The Ink Bottle

“Bring me the ink bottle from the drawer. I’ll show you something.” Richard walked over to the sink and filled a jam jar with water. Looking after a four-year-old could be trying but at the same time so simple.

            “Which drawer?”

            “The middle one.” Richard sat down and watched the little girl, Ellie, stand on tiptoes, rummaging. He rolled his eyes.

            “Is this it?” said Ellie.

            “Yes. Bring it here.”

            Ellie tilted the bottle to see the black liquid rise and slip as she came over to the kitchen table.

            “Give it here.”

            “No.”

            “Give it here!”

            “No, I want to open it myself.”

Richard willed himself patient, long-suffering. There was a creak as the lid slowly ground open. Ellie recoiled slightly at the dryness of the ink’s smell. She clamped the lid back on.

            “Careful. You’ll ruin the thread.”

            “What’s the thread?”

            “The way it screws on.”

            “What are you going to show me?”

            “Watch.” Richard let a drop of ink slowly fall from the lip of the bottle into the jam jar. They both peered at it as it briefly danced seven veils of indigo before tainting the water with a pale purplish hue.

            He sighed. It was like all his feelings about the girl’s mother, Beth, the ink bottle. Like grief. A substance temporarily contained, but with the potential to spill out everywhere, with no hope of reining it in. A thick, black, spreading flow.

            Beth, a travel writer who blogged and networked and translated her way around the world, used the ink the way it was meant to be used – dragging it across paper deserts, as yet unmarked, in waiting for the trails of nomadic people, gunrunners and caravanserai; pulling it, jabbing, arching, looping, halting; doubling back to dot and cross, holding back, pausing then leaning forward, head bent into the oncoming winds, always in pursuit of some mirage. However, she always came back to Richard, Ellie and the place they had called home for just under a year, at its heart the kitchen table where she wrote longhand, with a fountain pen and her bottles of writing ink.

            Now she was gone. And now here was he, performing elementary science tricks for their little motherless girl. Everything was so fragile. He felt constantly strung out. Like a mid-afternoon vodka hangover, pinned to a café bar seat having drunk too much caffeine.

            “Do it again,” Ellie said.

            “No, that’s it now.”

            “Do it again!”

            “One more time then we’re putting it away.” He swilled out the discoloured water and refilled the jar, repeated the trick. So basic you couldn’t call it a trick. An effect. An experiment. A lesson, of sorts.

            “Why do you think it keeps its shape for a while – all those swirls – and then mixes up with the water?”

            “Because it’s like fairies,” was her instant reply. “If you stare at them too long, they vanish.”

            He watched her walk back to the dresser, ink slopping up the sides of the little bottle. Like a captured black jellyfish or a sea slug. Or a monstrous oily blob from a horror film represented in miniature. He tried to see things from the child’s point of view. It helped him out.

            He took a wipe from the packet on the dresser and cleaned off the worst of the ink from her fingers. He filled the kettle, snapped the switch on, reached into the cupboard for pasta and measured out a small amount.

            The landline rang. It was Beth. He answered while leaping across the kitchen, tapping Ellie on the arm and raising a finger to his lips. She was quiet. She had already sensed who was on the other end of the line. Beth wanted to hear Ellie’s voice.

            “Please, put her on.”

            “Are you sure it’s a good idea?” he said. It was the first time she’d phoned in the two weeks she’d been gone. Over the crackling line, he could just hear her tell her daughter that she was only away for a short while, and that she’d be back soon. The girl listened silently.

            “Mummy just needs to sort a few things out”, said Beth. When Richard saw a tear roll down Ellie’s cheek he felt his heart in turmoil, swore inwardly never to abandon the girl from that moment, never stop looking out for her, whatever happened.

            He took the phone from Ellie’s grasp.

            “That’s enough now. She’s fine with me. You don’t need to worry.” He held Ellie close to him. “We’re ok with things, Ellie, aren’t we now? Goodbye, Mummy, and hope to see you soon.” He hung up and quickly unplugged the phone, knowing that she was bound to phone back any moment. He knew Beth was torn between continuing their life together as a family, and the opportunity to escape what she saw as the fetters of motherhood; he had realised lately that the travelling had ended up being the winning side. The domestic scene was not what she wanted anymore and she longed to be free of it.

            After Ellie had eaten her pasta and a fruit salad, he made sure she cleaned her teeth, washed her face with her flannel and brushed her hair. She laid out her stuffed animals and dolls along the foot of her bed and he tucked her in. He read her a story and coughed a few times in annoyance, feeling a sob catch in his throat, threatening like the ink to break out again in an unending flood. How much of this was in anger and how much in sorrow he couldn’t tell.

            Once she was asleep he ordered a takeaway and opened a bottle of beer. In these quiet moments he’d run the scenes of his life with Beth through his mind.

            It had all begun with a chance meeting in a palatial hotel lobby in India six years ago. A dinner date. Richard had been on his way back from seeing a friend in Mumbai. Beth was out there writing articles and fleshing out the structure of a novel that she’d begun planning at home before she left.

            In the gardens at dusk, she had worn a block-print dress and a dupatta over her shoulders. The sky was strewn with stars, an array of birds darted from tree to tree. A green and gold veranda; a white swimming pool filled with water tinged faintly with green. A table, cocktails. He cracked a joke, crude, ironic; she laughed aloud.

            He liked the fact that she shared his sense of humour. She adjusted her dupatta, sipped her drink. He fired off another line; she laughed again and responded in kind. She put her dupatta back on her shoulder. He straightened his shirt front. They were both afflicted with a desire to rearrange each other’s clothes. He drank, put down his glass.

            “Another?”

            “Good idea.” They drank them faster than the last two then ordered another round.

            They were going to be late for dinner. She was sipping, laughing, adjusting, watching; he was aching, longing. A hall of chandeliers and mirrors. Two long tables where only two places remained free – one seat at the head of one table, one at the head of the other. So they were king and queen of their realms, she said to him.

            As they parted to sit down, he said to her, “Never let anyone tell you you are not beautiful.” She wrote down all these things, she told him months later. How that sentence had carried her through the overwhelming heat of the room; the intensity and quantity of the dishes; the music, slightly too fast in tempo for the occasion; the inconsequential chatting over coffee among the tourists at her table. They shared a room that night, and the next.

            Now he was just waiting around, constantly worrying whether he was doing the right thing by Ellie. He knew Beth was in India again. It had been inevitable that one day she would just book herself onto a flight and leave to go there. She could barely tear herself away from the place the first time they met. It was also 99 percent inevitable, he thought, that she wouldn’t return. Any day now he expected a knock at the door from a family member coming for Ellie; or the police, to tell him something had gone badly wrong for Beth.

            His reverie was interrupted by a small voice calling his name. To comfort Ellie and distract her from her dreams, he led her to the sash window in her room and showed her the night-time scene outside their house. He only then realised she didn’t know what the streetlights were in the blue and orange vale of the town beneath their windows. She seemed to think that they were part of the sky.

            There was some consolation in this, he thought. If the world was so stuffed full of enigma to a child, then explanations were unnecessary. Perhaps Ellie’s vivid memory of Beth could be allowed to painlessly merge into her life like a beautiful but diluted, spreading colour.

© Jo Manby 2015