos crouched to gather a handful, then let them go again.
“Mam liked blossom,” he said. It was the first time he had said her name in weeks, not her name, but that small word that held everything.
“She did,” Charlotte said.
Tomos stood up and brushed his hands on his jeans, and they walked on, the four of them, along the path by the lake while the blossom settled on the water and the swans held their steady positions; the daffodils stood in the afternoon light, unembarrassed in their yellow brightness, as though they had been waiting all winter to do exactly this.
Her father reached over and took Megan’s hand. He held it briefly, awkwardly, and then let it go. It was enough.
On the walk home, Charlotte fell into step beside her father and they talked quietly about something Megan couldn’t hear, their voices low and close in the way of people who have known each other a long time and have survived something together. Tomos kicked a stone, then found a better one and started again.
Later, they headed to the high street that was busy in the late afternoon. There were families, dogs, a man outside the corner shop reading a newspaper, the small ordinary theatre of a Cardiff Saturday. Megan moved through it all feeling both present and slightly apart, the way she often did now. Changed by something that could not be unchanged. Carrying it, but carrying it here, outside, in the light.
That evening, her father made a roast. It still wasn’t quite right. But he’d put daffodils in a jam jar on the table. They were yellow, outrageous, and hopeful. No one said a word about it.
The cherry tree had come back.
The world, indifferent and gorgeous, was doing it again, the whole enormous, aching thing. But they were still in it, still together, still moving through the bright, impossible spring.
The green had returned.
Roath Park poster available by clicking here
