The mist

I knew as soon as Bree skipped into the bar that something was up. No one could be that happy. ‘What’s got into you?’

‘It’s Keith,’ she replied.

I might have guessed. Bree had embraced her new role—lover of another woman’s husband. But when she told me she was moving into a flat he’d bought her I couldn’t hold my tongue. I asked her if the great love she thought they had would pass the foghorn test.

‘Foghorn? What are you talking about?’

 

I’d read every detail of his last hour until I felt I’d been there. It was the sort of story the papers couldn’t resist. Two boats, adrift without engines. A thick fog rolling in so nothing could be seen and nothing heard except the occasional shouted words of two loan sailors separated by the mist. The rescue boats searching the wrong area, doing circles in the impenetrable white. And then the foghorn getting louder. Closer. Until it was upon them. The hulking shape above. The splintering crash.

 

And the last words. They’d been repeated at his funeral, as evidence of the injustice of his death. ‘Tell my wife I love her.’ The mourners flocked around her. And I was cast adrift in the fog of my own sorrow.

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