Fava Beans

tonight the soup again, with the same crusty bread as Saturday — only tonight I threw in some fava beans from the corner shop.

I’d gone down there for the paper and a few other things, and there was that dirty old window-box overflowing from above, poor Mrs Rodriguez up top with her hand trembling on the watering-can, splashing water all over my fresh trousers straight from the dry cleaner’s, which irritated me no end. I needed a quick bite before the show — War Horse, up in the West End — and I was halfway out the door, brushing at the wet, annoyed.

and then I saw the fava beans on the shelf.

and just like that I was small again, back in my mother’s kitchen the night they took my uncle away. there’d been a stew on the stove — fava beans in it, I think, the ordinary supper of an ordinary evening — and then the knock, the hurry, the grown-ups’ voices gone strange, and the pot left going cold on the hob while the house emptied toward the hospital. we never did eat it. and ever since, the smell of those beans is the smell of that night — the waiting, the ward, the fear a child can feel but not name.

I stood there, a grown man with wet trousers and a theatre ticket, undone by a shelf of beans.

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