Pea Soup

by Carolyn Smart

There are four people in the car, two are grown–ups, they are your parents, and they
have been fighting for most of the drive. Now it is dark, dark because it is the end of
the day but also because words are weighing you down like a hood without eyes and the
car is surrounded by fog. It is England in the 1950s and the man gets out of the car
holding a torch which you wish was a giant cone of flames to burn the whole night
down but it is just a simple flashlight, weighty, useful for some things but now it
cannot even pierce the first five feet of pea soup.

Your mother sits behind the wheel. She is leaning forward as if she is at the dining
table and her elbows would be up on that table positioning her body for an argument |
and she’d have a cigarette in her right hand, one of 60 she would have smoked that
day before she laid her head down on the pillow, tasting nothing in her mouth at all
not even grief. At the table she would have finished off the wine your father poured
and it would slosh around her stomach with the whisky and the rich red meat she
cooked so well. But now she has the cigarette between the fingers gripping a steering
wheel and she peers out through the windshield at the man she married walking with
the torch into the pea soup.

The man, your father, sometimes tells a story when he is driving the car. The story is
about another man who pulls his car over to the side of the road and gets out and
walks away forever. Your father has said he too will do this. One day he does, but
not the way you imagine as a child. One day he walks out of the world itself, leaving
things tidy behind him though that is not entirely true. It’s like he’s ripped off the top
of something no one wants to look inside and no one ever can.

In the back seat you are sitting perched far forward as you like to see most everything
that happens in your life, close up, to lean as far into it as you possibly can and if the
world smacks you in the face as it goes by you are familiar enough with that because
your mother smacks you in the face in public and no one seems alarmed.

Next to you your sister sits too terrified to talk. It is a true pea souper out there.
Years later you two girls will hurtle down the M1 in a bus through a pea soup, nuns
praying by your side. Your parents will have no idea where you are. Your sister will
have stayed up all night worrying about you, worrying about herself carrying the weight
of your care.

That is all this story holds: the man waving the torch against weather, the woman
fogging up the car with smoke, the two girls who grew up anyway.