Rosie Thomas - Strangers

The boat was rocking gently on the dark water, and in that movement Steve’s hand had become Matthew’s, holding hers, pulling her back. His voice was different but she knew his face, and the way he moved, and she could remember every hour that they had spent together as if she was reliving them.

For an instant she was suffused with happiness. It isn’t too late , she thought. Why was I so sure that it was?

She smiled, and then felt the stinging pain at the corner of her mouth where the blood had dried.

Not Matthew’s hand. This man was Steve, a stranger, and now more important to her than anyone. She felt another pain, not physical now but as quick and sharp as a razor slash. It was the pain of longing and regret.

‘I wish I could reach you,’ she said. ‘I wish we could hold on to each other.’

Tears began to run out of the corners of her eyes and she felt them running backwards into her knotted hair.

‘We are holding each other,’ Steve said. ‘Here.’

The pressure of his hand came again, but Annie ached to turn and find the warmth of him, pressing her face against his human shelter. She was afraid that the weeping would take possession of her. It pulled at her face with its fingers, distorting her mouth into a gaping square and the blood began to run again from the corner of it.

‘It’s too late,’ she cried out, ‘too late for everything.’

This was the end, here in their tomb of wreckage. The tidy plait of her life stretched behind her, the stridently glittering threads of the past softened by time into muted harmonies of colour. Martin and she had woven it together. She thought of her husband and of Thomas and Benjamin left to look at the brutally severed plait, the raw ends uselessly fraying. Sobs pulled at her shoulders, and her hair tore at her scalp.

‘Don’t cry,’ Steve said. ‘Please, Annie, darling, don’t cry. It isn’t too late.’ If they only could hold each other, he thought, they could draw the shared warmth around them like armour. He tried to move again, and knew that he couldn’t pull his crushed leg with him.

‘My mother’s ill,’ Annie said abruptly. ‘She’s got cancer, they’ve just told her. It must be just the same.’

Steve could follow her thoughts, unconfined, flickering to and fro. The extra dimension of understanding was eerie but he took it gratefully. ‘No,’ he contradicted her. ‘Not the same sense of loss. No waste. Your mother has seen you grow up, marry. Seen her grandchildren. Illness isn’t the same as … violence.’

He wouldn’t say violent death , but he sensed Annie’s telepathic hearing as clear as his own.

‘Perhaps … perhaps everyone’s death is violent, when it comes.’

They were silent then, but they were unified by fear and they could hear one another’s thoughts, whispered in childlike voices quite unlike their own.

‘If they come for us in time,’ Annie said, ‘and there is any life left for us that isn’t just lying here, I won’t let any more of the days go. I’ll count each one. I’ll make it live. I’ve shrugged so many days off without a single memory. Dull days. Resigned days. Just one of them would be so precious now. Do you understand, Steve?’

‘Oh yes,’ he answered. ‘I understand. Annie, when we’re free we can do whatever we like.’

Steve tried to think about how it would be, and nothing would come except confused images of Vicky, and of unimportant restaurants where he had sat over lunches, and of preview theatres where he waited in the dark for clients to watch their fifteen-or thirty-second loop of commercial over and over again. ‘Run it through a couple more times, David, will you?’ His own voice. ‘Did you learn all that at LMH?’ The self he had been. Work and play, alternating, undifferentiated, spooling backwards. And now the tape snapped, and the film he had only been half-watching might never start up again.

Steve opened his eyes on the real darkness. He seemed to have been groping backwards for hours, failing to find an image that he could hold on to amongst so many that flickered and vanished.

‘Annie?’ he called out, seized with sudden panic. ‘Are you still there?’

‘Yes.’

She sounded drowsy, too far away from him.

‘ Annie? ’

He could hear the effort, but she responded at last. ‘Yes. I’m still here.’

‘Talk to me again. About your mother. Anything, just go on talking.’

‘I …’ she sighed, a faint expiry of breath and he knew that he was only imagining the brush of it on his cheek. ‘I can’t talk any more. You talk, Steve. I like to hear your voice.’

When was the last time? That was what he wanted to catch hold of before it was too late, the last time he had felt the rawness of wanting something very much. The last time he had wanted something in the way that he wanted to live now, because he wouldn’t be defeated by a maniac’s bomb. Was that the key to it? Because he wouldn’t be defeated …

Steve felt his head thickening, the thoughts and memories beginning to short-circuit. He forced his eyes open wide, willing himself to hold on to consciousness, and he began to talk.

‘A long time ago. So long I’d forgotten how important it was. I wanted to get away, that was it. My Nan’s flat, Bow High Street, three floors up. From the moment I went to live there, I wanted to get away.’

It had taken long enough, but he’d made it in the end. When the day came he went into the little room that led off Nan’s kitchen and stuffed jerseys and shirts into his blue duffel bag. Nan was sitting in the kitchen watching the television. He could see her bulk past the half-open door, and the tablecloth half-folded back over the Formica-topped table, and the brown teapot and milk bottle, and her cup and saucer waiting to be refilled with thick brown tea.

‘Off again, are you?’ she shouted over the din of the television.

There had been trial getaways before this. Plenty of Saturday-night stopovers in overcrowded flats when those who were left behind after the part petered out had just fallen asleep wherever they fell down. There had even been a week, not long ago, when he had stayed with a girl up near Victoria Park. That had been too good to last, of course. She’d seen through his assumed adult suavity all too quickly.

‘Sixteen? Is that how bloody old you are? Sixteen? Go on, get back to your mother before they come and lock me up for corrupting infants.’

Nan had welcomed him back, and the sharpness of her tongue didn’t disguise her relief. ‘Where the hell d’you think you’ve been? Not a word from you for a week. Didn’t you know I’d be worried stiff? You’ll end up like your Dad, Stevie, after all I’ve done.’

He put his arms around her. She was fat, but she was also frail and she could only move stiffly across the poky kitchen.

‘I will not end up like my Dad. You know that.’

Nan had shifted her dental plate with the tip of her tongue and said acidly, ‘Perhaps not. But there’s plenty of other ways of going to the bad. I daresay you’ll manage to find one that suits you.’

There had been calm after that for several months.

Now, as he closed the empty drawers in his bedroom one by one, he tried calling out, ‘Nan? Nan, I’m going to live up West …’

She couldn’t hear him, of course. The television obliterated everything. So he had finished his methodical packing, even taking down his childhood posters of West Ham United and Buddy Holly and folding them up. Then he went into the kitchen and put his assortment of bags down on the cracked lino floor. He crossed to the vast television set and turned the volume knob, and silence descended.

‘Eh? I was watching that, Stevie. Don’t play about, there’s a good boy.’