Imagined Slights

by James Lovegrove

  "We're closing now," the waitress informed them without a hint of apology. "You'd better be off." The two old men with the sports pages, being regulars here, knowing the form, had left a few minutes ago.

  "It's all right," said Rosemary. "We were just going anyway. We've got a bus to catch."

  George rose to help her to her feet. She did not refuse his hand. Her hip bones were a little stiff.

  "Come on," said the waitress, holding open the door. "I haven't got all bloody evening."

  "You're frightfully rude," George said, and the waitress puckered her mouth as though she had just swallowed a sour grape.

  "Out," she said.

  They went out into the night, and just as the waitress was about to close the door behind them George turned and said, "January, eleven years from now."

  The waitress scowled. "You what?"

  "Ovarian cancer."

  The waitress's expression brightened and she returned a contemptuous grin. "Wrong. Pisces, actually."

  George just smiled, and it was only after he and Rosemary had walked well out of earshot that she asked him what all that had been about.

  "She won't even think about it until the time comes, and then she'll remember," he said, looking satisfied.

  "Oh," said Rosemary, understanding. "Wasn't that a bit mean? I must say I don't recall you ever being cruel like that. Not even to be kind."

  "I can't help having changed, love. Just the waiting itself wore me down. The boredom was enough to turn the sweetest nature bitter. From time to time, I screamed for release."

  "And isn't there release?"

  "Only for those allowed to take it."

  "And weren't you?"

  George halted to look at her. "Don't you see?"

  She shook her head.

  "I made a promise." He said it as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "I made a promise to you. And you held me to it by waiting."

  "Oh my God." Her hand flew to her whiskery mouth.

  "By waiting, all day, every day," he said with a confirming nod.

  "Oh my good God, I never thought... It never occurred... I never realised..."

  "Of course you didn't, old girl."

  "Fifty-two years," she said with a sigh, a wisp of breath in the wind. "If I'd known..."

  "I don't hold it against you. If I hold it against anyone, it's whoever made up the rules of the game and then refused to explain them to us."

  "How can I say I'm sorry?"

  "Don't."

  "All that time..."

  "It wasn't so bad," he said, in the same airy dismissive tone that she had said, It's been quite a wait, just after he stepped off the bus. "For either of us. Was it?"

  "But at least I had a life."

  "Did you?" he asked matter-of-factly. "Did you really? How different was your existence from mine? Not much. You weren't living, you were just going through the motions, that's all. At least I didn't have to pretend that."

  "I never realised," she said again.

  "That's the tragedy of it," he said. "Neither of us did."

  His letters from camp were filled with amusing little episodes that happened during training, jokes at the expense of the RSM, thumbnail sketches of his comrades and cheerfully blithe descriptions of the privations and hardships of military life - cleaning the latrines on a frosty morning, the greasy food doled out in the mess, being shouted at from dawn till dusk, and the sheer daily fatigue that, come bedtime, made a camp bed seem as soft and welcoming as a king-sized feather divan. He always signed off on an optimistic note. "Everyone keeps telling us to keep our chins up," one letter ended, "but I know you'll be doing that anyway, old girl, so all I can say is keep yours higher than the rest of them. I remain, yours affectionately, G."

  She tried, for his sake, and her mother and Maureen rallied round. Her mother kept her busy around the house. She had taken on piecework, and enlisted Rosemary to spend a couple of hours with her each evening mending trousers and reattaching buttons, their needles darting while her father read the paper by the sighing grate. Maureen, meanwhile, became a surrogate George, dragging Rosemary out to the pictures and tea-dances. Her father, for his part, was not unaware of the situation and did his best to keep his daughter entertained at mealtimes with solo Will Hay routines, although these, being closely associated in her mind with George, caused her as much pain as they did pleasure. And she wrote to George almost daily, matching him anecdote for anecdote, keeping him informed about funny and finicky customers, giving small critiques of films she had seen because there were no cinemas near the camp, and trying to show him that she was getting on with her life as normal, as he wanted, while still making it clear that things were not the same. The closest she came to saying she missed him was mentioning their Sunday day trips, which was the one role of George's that Maureen could not and would not fill. "When you come back," she wrote, "we shall each buy a bicycle or perhaps even a tandem (!) and pedal our way further and further out of town. We shall form our very own cycling club and we shall go when we like and where we like."

  In George's last letter from camp the levity was still there, but between the lines there was agony and, as the letter progressed, the agony seeped out.

  Basic training is complete (he wrote) and I am now a full-fledged Private in the King's army, or so I am told, although I don't feel any different, I just feel like a bank teller in a uniform with big boots and a gun. Nothing else here has changed, either. The food is still awful and the weather is still rotten and the Sergeant Major is still both. The wind from the sea smells foul, like bad fish. I long for the still sweet air of home. (Ho ho!)

  But here's the bad news, old girl. (But as you turned nineteen last week, perhaps I ought to be calling you "young woman" instead!) We've been given our marching orders. It's time to up sticks and go. Britannia calls, England expects and all that. We'll be shipping out in four days' time. What do you know? Action! So soon! As for where we're going, I'm not at liberty to say, malheureusement, but rest assured that I will be keeping an eye out for myself. I won't forget what you said about not dying. Why would I be so stupid as to get myself killed when there's so much to live for?

