1st Runner Up

 

Brussels by Ingrid Murray. Judges' comment:  “Alternating between past and present in a 900-word short story is a risky business. But here it works beautifully. The past feels as immediate as the present, brings the central character to life in the reader's mind and makes the final, shocking realization all the more powerful."

Ingrid Murray writes fiction and poetry. Several of her poems have been published by Poetry Scotland. Ingrid is currently undertaking a creative writing course with the Open University. She has completed her first novel, ‘The Birthing Pool’, a story about childbirth and motherhood.

 

BRUSSELS

Ingrid Murray

 

Je t’ai tenue, mon étrangère,
Dans un piège de chair
Pour que tu réinventes le monde,
Pour que tu naisses forte
De toutes mes faiblesses,
Mon rocher sur lequel
Je me brise.
(Anne Marie Derese)

Apparently it was the British who invited Leopold of Saxe-Coburg onto the throne of Belgium. I imagine he was quite flattered back then on 21st July 1831 and I dare say he’d be equally proud today to see his little state flaunting its hardware, parading its military might on the streets for all the world to see just how well this disregarded little state is doing right now.
Right now it is July 21st 1987. Belgium’s national day. The heart of Europe is beating.
The boy is the eldest of three. He is eight or thereabouts, born under the sign of Pisces - on a Friday so he is loving and giving, dreamily meandering, buoyed by warm currents of familial love, fascinated, like no other Piscean I know, by guns and warfare. As his mother, I am far from neutral regarding this obsession but my former youthful reasoned stance on questions of morality and politics has long since - 8 years to be precise - become complicated and convoluted to the point of unpickability like an Arran cardigan gone wrong.
I take the metro from Vandervelde to Schumann, descending and ascending the silvery continuum with all the singular purpose of a locust in a locust swarm bent on the Argentinean Pampas. The girl clings to the buggy’s handle; the boy is off. I call him back. He reins in his enthusiasm with undisguised antipathy.
We emerge into what should be sun were it not for the sun-eclipsing concrete of the European Quarter. The sight of the tanks gathered at Cinquantenaire waiting, deadly, for the off, make my stomach leap into my throat. The boy is transfixed but this feeling of enclosure, encirclement, of threat will not leave me. We set off in the direction of Rue de la Loi, heading, with the rest of the cannon fodder towards Parc, the Parliament, the Royal Palace, the green flowering place, the lung; therefrom to watch the procession with a degree of equanimity (I am hoping).
Somewhere in the corridor that is Rue de la Loi, the boy disappears. How long ago was that? I cannot say. A few minutes? Five? Surely less? I shout soundlessly as the tanks file past on the road. I move will-lessly forward, part of a multi-celled column of lifeblood, stuttering along a pavement that has become sclerotic. I can’t stop now or the body will seize up. I understand somehow that in this place it is useless to panic.
We are drawn to the delta. In front of the parliament house the file of tanks and missile launchers is heralded by undulating and ecstatic Belgian flags. A fly-past of jets roars its accompaniment. I turn left, pushing on towards the palace scanning the crowd as I go, for a red sweater, a Where’s Wally task in this sea of military grey and tricolours of gold, black and red. The girl is sobbing her disquiet. I am unmoved. The baby’s party dress is smeared in rusk. I turn in front of the Royal Palace. Onwards. And once more I turn. I see a Gendarme, a spectator of the spectacle. I approach this gun-toting protector of the public. I am preparing to speak in schoolgirl French.
And then I see him, insouciant, rapt. Someone has lifted him to a vantage point and he is perched on the perimeter wall of the park. His back rests on iron railings. He holds a Belgian flag. He sees me and does not flinch.
My heart beats again. I have him once more. I cannot reprimand him. We stop with him and watch with him. The girl stops her sobbing. A cotton-wool calm descends around us.
I lied. In fact it is 2010. Belgium has surrendered itself unto itself. Lost in an ocean of bombastic rhetoric, it is without government.
I am back in England, divorced, grand-mothered. My older daughter’s baby son is four weeks old and poorly or else she would be here with us. My younger daughter has brought her fiancé. He is tall and handsome and a bit like my son about the eyes. He is Piscean too, but born on a Thursday, he has far to go. I hold tight the hands of my son’s step-daughters. The eight year old, the more sensitive of the pair, holds mine tighter, her still small fingers like balm on an old gardener’s skin. The girl’s mother, my was-about-to-be daughter-in-law, links hands with the older girl on one side and with her own mother on the other. The six-year old clings to me on one side and to her Jellycat on the other.
The procession makes its way through the town, a solemn cortege filing past people six to eight deep on the roadside. Flags drape the coffins of our loved-ones. There are whole families wearing tee-shirts naming their loss. I wear light green. The suit I bought for my son’s wedding that will not now take place. My not-quite daughter-in-law is in grey. The girls are both in blue and white with little frilly socks and black patent leather shoes. My younger daughter wears black. Her face is swollen with grief. She leans on her fiancé for support and the most terrible thought enters my head as I look at him, protective and kind, and solid, alive with a bit of my son’s colouring in those eyes.