Carra Finlay stood under the clothesline and watched in dismay as all her dreams blew away in the wind. In linty little pieces, they whirled up, up and all around. Some landed in her hair, others collected cheekily in the folds of some drying knickers before shimmying skywards, and one very bold piece danced right into her gaping mouth. By misfortune of reflex, she spat the tiny scrap of paper onto the lawn, then stared at it in dismay, wondering which particular fragment of which dream it might have been.
‘You will go,’ said Carra to the fleck of paper, ‘to the place where all the broken dreams go.’
She spent a moment wondering what a place filled with broken dreams might look like, and just as it was starting to take on a familiar shape in her mind, the corner of a sheet whipped her smartly in the face.
‘Ow,’ Carra said to the wind, rubbing her cheek. She flushed with rage, but quickly saw that being cross with the wind was unfair. It was, after all, her fault for leaving the list of dreams in the pocket of her jeans. It was she who had put the jeans in the washing machine. She inspected again the bits of notepaper dotted on the lawn in case they might be reassembled, and leaned down to pick up a few mushy flecks. The grass, by contrast, was brown and crisp. The warm spring wind buffeted her ears before blustering away towards the hills. Carra looked up at the dun, threadbare hills and let her anger return.
‘Sod off, you bastard wind.’
In response, the wind flapped the sheets again, as if to remind Carra of its usefulness.
‘Sod off,’ she said again, but quietly this time, because fast-drying sheets could help the day catch up on itself. It had got unruly, the day. As usual.
Carra berated herself for being so slapdash about the laundry. Once, she had found great satisfaction in viewing her neat lines of clean washing: tiny, bright white socks and wafty, softened muslins. Now she couldn’t remember how to care. And evidently nor could she remember to remove things from pockets. Not two months before, she’d presented her husband, Duncan, with the sodden pieces of his pocketbook and said meekly, ‘Um, I’m hoping this didn’t have all your passwords in it.’
Duncan had drawn one of those deep breaths with a significant pause before the exhale, which is how Carra could tell he was cross. She wished he’d yelled about it, though. She didn’t know what to do with such a tiny hint of anger, couldn’t yell back about doing his own goddamn washing or checking his own pockets. She could only feel guilty. The little notebook had been filled with reminders, contact details, jottings to enter into patient files, details of committee meetings . . . all the hallmarks of an active and conscientious community member, good friend and diligent GP. He had reason to be grumpy about losing it, but, as always, Duncan’s temperate nature prevailed.
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