Small peace sign on a finger

I went to the reunion after all, though I stood by the urn for an hour pretending I was waiting for someone. Nobody recognised me until Malcolm Thwaite said my name like a question, and then he wanted to talk about the woodwork room, of all things. He said they're pulling the old benches out of Ashby Road School for a skip, and he'd pinched one before the lorry came. He wanted me to see it. You remember the one by the window, with the circle scratched in the top corner, the one Terry Eccles carved in the spring of sixty-nine after reading about marches in the Sunday papers?

Malcolm had sanded it down to pale oak, but the lines were still there, a circle with three spokes pointing down like a fork. He said Terry had gone to Canada and nobody had heard from him since. I told him I thought Terry had been on the Mersey with a banner, and he said I was making it up. We argued like we were fourteen. It felt good.

On the train home I kept turning the thing over in my head. Somebody had sat at that bench for hours, cutting something small and certain while the rest of the world was loud. I think about that more than I think about the reunion.

I'm sending you a photo of the bench. Malcolm said I could have a splinter of it for the mantel. Come and see it before the cold weather.

Love, Margaret