Chiaroscuro
A line of blue hills in the distance
is contoured like a monumental sentence…
– Ciaran Carson
He began his day as he’d always done—by fetching up the milk from his doorstep, putting the kettle on and tumbling Darjeeling leaves directly from the tin into the pot. The Belfast Telegraph languished in the oven at gas mark 1, the timer set for nine minutes. This made the paper brittle but dried the ink so, after reading it, his fingertips wouldn’t be blackened. James MacMinn had learnt the habit from his dead father, a dental surgeon for whom blackened fingertips had been thought professionally unwise.
James loved the scent of printer’s ink that filled the kitchen by the time he sat himself down at the table with his mug of morning tea, two Digestives and the paper. It took him back to his days as a master compositor when he’d worked arranging movable type, turning vast trays of it into meaning: those long-ago days when he’d felt useful and when blackened fingertips had been a necessary evil.
It had been eleven years since he’d built his last story in the composing room for the Telegraph. His wife Lillian—six years his junior—had worked a few more years in the steno pool there after he’d been pensioned off. Adrift, he’d felt then the occasional twinge of resentment. Her life had remained bright with purpose. Until, that is, she was felled by dementia. His life stayed dark and shadowy, first with ennui, then sorrow.
For James, blackened fingertips had for most of his adult life been a blazon of his worth. His agility in the composing room was legend. He knew the locations of all the hundreds of trays and the legions of typefaces, diacritics and fleurons they contained. James knew them the way a London cabbie knows the streets, mews and closes of Hackney and Mayfair. His father had wanted him to follow his lead and qualify as a dentist. But serving as an after-school helper at a jobbing press had persuaded James, early on, that printing was his métier. No ‘down in the mouth’ for him. Bodoni. Gill Sans. Didot. Baskerville. Caslon. He learned to recognise them all, to love their different personalities.
Finishing his tea, James stares down at his fingers, the joints gnarled and contorted by arthritis, the tips brightly, vexingly clean. With Lillian now at the nursing home in the Ard Na Va Road, just off the Falls, his days are longer and darker. He visits her every day, though the charges for the car park nearby are fierce. ‘Sure, you’ll put me in the workhouse for visiting my sick wife,’ he told the heartless Mrs Ogilvie who rang incessantly, dunning him about unpaid charges on his Ulster Bank credit card.
Unexpectedly, dementia had taken Lillian’s gentle demeanor and made her into a prize-fighter with a dead aim. James’s right eye, lately blackened by one of Lillian’s knock-out punches, was just beginning to blossom into a rich purple green. But with his left one almost healed, he could make out the hazy blue outline of Black Mountain in the distance quite clearly; so also the white lavatera blooming in the shadows beside the nursing home’s entrance door, though in double.
P.W. Bridgman has published five books of poetry and fiction. His work has appeared in The Moth, Skylight 47, The Honest Ulsterman, The Galway Review and numerous other outlets. Visit Bridgman’s website at www.pwbridgman.ca and follow him on X: @PWB_writer1.
Note: Ciaran Carson, Claude Monet, “The Artist’s Garden at Vétheuil”, 1880 (The New Yorker, August 12, 2019).