by Hugh Breakey
She lifted her chin, but her lips were trembling, her eyes red where just moments earlier they had been shining in triumph. She shouldn’t have looked beautiful. ‘I think maybe the shoes aren’t helping.’ Her voice quavered, but she forced it onward. ‘There’s too much grip, in all the wrong places. I know it would seem weird to just try it in socks, but it—’
‘No.’
‘Okay.’ Her voice broke on the second syllable. She sank into her chair. ‘I’m sorry.’ Her eyes were on the table, on our glasses of juice. Anywhere but me. There was no anger in her anymore. No strategy. She looked beaten.
‘I didn’t mean for this to be awkward for you.’ Her hands were balled into fists on the table. They held her full attention. ‘You remembered before. We got you back into the studio not long after the first time. You’d forgotten my name, forgotten all of us, but there was a world you still knew. In your arms and in your eyes, you knew the dance.’ Her tone stayed even, but her fists squeezed hard as she spoke. ‘It must have been too long away. Stupid idea.’
This had been her master plan all along. Now she’d played her trump and lost, it was as if she had lost everything. Looking at her, watching her try and fail to put a brave face on it, I didn’t feel sorry. I didn’t feel guilty.
I felt free, I realised—free to choose.
Water began to well in her eyes, but she just kept staring at her clenched fists. Sad because I wasn’t him, the man I’d once been? Or because she felt she was losing me, the man sitting in front of her.
I knew which I wanted it to be.
‘No,’ I said slowly. ‘We were right to try.’ I reached across the table; wrapped my hand gently around her fist. Julie looked at it blankly.
Moments passed, and we stayed like that. Her hard white knuckles under my light caress, the tips of my fingers grazing the underside of her wrist. She frowned. She stared at my hand a moment longer, her jaw tightening. Anger?
‘If you’re trying to be comforting,’ she said, ‘you’re not doing it right.’
‘I’m not trying to be comforting.’
Her breath hitched, and her lips pressed together hard. But hope flickered in the red-rimmed eyes that searched my face. ‘Oh.’ She swallowed, and then nodded.
My other hand closed around her still-clenched fist. Her eyes fixed on mine. I felt her fingers relax, then uncurl. Slowly, deliberately, her hand rolled over, palm upward and open. My hand slipped into hers.
‘We could walk along the river on the way back to my place,’ I said.
The breath released from her body, shuddering. An almost imperceptible nod answered me.
Julie reached for her handbag with her free hand and hooked it over her shoulder. We stood in unison, hands and eyes locked together. The grip of her hand was soft, almost yielding—like she was frightened to grasp too hard at something that might slip through her fingers—but every move kept open our line of physical touch and sight.
Wordless, we left the table. Everything else floated into the periphery. The cacophony of voice and music. The colours of dress and light. The shifting bodies and the solid walls that must have marked our exit. She didn’t say anything at first. I had the sense she didn’t want to break whatever spell was at work on me. Whatever was changing me.
We’d almost made it back to the bright lights of West End when Julie stopped short. She still had her hand in mine: now she gripped hard and pulled me to a stop.
‘So…’ she said. ‘Um, so this is nice.’ She looked down at our interlocked hands, then up at me. ‘But Robbie, I have to know. If you’ve made a decision, you have to say the words. Because I’m dying here.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Yes, you’ve made a decision? Or yes to me?’
‘Yes to everything.’ Then my hands were on her hips, and hers were in my hair and we were kissing and it felt nothing like the other times. There wasn’t a hint of hesitation or clumsiness: this was what it felt like to move with complete confidence.
After a while, we got to the main street. I stopped at the streetlights, unsure of my bearings. Tucked in the loop of the river, every direction led to water except the direct route back to the apartment.
‘This way,’ she said, her voice quiet. We drifted into the bright lights and hubbub where the restaurants and bars had spilled out onto the footpath in the warm evening air. Bodies brushed against us as we wove through, the noise and movement no more than a backdrop.
Past the last of the hotels the noise and people evaporated, leaving us to ourselves. The river appeared before us, inky black ripples reflecting the city lights and a cool breeze gusting over the water.
