Who were you, little pipette?

It’s all on a rota, so there are years when it’s up to me to help the fathers on this day. 

They emerge all at once, sometimes at eleven in the morning, or at 10:17 in the morning, a time when the rest of the population are busy. They choose a silent abandoned time of soft sun and frayed clouds. Each father emerges from their dwellings and they blink at one another across the dust pathways, or the swathes of lawn. Soon they will merge and be off somewhere. 

If someone doesn’t step in, they can cause harm to themselves, or go off into the forested area and damage ancient trees, so that’s why we have a rota. 

It’s painful how the heart stretches for some of them. It gets coiled round their ribs like sugar work, like a tongue in there. These kinds of pain cannot be removed, even in the village. We have to walk together, all of us. The volunteers have to accept as real the pain they suffer, the fathers. The blows they perceive from the children they have not seen for a long time. The unfairness in their bodies. Their tired steps. 

of course - no memories from before you arrived in the village can be trusted. These people may never have had children. They may have had wonderful lives with them, but that doesn’t matter. It won’t do any good to tell Sam, who talks bitterly of being shut out of his son’s life after a fire he caused one night, that this may not have happened.
It is no good telling Guy that he does not truly remember that his daughter, his tiny pipette, used to hide from him during their one day a week visit. She used to hide in the toilets at MacDonalds or slip his hand and go freely around the shopping centre, asking for money from the people working on the hot nuts stand. Money for an ice cream, she’d ask. Money for a mask so I can hide from that man. It never happened but Guy can’t help it.

We go to the long fence and walk along, keeping one whole side of the world blank. They are able to go back into the rhythm of village life there, to accept the slow wind. I lead them on a rope sometimes – they are not bound to it - but hold on, like the makeshift sleeping lines invented in the cruel age of the Victorian boarding house. 

It’s a long day. We are left alone by the populace. Some others (on a different rota) will leave little marks of encouragement on the fence. All of us are human, they might say. All of us are made up of disappointments and things we wish we had done better. 

In some cases, there are trifles left out, or curries, or pies and chips. We eat all of it with cutlery that I usually pack for the occasion. We drink a lot of tea. 

By dusk, we have formed a large circle, and each one of us calls out a name. We call out to be soothed. To have our past homes mended and bruises healed over by hands of our children and yet of course we cannot know if any of them even existed we can only chew our elongated hearts like sugar.