Nine Notes Sally

He calls me Sally and I’ve never bothered to correct him. No point. My real name has nine notes in it and he wouldn’t even get past the second.

I just took a chip clean off his fork and laid the morning wide open with my best laugh, the one that carries right along the promenade and scares the toddlers. Forty-seven years and the man still sits with his back to the sky. The sheer nerve of him. Some enemies you keep alive out of respect.

It started with a chimney. Spring of ‘79. He came up the ladder with a bucket and a grin and tipped my nest into it like it was just gutter muck. I’ve built an entire life on that grin. Birds talk about letting go but letting go is for gulls who die at thirty. I wasn’t going to die at thirty. The books say forty-nine’s the record, some ringed nobody in a Welsh archive, I expect, whereas I consider forty-nine to be nowt but warming up.

I’ve been thorough, mind. The ice cream at South Shields, 1986. The toupee incident of 2008, which I don’t need to detail, he remembers. Oh aye, he remembers. His daughter's wedding, where I conducted myself with absolute restraint and only took his buttonhole. The christenings, the school fêtes, the walks to work, the lot. Riding the thermals while he went fat and grey and slow and wonderful to hunt.

His wife used to sit where the boy sits now. She'd flap her serviette at me and call me a winged-devil and shriek. Until one day he came down to the front in a black coat with nobody beside him. I sat on the railing and didn’t move. Some mornings you let a man have his chips.

That was ages ago, though. Now it’s only the boy, every few weeks, wiping his mouth, listening to his daft seagull story, pretending the maths works. There used to be so many more of us but now the picture’s just two old enemies and a young lad who thinks he’s humouring his grandad.

Anyway. Back to the chip. It wasn’t just clean off the fork. The wingtip across what's left of his hair made it a masterpiece, my finest dive in a decade, and I banked up into the sunlight expecting the curse, the fist shake, the pure joy of watching him seethe.

But he didn't flinch. He just set his fork down, looked up, past the boy, straight to the gap in the clouds where he knew I'd be. And he wasn't angry. That's the thing. After all these years I know his face, and it’d gone quiet in a way I didn’t like. Then under his breath I heard, right on the edge of the breeze:

"When will this end, Sally? When will this end?"