Somewhere along the way, we’d both started smiling too. Perhaps I’d been smiling ever since I reached my hand across the table to her clenched fist. But it was impossible not to notice it now. It seemed an effort just to keep my feet planted on the ground, as if the lightness deep in my chest had infected gravity itself.
The rest of the world carried on. On the bridge above our secluded path, cars roared back and forth. The red-on-red flash of a fire engine above us seemed distant. It shone on Julie’s face, flashing its crimson across her pale skin. The second time this week I’d seen that sight.
‘What?’ she asked, marking my gaze.
‘Nothing.’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘I am not responsible for every fire alarm in this city.’
‘I didn’t say anything,’ I objected. ‘It’s just you were out of sight for almost five minutes at the bathroom back there. Who knows what you got up to?’
‘Oh. My. God.’ She turned to face me. ‘Was that a joke? An actual attempt at a joke? I’d given up all hope a sense of humour still survived in there.’
‘Huh. I can see the funny side of felonies.’
‘Well,’ she sniffed, stepping backward, mirroring my own steps forward. Now that I knew about the dancing there seemed to be rhythm in her every movement. ‘If you can think of a completely legal way to inject yourself into someone else’s life, feel free to let me know.’ Her crooked smile widened into open mischief. ‘I’ll use it next time.’
‘Next time?’ I should have been outraged, but it was impossible. ‘If it comes to that I’ll get your mugshot tattooed on my chest with the words “Here be dragons”. Just to ramp up the difficulty level for your next attempted infiltration.’
‘Here be dragons?’ Her free hand shaped into a fist and mock-punched my shoulder. ‘You jerk.’ She gripped my shirt at the shoulder. ‘That’s it. When you forget on Sunday, I’m not going to tell you you’re a dancer. I’ll say you’re a performance artist working in the medium of, um, milk and toast. See how funny you are then!’
Our linked hands reset themselves, palms pressed, fingers interlaced. ‘Well,’ I grinned. ‘I’d like to thank you for a truly forgettable evening—’
Julie pressed a finger hard up against my lips, cutting off my words. ‘You know,’ she said, lifting herself up onto her toes, pushing herself forward. ‘I’m thinking I liked you better before we found where your sense of humour was buried.’ Her finger slipped off my lips just in time to make space for her mouth.
Eventually we set off again, and the world flowed by us, slowing to a stall each time we circled into each other, and then rolling forward again when we turned homeward. At last the river retreated behind us, and our steps traced out paths I’d once taken long ago.
This did seem a particularly familiar stretch of walkway, come to think of it. ‘Were you looking in on me three or four months ago?’
‘Of course. I moved up well before that.’
‘Did you notice I stopped going out so much about then?’
‘Yeah.’ She nodded. ‘Absolutely I did.’
‘Random fact. It’s because of what happened right here. Just a stupid thing, but there was this jogger—’
‘You did see me!’ she exploded.
‘What?’
‘That was me!’ She turned to confront me. ‘I told you I’d tried every
thing.’ Her hands flew up in the air. ‘I thought I’d staged my fall wrong and you just hadn’t seen me.’
‘You were the jogger?’
‘I took all my jewellery out, added the sunglasses and the running gear.’
I thought back, trying to paste Julie’s face into my memory of the jogger. ‘Your hair was different.’
‘Right,’ she said. ‘That was the shoulder-length phase: dyed brown and pulled back in a ponytail. Each new disguise, I had to take a little more off the top.’ She grinned. ‘Lucky things are looking more promising this time. There’s only one place left to go.’ She pressed in closer to me. ‘What’s your feeling on the military look? Shaved head, uniform. Work for you?’
‘Oh.’ We had been in different worlds, she shedding her skin, again and again, while I built cathedrals in the sky, one tile at a time.
‘Oh?’ She mimicked my surprise, and punched me in the arm. ‘You just left me lying there.’
‘I’m sorry, at the time I thought—’ My mind took a moment to catch up with the rush of guilt, then sanity took hold. ‘Hold on. Am I apologising for not falling for your ruse?’
