Tag Archives: romance

The chain

Leave a reply

I tell you later that I knew you’d be there. Knew you’d be up on the balcony, looking kinda sad, getting wet, staring out at the passing cars and watching their headlights refract in the rain. The truth was a little different but it was still like me to double down on front and confidence when I was terrified. Even after all this time. Especially after all this time. The truth was that I’d travelled five thousand miles to see if I could find the only place I ever felt at home and I had no idea what I’d have done if you weren’t there. I have no idea what to do now that you are.

“Do you wanna cut RE?” I say.

“Always,” you reply. “I was saving your spot. Where have you been?”

“Well, that’s complicated,” I say. “You know us women. We will come and we will go.”

“Stevie?”

“Always,” I reply. “Now either you come here and hug me or you find me a drink or I’m on the next flight back to California.”

In the event you deliver on the hug and the drink. I think we both needed the drink after that embrace. Later we’d fill in the long blanks we had in each others stories but, in a way, we didn’t need to; there was something in that moment that unspooled the past twenty or so years and we were as we’d been, stood on the balcony, buried in each others arms. Only then we were saying goodbye and now I didn’t know what we were saying. When we parted I’d whispered ‘If I could I’d give you my world’, my parting gift from the Mac. I don’t know if you heard it. It wasn’t really like me, a rare moment of honesty and vulnerability making itself heard over the bluster and bullshit. Plus it was a Buckingham line and, as you knew, repeatedly and with great passion, I was more of a Nicks kind of woman. You shift your head slightly so that your mouth is close to my ear and you say: “I never broke the chain.” That was one they sang together. “Me neither” I say back. For a long, long time there’s just silence and two people holding on to each other as if they can squeeze out of existence the time they spent apart.

It’s when you buy me that drink that I tell you I knew you’d be there. I catch myself slipping back into my old habits, the bullish bravado, but I guess you can’t expect that to all fall away immediately. We’re in one of those pubs you used to insist existed near the school but never had the nerve to take me to. That part of you, the insecurity and the nervousness, has gone but there’s still something unsure about you; like you’re looking for something. Was it really me all this time? I see the way you look at me now and it’s like all those years just evaporate, you still see the wise-ass kid shooting her mouth off at the world, shooting first and asking questions later. I think you still see what I could have been and, just for a moment, I worry whether I’ll match up to the idea of me that you’ve been carrying around all this time. But then I realise you’ve seen the tattoos, maybe even clocked the track marks, and that look hasn’t changed. You still see me. Like you did back then.

We have a couple of drinks and talk. It’s like we never stopped. You ask me where I’m staying and I confess that I hadn’t thought that far ahead – it’s the first moment I let slip that maybe I wasn’t so sure you’d be where I expected you to be after all. I figure you probably haven’t changed so much and so I suggest that I stay at yours. I waited twenty five years for you to make a move on me and I’m damned if I’m going to wait another twenty five. And I can’t really afford a hotel.

Back at your house we dance. You put on Rumours – what else – and we shuffle and giggle our way across your lounge, towards your stairs. We kiss and you, in your terribly formal English way, invite me to bed. I almost feel like I should curtsy, take your hand and pull the full Stevie Nicks pose from the album cover, but I catch myself. I sense you might mistake the gesture, think I don’t take you seriously and I don’t want that. I recognise what I feel as love and joy and that’s all I want to convey. For a few moments I whirl on the spot to the music, silk scarf trailing up and around my head, dancing, spinning and turning. And then I stop, take you by the hand, and lead you up the stairs.

 

Dreams

Leave a reply

I didn’t know why I’d come. I mean, of course, I did but my reasons were too ridiculous to acknowledge honestly to myself. Had I seriously expected to pull open the door to the old school hall, stand silhouetted in the frame, and watch as you turned, met my eyes, and ran across to embrace me? A woman I didn’t know that used to be a girl that I did. We knew each other for such a short time, and it was so long ago, but I’ve never known anyone so completely before or since. So why come? The girl I knew wouldn’t be seen dead back here.

This was the hall where we’d sit for assembly and you’d roll your eyes to the ceiling, exhale just loudly enough to be heard, shuffle deliberately in your chair every time the Head started another of his speeches about values or the ethos of the school or anything you saw as pompous English bullshit. That was almost everything as I remember it. We used to do that experiment in Physics where we observed a magnetic field by scattering iron filings onto paper and then putting a long, rectangular magnet down amongst them. Most of the filings would disperse, be pushed away. A few would cling to its sides. You were like some sort of super magnet dropped onto the school, poles misaligned, repulsing everyone with waves of force. Everyone except me. I was the iron filing that attracted and stuck. Like the patterns on the paper in the experiment I saw the strange beauty in the disruption you caused, too.

I don’t really recognise anyone. There may have been a circuit where people had stayed in touch but I wasn’t part of it. I imagine people had found each other again on social media but I’d never kept any kind of online profile, hadn’t even done that lurker thing of checking people out anonymously. Okay, that’s not entirely true. A couple of times, maybe five years ago, I’d looked for you. I didn’t have much to go on. It seemed fair assumption that you’d still be called Anna – although you had always joked about changing your name to Stevie – but would you still be a Meredith? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. It was impossible to know. I couldn’t find anyone that I believed was you on Facebook and I could hardly search google for “Anna, the American Girl”. I did, anyway, and it just turned up a line of dolls. Dead eyed, plastic, and passive. Pretty much the least appropriate search result for you imaginable.