  In the past I haven't promised you anything, Rosemary. This is not because I had no promises to make but because I did not want to make a promise I couldn't keep. I realise now that this was a mistake, now when it is almost - but still not! - too late to rectify the error. I realise that my notion of honesty was misguided. I believed that if I said anything to you that contained the smallest hint of a lie, it would somehow hurt you, damage you in some way, that you were a tender fragile creature to whom it was better to say nothing than say something untrue. But little lies are necessary, useful things, as necessary and useful as - if you will pardon a slightly crude analogy - manure is to a rose.

  It doesn't matter if a promise is made that cannot be kept as long as it is made with every intention of being kept. I particularly regret not promising that I would come home safe and well, and I make that promise now, here, on paper, in black ink. Lacking the witness of your own eyes, I will call on God instead.

  I promise that I will come home. I promise that I will come home to you, Rosemary. Come what may, I will be back. One day, when the fighting's done, I will take the bus from the station and you will meet me at the shelter where you gave me my first glimpse of the truth about necessary lies, and there I will make another promise to you, the promise I should have made on that hillside on that cold Sunday afternoon, that we will be together. Always.

  I don't know when you will get another letter from me, love. I will write, but I can't vouch for the postal system. It's bad enough here. Imagine what it's going to be like abroad!

  My fondest regards to your parents and to Maureen - and to you, old girl, the promise.

  Yours affectionately, G.

  The next letter she received, three months later, was not from George but from his mother. It began:

  "Dear Rosemary Thomas,


  "As a precaution, my son gave me your address before he left, and although we have not met, I am not ignorant of the regard in which he held you, and so I feel that it is only right and fair that you, after his close relatives, should be the first to be informed..."

  They were near the bus shelter now. From a distance, with its tiled roof and sturdy walls, it looked like a tiny house, a single tiny house at the side of an uncommonly wide road.

  The wind pounded at their backs, urging them on, but George was in no hurry and Rosemary was certainly in no hurry. These were her last few steps on this earth. She savoured them. She savoured the taste of the city air in her mouth, the sight of the city's grey-sea skyline, the sound of the wind batting at her ears, the slap of her coat-tails around her legs, the pressure of George's hand on her arm, the sensation of her body still working, her muscles still propelling her, her bones still obliging, her heart still thumping, the blood still rolling through her veins and the breath still heaving in and out of her lungs. She cherished the little life left to her, her last possession of any value, even as she prepared herself to surrender it up.

  At the entrance they stopped.

  "What do we do?" she asked.

  "We just sit."

  "Will it be long?"

  "Not long."

  The tramp reek inside wasn't bad, once she had resigned herself to it. George seemed not to notice. Used, discarded containers of one kind or another littered the floor: crisp packets, condoms, fish-and-chip newspaper. Crudely scrawled messages of love and hate on the walls, with their numerals and misspellings, were so many incomprehensible hieroglyphs.

  George heard the bus first, when the rumble of its engine was still beyond the threshold of normal human hearing. He put his cool dry hand on Rosemary's.

  "Here it comes," he said. "Don't be scared."

  "I'm not scared."

  "Good girl."

  At that moment she felt a slight discomfort, a little like a twinge of trapped wind in her innards, but it quickly passed, and then she could hear it too: the distant grind of cogs meshing, teeth gnashing, gears and gear-shafts, wheels turning, coming closer, combustion, a thousand tiny fiery detonations per second, approaching, the low steady thrum of rubber tread on tarmac, the wheeze of exhaust, getting nearer now and nearer and nearer still, the churning engine, the thunderous engine, growing in size and might until the noise drowned all others and was the only noise in the whole world, an immense, engulfing roar of motion and travel and revolution and repetition, and at last the bus appeared in the entrance to the shelter, sliding across the doorway and filling the aperture with dusty green and rectangles of glass, and came to a halt with a hiss of hydraulics and a sigh of pneumatics.

  "Now," said George kindly. "Are you ready?"

  "Of course."

  They stood up and stepped out.

  Clouds of fumes purled around the bus and great shudders passed through it, the pulsing vibrations of the idling motor rattling its windows.

  The doors concertinaed open. Rosemary peered up at the dark driver within. He was smiling whitely, brightly.

  "All aboard," he said.

  She turned to George. "There's no pain," she said. This was almost a revelation. "There's no pain at all."

  Acknowledgments

  "The Landlady's Dog" first appeared in Narrow Houses (Little, Brown, 1992); "Wings" in Heaven Sent (Creed, 1995); "Satisfaction Guaranteed" in FEAR (October 1990); "Britworld[tm]" in Interzone (December 1992); "The House of Lazarus" in Destination Unknown (Borealis, 1997); "The Driftling" in Interzone (July 1997); "Dead Letters" in Scaremongers (Tanjen, 1997); "A Taste of Heaven" in Dante's Disciples (Borealis, 1995); "The Gift" in Interzone (February 1996, under the title "Giving and Taking"); "Thanatophile Seeks Similar" in The Third Alternative #16 (1998); and "Rosemary for Remembrance" in Blue Motel: Narrow Houses 3 (Little, Brown, 1994). A big thank you to all the editors of the above - Andy Cox, Peter Crowther, John Gilbert, Andrew Haigh, Ed Kramer, David Pringle - for commissioning the stories and/or accepting them for publication.

  "Nana" and "The Unmentionable" appear for the first time in this collection.