‘You damn well should apologise.’ She pointed to one finger. ‘A: I spent weeks working on that ruse. And B:’ she moved to a second finger. ‘Jerk.’
This really was the limit. The months I’d spent feeling guilty, thinking I’d been responsible for the whole thing. ‘Is there nothing you didn’t try?’
‘Well…’ She linked her arms around my neck. ‘There was a plan involving chloroform and handcuffs, but it didn’t come to that.’
We kissed again. The sharp edge of her teeth brushed against my tongue. She drew back. Not far, but just enough to speak. ‘Sorry. I’m smiling too hard. It’s a problem.’ Her hand cupped behind my head. ‘It’s been so long.’
‘Was it all so perfect?’ Surely it wasn’t always like this. Ordinary life would be impossible. ‘That you’d fight for it so hard?’
‘Not perfect at all.’ Julie wrinkled her nose. She kept her arms linked around my neck. My hands circled her waist. Our feet shuffled together, spinning in slow motion in our corner of the park. ‘We both had our careers. You in dance, me in theatre. One of us drank too much. That took some dealing with.’ She smiled ruefully. ‘Perfect? God, there were times when we’d drive each other crazy.’
‘Why then? Why pursue this so hard, for all this time?’
She ran her hand through my hair, tousling it. ‘Well, there were times when we’d drive each other crazy.’
‘I’m serious.’
‘I’m serious.’
‘Ohhh…wait…’ An awful thought surged into mind, like a thick hand crushing in on the butterflies inside. ‘I’ve been so wrapped in my own little bubble I didn’t think about what would be best for you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘However good it once was, that’s not what it could be now. That’s not our future.’ I held my hands firm on her hips, drawing our circling to a halt. ‘We’re not going back to those times when we first met. We’re going back to me forgetting everything in three days’ time. And then again every six months. Maybe for years.’
I ran my hand through her hair, shaking my head at how callous I’d been. How thoughtless. ‘You saw me drowning and thought you could rescue me, but all I can do is claw you down with me.’
Julie shrugged. ‘Well, you know my policy on that. One vice at a time.’
‘No,’ I said, annoyed. ‘You’ve been so busy plotting how to get here, did you ever stop to think about whether this would make a good life for you?’
She smiled fondly. ‘You always think too much. And always about all the right things.’ But my eyes burrowed into hers, forcing an answer. She sighed. ‘All right, no, I didn’t, to be honest. The big-picture thinking was always more your suit. That’s how we worked.’ Her hand slapped gently against my cheek a couple of times. ‘That’s why I got one of you. You’re the one choice I got right in my twenty-eight years. The one thing I really had sorted.’
‘Sorted?’
‘We fit together. Somehow our warped grooves and jagged edges lined up in all the right ways. It’s like if you have one person staggering and contorted, it looks mad. But if you have two together, different maybe, but still in tune, in beat…’ She thumped the heel of her palm against my chest. ‘It becomes something else entirely.’
‘Dance.’
She nodded. ‘And that’s worth holding on to. It’s worth fighting for.’
‘Maybe once. But now?’ I squared my shoulders. ‘You’d be condemned to a future building something over and over that just keeps falling down. That has to be my life. It doesn’t have to be yours.’
Julie shrugged, but with gravity rather than her earlier nonchalance. ‘That’s what life is anyway. We’d have an argument. I’d stomp off to bed and we’d sleep on opposite edges. The next morning we’d wake up and you’d ask if I wanted a coffee and I’d grunt at you and you’d make us a coffee, and I’d manage a thanks. Then we’d start picking up the pieces. If I wasn’t up for perpetual rebuilding I’d never have got married in the first place. Actually, I’d never have done anything worthwhile. I don’t know how many times I made it to a week sober before having to reset the clock. Once I made it almost a year before falling off the wagon. And starting all over again at day zero. Everything falls. Everything is rebuilding.’
‘This is different. You know it is.’
‘Whatever this is, I signed up for it. For better or worse. I could never just walk away from you.’
