I don’t know what triggered it, but I had the strangest of memories last night while watching television. Ten or eleven years old and still at primary school, I’m sitting in the back of a taxi, jammed up against the window. It’s a proper black cab, the first time I’ve been in one. Mum and Dad are also in the cab, along with a bevy of my siblings. There are so many of us that Dad has to sit at the front beside the taxi-driver. We’re on Queensferry Road, heading home. We’ve just been to the Sick Kids Hospital in Edinburgh to collect my wee sister, who had been very ill for a long time. But now she’s wrapped in a shawl in Mum’s arms, looking tiny and frail. The inside of the taxi is a hubbub, but I’m oblivious to the noise. I’m too engrossed with my notebook and pencil, recording random numbers I see from the window. Car and motorbike registration numbers, the numbers of buses, the numbers on speed limit signs, the numbers of miles on signposts – they are all jotted down in the notebook. And all the numbers are building up into the shape of a rifle. An odd pastime, I suppose, but I’m contented. The numbers are coming together. And the wee sis is coming home.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
January 2022
|