Postcard from Liverpool
David Hayden
I am not in Liverpool. I sit on a rotten bench by the river Wensum in Norwich, at the edge of early old age. The last of the summer sun is pouring unseasonably into autumn, and it is warm in the shade of the twenty trees planted in the memory of the painter Leslie Davenport. Long ribbons of weed wave in the turbid green and black pigment flow. On the far bank was, and is, the pit where the flower of Lollardy were burned alive for addressing their imagined god directly, and other offences.
A dozen or so loose pages of a novel set in Liverpool are next to me, weighted by my phone so as not to be scattered by the irregular breeze. I have been scratching in interpolations, and marking out corrections, as I understand them, and have looked away to find myself out of time and place. I am not where and when I am, but stood, an ancient teenager, cold-bitten, hands in the holey pockets of my thin overcoat, following in sight the wide green-grey motion of the Mersey along its course and out through the narrows to the Irish Sea. This version of me briefly realises a semi-real, golden memory of my, of his, two-year old self liberating along Dollymount strand in Dublin. (I would leave but never get away.)
At the youth’s back, which is mine, are the Three Graces of the waterfront: the Liver Building, the Cunard Building, the Docks and Harbour Board building. They stand for trade, labour and assurance, departures and arrivals of classes high and low, of the centuries past, and present in this moment, of persons as chattel, of sugar and tobacco and cotton, moved for money, of journeys of pleasure and loss and escape.
Settled on high on the domes of the chief grace are two pale green copper giants, the Liver Birds, wings outstretched, never to take flight, sightless, with a peerless view of the river, the estuary, the Wirral peninsula, the sea, the island of Ireland, the wild Atlantic and the Americas beyond. Many or all who live here, however briefly, come to see the world from their vantage, with the desire to rise and fly, to leave and return.
I am insubstantial wherever I am, migrant, unbelonging, longing to be fully present in some place, to be present in the present, while alive in the memory of the presences of my past. The rivers of my life course through me—Liffey, Mersey, Thames and Chicago—wordlessly bearing the forgotten and the remembered.
I rest on a narrow, shadowed seat before the stately Wensum and try to recall the present.
David Hayden's writing has appeared in gorse, The Yellow Nib, The Moth, The Stinging Fly, Spolia and The Warwick Review, and poetry in PN Review. He was shortlisted for the 25th RTÉ Francis MacManus Short Story prize. Born in Dublin, he has lived in the US and Australia and is now based in Norwich, UK.