‘But that’s just it,’ I seized on her words. ‘We’re already “away”. So you wouldn’t be walking away. You’d just be…’ I searched for the words that might convince her. ‘Not walking back.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘I don’t feel very away.’
She had a point there. Her lips were inches from mine. Our eyes could hardly pull away from the other’s for more than a moment. Close? We were entangled.
I pushed the unhelpful thought aside. ‘I’ve created a life here on my own. I’m okay.’
‘You’re facing all of this every day, alone,’ she scoffed, ‘without anyone to rely on and get you through it? Do you really believe you’re okay here on your own?’
I looked away, unable to meet her eyes. I wasn’t okay. Not anymore. Not after having been here with her, like this. No one would be okay after giving this up. But in three days’ time, when the forgetting came, this feeling would be gone, and all memory of it. Only the journal would remain, a pale copy of something once complete. ‘I’ll be okay,’ I not-quite-lied. ‘It would have been different if we’d been together all along. But it’s not like that. You have an opportunity to be free of this. To live your own life.’ I took her hands. ‘You wouldn’t be leaving me. The leaving already happened, and it wasn’t anyone’s fault.’
‘Robbie—’
‘You said yesterday that you’ve suffered more from this than I have, and now I can see that’s true. This is worse for you than for me. And for me, escape is impossible. But not for you.’
‘I suffered because we were apart, not because we were together. Anyway, it’s not like it will be forever. Your condition might just…stop tomorrow.’
‘Said Doctor Varma. I thought you didn’t like her.’
‘I didn’t like her because she was right about everything. About your condition. About me.’
I put my hands on her shoulders and spoke with something intended to sound a lot like honesty. ‘I’ll. Be. Okay.’
She shook her head. ‘Look at me.’ Her emerald eyes blazed into me from point-blank range. ‘How do I make you feel?’ Soft hands slid up to where my shoulders met my neck, thin fingers pressing into the muscle with sudden strength. Her face filled my vision. ‘Don’t think. Just answer. How do you feel right now?’
‘Alive.’ The answer tumbled out of its own accord.
The grip around my neck released. A small nod of satisfaction. ‘There you are, then.�
�
I frowned, angry at my own admission. A betrayal, even if it was the truth. It would have been better to lie.
‘Okay, look.’ Her hands went from my shoulders to my hands, and she stepped back. ‘Imagine we’d had long enough for you to fall for me. Really fall. Imagine you love me.’
‘Okay.’ I kept my voice level. ‘I’m imagining.’
‘Now I tell you I’m sick and that it’s bad.’ Her eyes searched my face. ‘Does that change your mind? Does it change what you want or how you feel? Does it change what you will do for me?’
‘No.’
‘No.’ She nodded.
‘But that doesn’t change what I should do,’ I objected. ‘I can’t give you happiness or the life you deserve. I don’t have that power. But I have the power to let you go, and to stop this sickness dragging both of us down.’ My hands clasped hers in front of me. ‘What sort of person would I be, condemning you to this life?’
She stepped back from me and drew herself up to her full height. ‘What was it you said this afternoon? An informed decision, with knowledge of all the good and all the bad. You deserve that choice. But I do too.’ Her fingers curled around the scruff of my shirt. ‘I chose this then,’ she whispered, her lips almost touching mine. ‘And I choose it now.’ Her mouth pressed hard against mine.
Beneath her kiss, I was defeated. However much I wanted to protect her from this, I could not deny her the same choice I’d demanded for myself.
‘And you know what?’ She broke off the kiss. ‘We have this. Tonight.’ She pulled away from me a little. ‘You and I will grow old, but we will never get old. For as long as the forgetting keeps coming back, this will never get old. Every time you forget, I’ll make you fall in love with me all over again. I’ll get a lifetime of you falling for me.’
‘You are impossible.’ I smiled in the face of her irrepressible optimism. ‘You would take lemons and make—’
‘Whiskey sours.’ Julie’s cheer cut through mine. ‘But I’m trying to break that habit, remember?’
I lifted her, my forearm scooping underneath her until she was almost seated on it. She seemed weightless, above me, her face bending down to meet mine.