I have brief, polite conversations with a couple of people that pretend to recognise me, swear they remember me like it was yesterday. I don’t recognise the person they’re remembering anymore. A little part of him never properly left this place, a little part stayed bound up in the memories of someone he collided with nearly thirty years ago. I wonder what he’d have done if he knew then what I know now. The conversations dry up. My evident distraction is maybe taken for rudeness and I excuse myself claiming that it’s all just a little overwhelming. And it is. Just not in the way that they imagine. I scan the room again and mark your absence in it. Like I say, it was always ridiculous. For old time’s sake – all of it was for old time’s sake I guess – I leave the hall and find my way back to the balcony above the back of the school. The one we used to sit up on and listen to the drone of cars along the main road into town. Out of town. You always insisted it was the road out of town but then you were always on the move, always ready to leave.

There’s a stillness up on the balcony, cold air pinching my skin after the stuffy heat of the hall. I’m aware of my heart beat. What was that Stevie Nick’s lyric? Something about your heartbeat being the sound of your loneliness? You would have known and would have been outraged that I didn’t remember. All I remember is what I had, and what I lost.

It starts to rain. Just one of those dreary light drizzles but enough to shake me from my thoughts. I turn to head home and you’re standing there at the door out to the balcony, arms crossed, satin scarf hanging from a wrist, thirty years older wearing a lifetime’s story that I don’t know in the lines on your face. “Do you wanna cut RE?” you say.

“Always,” I reply. “I was saving your spot. Where have you been?”

“Well, that’s complicated,” you say. “You know us women. We will come and we will go.”

“Stevie?”

“Always,” you reply. “Now either you come here and hug me or you find me a drink or I’m on the next flight back to California.”

 

Guinness and chocolate

Leave a reply

He took a long draught on his pint and set the glass back between them. A creamy white moustache burnished his smile. She pointedly dabbed at the corners of her mouth with a tissue and, with seeming reluctance, he wiped his face clean on the back of his sleeve.

“Spoil sport,” he said. “And, by the way, you’ve still got a smudge of chocolate on your cheek.”

“What ? Really ? Why didn’t you tell me earlier ? I ate that ages ago.” She rummaged in her bag for a vanity mirror, gave up, and turned her phone camera on herself. “Where is it then ?”

He grinned. “Just kidding. You look kinda cute when you get cross though so…”. He flinched as a scrunched up tissue flew across the table. It bounced neatly off his nose and landed in his pint. “Hey ! Now the gloves are off. That’s Ireland’s finest 5% stout you’re spoiling now. They’ve not been making this since 1759 so you could pep up its flavour with an old bit of paper.”

“Why’d you do that ?” she said, leaning forwards. “Why’d you have to know everything. It’s all facts. It’s got this percentage of alcohol and it was made in this brewery and this many pints have been drunk since the dawn of time.”

“I like facts,” he replied.

“But they don’t tell me anything interesting about you,” she said. “I think you hide behind all those facts. Tell me how you feel about your beloved Guinness ? How does it make you feel ?”

“Drunk.”

“Very funny.” She smiled despite herself. “It’s too bitter for me.”

“Me or the Guinness, Dr. Freud ?”

“Oh wouldn’t you like to know ? Anyway, as you should know, I prefer a nice slab of chocolate. Just letting it melt in my mouth, closing my eyes and drifting away. All warm and…”

“Steady. Is this going to get all ‘When Harry Met Sally’ ?”

“I’ll have what she’s having ? Ha, don’t worry. Besides you’ve seen me fake it often enough by now my dear…” She gasped theatrically and clapped both hands hard down on the table. The Guinness sodden tissue was returned at speed, catching her on the ear but she was laughing too much to notice. It was his turn to smile despite himself.

“It’s too sweet for me.”

“Me or the choc…”

“Both,” he interrupted.

“Ah come on. Admit it, we’re good for each other. Bitter and sweet. Facts and dreams. Pragmatism and idealism. All that stuff. Ying and yang.” She held out her hands across the table, palms up.

“Rough and smooth,” he added sliding his hands into hers.

“Only if I’m smooth,” she said. “I am smooth, right ?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know ?” he smiled. “Listen, I don’t know why we work. There’s no facts to it. But I guess that’s okay. I like your…”

“…wild and romantic flights of fancy ?”

“Your ideas. Your fizz. Your spark,” he finished. “Okay, okay, and, if you must, your wild and romantic flights of fancy.”

“You see ? Guinness and chocolate. Perfect together,” she declared. “Keep telling me the facts though. I like them really. They give those flights of fancy somewhere to take off from.”

“You just come up with that ?”

“It was a bit much, wasn’t it ? Bit cheesy ?”

“A bit. Come on we’ll be late.” They finished up their drinks and hurried out into the cold.

 

……

This is story 25 in a series of 42 to raise money and awareness for the mental health charity Mind. My fundraising page is here and all donations, however small, are really welcome: http://www.justgiving.com/42shorts

This one came from an unlikely source. Challenged with baking something that had a personal story attached to it for a work event I (with quite a lot of help) settled on a Guinness and chocolate cake. And then I took the story part literally as I’m much better at writing stories than baking cakes. Hopefully they will like one of them.