Pocketful of Poseys by Thomas Reed

Author:Thomas Reed
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beaufort Books
Published: 2023-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

SINGAPORE

The Poseys had struggled to tear themselves away from New Zealand at the end of Frank’s sabbatical year. Spotting anguish on the horizon, Cinny had planned a long, fun-filled trip home as a palliative. They finished circling the globe in a westerly direction, stopping in Singapore and Dubai before boarding a well-worn cruise ship in Civitavecchia for a week-long tour of the eastern Mediterranean. After hitting Taormina in Sicily and the usual destinations in Greece, they spent another week in Rome, staying in a charming vacation rental just off the Campo di Fiore. Frank and Cinny went out each morning to walk along the Tiber and came home via the open-air market and the local panetteria, picking up fresh fruit and pastries for breakfast. Grace and Brian had never felt more coddled.

All these years later, leaving the South Island wasn’t much easier. The biggest challenge for Grace and Brian was obviously leaving actual, physical bits of their parents behind. For a while at least, they’d still have five-sixths of Cinny and Frank’s mortal remains close at hand, safely transferred into their matching cobalt blue canisters. Yet there was a deep-in-the-bone finality about turning their backs on even a small proportion of the carbon atoms that had, though in different molecular arrangements, once made up living creatures who’d loved them and cared for them and shared their joys and sufferings for dozens and dozens of years. Part of it, too, was seeing the affection their own spouses and offspring had developed for New Zealand during their short stay. And so, as they made their way to Christchurch International Airport for their own flight to Singapore, there was plenty of bona fide melancholy to go with the joyful new memories.

It was a day flight, but Brian was glad he’d booked business class for this leg as well. Sitting for ten hours with his knees mere inches from the seat in front of him would have been unbearable. Even on short hauls in Economy Plus back home, Brian suffered flare-ups of his self-diagnosed PBTSD—Post-Birth-Trauma Stress Disorder. He might, for example, be reading in the airline magazine about the most recent selection of America’s Best (as in most publicity-conscious) Surgeons, or sipping contentedly on a craft IPA when something would seize up in his bones and muscles and he’d know beyond a doubt that, unless he could thrust his legs out ramrod straight and cast his arms out wide and arch his back like an Acapulco cliff diver, his seat would, any second, snap shut on him like a leather-upholstered mousetrap. He knew it was just a mental thing. But it was a mental thing he couldn’t control, any more than he could will away a leg cramp or avoid weeping when he sliced onions. In his worst moments, he blamed the psychic infirmity on Grace and the crowded conditions she’d caused as co-occupant in Cinny’s uterus. In his best, he took it as a challenge he might one day overcome, maybe when he finally caved to Ella’s demands and joined her yoga class.

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