Two Lanterns

Two friends meet on the moors—trying to find a ritual, a gesture, anything that might help to hold the weight of profound loss, knowing before they even begin that nothing ever will.

Madeline and I are stumbling in the velvet darkness, trying not to trip on the rocks or to tread in the sheep shit as the wind gusts around us and douses us with Dartmoor drizzle. A ewe bleats dismally, calling for her lamb. I pull my coat’s zip up a little higher, light the first sky-lantern and launch it confidently. It flaps wildly then is brutally torn apart. This wasn’t part of the plan.

We turn to the second lantern. As Madeline holds the paper part ever so gently with both of her hands, I crouch in the shelter of her grey Mercedes holding a flame against the block of fuel in the base of the lantern and will it to light. My fingers are starting to burn against the metal of the lighter and I hold my breath, determined to bear this inconsequential pain until it catches, and then I breathe out as the fire takes hold. The flame grows steadily in confidence and the paper starts to inflate.

Madeline tenderly and slowly lifts the whole thing skyward. Gradually, as the hot air rises into the body of the lantern, it begins to tug upwards and she lets it go. For a few moments it moves upwards, even swoops a little, and we watch, hearts in mouths, as the wind catches it and then throws it violently into a small thorny bush with fragile yellow blossoms.

It becomes a distant, tiny beacon under the starless sky for a minute or two, then disappears without ceremony. We stand and watch, understanding ourselves to be powerless, and we allow silence to echo between us for a short while. Then we climb into the car and light our cigarettes, hers a Marlboro Light and mine a roll-up.

We smoked together for the first time thirty-five years earlier, in the school toilets while we were supposed to be in our A-level Physics lesson.

“Who’s in there smoking?,” I had asked from the privacy of my cubicle, a toilet pan for a seat.

“Who’s in there smoking?”, she retorted. Hers a Winston and mine a No 6.

Her mother drove a Buick that she later shipped over from the States, while my mother drove a Ford Cortina and we recognised the rebel in each other that afternoon.

Madeline’s son Benjamin was born when we were twenty-three and mine, Samuel, when we were twenty-five. They were followed by her daughter, Bethany, then my Jessica and, lastly, my second son, Joshua.

Between Sam’s and Ben’s birthdays, if someone commented, as they frequently had cause to do, “Whoa! They’re a bit of a handful aren’t they? How old are they?” we liked to say, full of pride, “They are 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6 years old!”

We had both married and then divorced as our husbands continued to play out the lawless wildness that had once attracted us. We leaned into serious motherhood. We spent our days loading bikes and scooters into the backs of cars, striding about in woods, pushing park swings, counting heads in swimming pools, watching football matches, making birthday cakes, reading stories and putting plasters on knees and sometimes counting the minutes to six o’clock bath-time.

Neither Madeline nor I went to university when we were young, nor even managed to survive our A’ levels at school, so we were inordinately proud of our boys when they did both these things. Ben, a gorgeously strapping and popular young footballer, went to study History at Lincoln and then the following year, Sam, six foot two, with long dark curls and olive skin, his dazzling smile decorated with a gold lip ring, went to Nottingham to study Maths.

Then, a year after Sam started university, Madeline and I were smoking together again in a bland Nottingham hotel. There was an untouched plate of Nachos on the table with cheese congealing over them and a collection of empty red wine bottles and an overflowing ashtray. Josh, was with us as well as my brother, who had driven the Mercedes like the wind to get us here. Ben arrived from Lincoln and he and Josh went out for sandwiches in the early hours of the morning.

As we drove into the city that morning there was a huge rainbow stretched across the university campus and I had known, immediately, that the rainbow was put there for me. Once the bar closed and the boys were safely back and asleep in the next room, I lay on the bed hearing my brother snoring across the room, and Madeline’s quiet breathing next to me.

Earlier, my body had begun to grieve loudly, gutturally, and Madeline said, “Davina, you need to stop that, you’re scaring Josh.”

I didn’t feel safe to allow my body to take charge so I brought the rainbow into my mind. I immersed myself in each colour in turn as if the strength of the hue could hold me in safety or connect me with my boy, or at least keep me away from reality somehow.

Eventually I slept for an hour or so and then as I woke there was the tiniest of pauses before I remembered again and the powerful sobs convulsed my body once more. I used my sleeve like a three-year-old child - Sam’s long-sleeved t-shirt that I’d been wearing for two days - and pressed it against my face. I held it there and let the tears and the snot run into the cotton fabric.

After some time, I don’t know how long, I started to think about coffee and without doing anything about my snot covered shirt I stood up, opened the door with its Do Not Disturb sign suspended from the knob and walked along the carpeted corridor past the numbered doors to the stairs.

I walked downstairs and next to the foyer was a cafe where a quiet queue of people in suits waited to be served. I could smell bacon cooking and I was aware that there was a distant parallel universe where I might have felt enticed by that. I walked to the front of the queue and stated my immediate need,

“I can’t queue, can I just have some coffee now?”

The assistant looked at me in surprise then uncertainly at the others who were dutifully waiting and then back to my dishevelled hair and exhausted face and said,

“Ok. I’ll bring it.”

I was vaguely aware of many eyes following me as I walked to a table and sat rolling one cigarette after another and laying them on the table in a row. I rolled them very thin. When I smoked one I lit it, took a few drags, extinguished it then rolled another.

I was aware of the buzz of conversation around me, perhaps some of it was about me, it wasn’t important. I just needed to get to the time when I could see my boy again. We had seen him the day before.

We had followed a police officer, walked and walked down corridors past door after door and occasionally passing incongruently chatting people and then into a waiting area. Finally, we were invited into another room and there was my boy lying there with his beautiful curls combed into a parting and his face calm.

He was covered with a white sheet up to his neck. I watched his father wailing and roughing up Sam’s hair into its familiar tumble. I held Josh as he wept, shattered and afraid. I was afraid too, especially about what injuries lay beneath the sheet, and as I stroked his beautiful face I could see his chest rising and falling with his breath and I knew this was an illusion but still couldn’t stop seeing it.

Exactly four months later, on a freezing winter’s night, the call came from Madeline’s daughter, Bethany, “It’s Ben, he’s dead.” I couldn’t take in her words. How could this be? How could our children be 16, 17 and 18 without the 19 and 20? Yet, I could hear Madeline screaming, just screaming, in the background. I drove the motorways and went to her, holding my dear friend in my arms and whispering to her,

“Just breathe, all you need to do right now is breathe. This is the worst day. I promise you, this is the worst one.” I knew her pain tangibly and hopelessly.

Then, I made the parallel journey with Madeline that she had made with me those few months earlier and as I stood with her, in another mortuary, in another city I silently promised Ben’s broken body that I would do all I could to help his mother to bear the unbearable as she had tried to help me.

Each year, as the season changes and the chill of autumn enters the air my body remembers the night when I lost my firstborn son. The coldness tightens around my heart and I sense the familiar hollow ache in my chest and the echo of the sharp pain beneath my heart more keenly. I want to mark the day, yet I find that nothing I do can hold the size or the texture of all of this.

When Madeline and I stepped out tonight we knew from the start that we were going through the motions of something that could not and would not bring true comfort. Our two lanterns lay broken and motionless in the mud.

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Thank you for reading.