Fava Beans

the soup again tonight, using up the stale crust of bread from Saturday, only tonight I bought a tin of fava beans from the corner shop, breaking a thirty-year silence I hadn’t meant to break.

I’d gone down there for the paper, and just as I passed under the flats, old Mrs Rodriguez tipped her watering can with that shaking hand of hers, and the dirty old window-box overflowed right across my trousers.

I needed a quick bite before the show in the West End, and I was halfway out the shop door, wiping at the wet fabric and cursing under my breath, when I saw the tins of fava beans sitting on the shelf.

and just like that, the shop vanished, and I was small again, sat in my mother’s kitchen the night they took my uncle away. there’d been a stew on the gas ring with those beans in it, a dull, normal evening, and then the heavy knock. the sudden hurry, the grown-ups’ voices shifting into that flat, terrifying register, and the pot left to go cold on the stove while the house emptied toward the hospital.

we never ate it.

ever since, that smell is just the smell of the waiting room, the linoleum, the chemical reek of the ward. I just stood there in the aisle, a grown man with wet trousers and a theatre ticket in his pocket, completely undone by a cheap shelf of beans.

ward twenty-seven,
just after intensive care,
the all-night vigil.