Snapshot Part I

Quickly folding the crumpled up piece of newspaper, I started, and turned at the sound of her voice.

“Hello stranger,” she said and laughed, and those 10 years vanished in a second.

“Helen,” I answered uncertainly. “It’s been...it’s been a long time.”

“Ten years, you dope,” she said and hugged me. I smelled her hair and it was the same as then. Parched fields after a storm; raindrops in mid flight.

We held each other for a few short, endless moments and blotted the rest of the world out of existence. Then she stood back and looked at me quizzically, half-smiling. She had barely changed. Even though the sun was wrapped in a thick blanket of cloud her hair still seemed on fire. I imagined that if I closed my eyes I would still see its after-image branded onto my retina. I remembered this very place some 15 years before, meeting her for the second time after months of letters. For a time our conversation had been stilted and trivial. We’d found it far easier to write our thoughts on paper, but when it came to uttering them we were hesitant at first, before slipping into the easy conversation from the day we’d first met.

Sitting in front of her fire staring into the flames and the glowing caverns beneath the wood, wondering if super-heated people lived there, their hearts pulsing with the beat of the embers, bodies touching but hands afraid to hold each other. Staring at twin flame-reflections in her eyes, knowing what she was thinking but unable to tell her what I thought...

“Mark?” I snapped awake and found myself staring into her eyes again. “Penny for your thoughts?”

Oh...you,” I answered dreamily, realising the car had stopped and we were outside her house, The same house as ten years before of course, surrounded by barns and clusters of oak trees. The land stretched lazily and flatly in all directions. In places the sky darkened and sagged and touched the earth with rain. The thunderclouds seemed to dance and wheel in the distance, occasionally gliding nearer and sprinkling her windows with drizzle, threatening to rumble overhead but turning away at the last minute before repeating the cycle.

“Drink?”

“Red wine please,” I answered.

A cork popped in the kitchen as I sat cross-legged on the ground before a crackling hearth. A cat jumped as something imploded in the depths of the fire, squirting sparks.

She came back in and sat cross-legged opposite me on the rug, handing me a large glass full to the brim with wine. “Cheers,” she said and we touched glasses.

“I bet you were surprised I answered your letter,” she said at last, after a few moments of awkward silence.

“I knew you’d answer,” I replied. “But I never thought you’d invite me over after so long. I couldn’t believe you still lived here. What about your parents and sisters?”

“My parents died, Mark. And left us three the house. Don’t sat ‘I’m sorry’ because it was such a long time ago now. My sisters are both married. Milly’s got two kids.”

I nodded. “Do you remember...do you remember that other letter I wrote, a couple of years after we last saw each other.

She laughed, and the sound was so familiar that something jumped painfully in my chest. “That was a beautiful letter.”

“When you replied I felt so happy. For a time. I knew you wouldn’t feel the same way, but just to hear from you again, and to get such an inspiring letter...I just wish I’d said it all long before, when we first met.”

“So do I,” she said. “It’s so weird that it was only five minutes from her, that that place is still there, that...that the buildings and the trees that saw our first meeting are still there and have seen so many other things since. I just couldn’t get you out of my mind for months after that.”

“And there’s m, sad git that I am, still unable to get you out of my mind after ten years!” I looked at her so-familiar face, the blond curls hanging over her forehead, her pale skin, her wide smiling eyes and couldn’t believe these features of so many of my dreams were here before me, the shadows beneath her eyes dancing in the firelight.

She leaned over and brushed her lips against my cheek.

A bustling London station; waiting for her train to arrive with my heart juddering away so loudly that I thought passers-by glanced at me strangely. Sitting on my bed and kissing, on the cheeks, like the good friends we were. But never like lovers. Only in our thoughts. Never in reality. Always wanting to say something but lapsing into inane trivia.

“You know,” she said. Her face was slightly closer than before she’d kissed me. “That first time you came her and slept just down the corridor from my bedroom. Do you remember after we’d gone to bed I came to your room and asked what your middle name was. You must have thought I was mad. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I just wanted to see you again, on that same day. Then, afterwards I lay in bed in the dark and willed you to creep down that corridor and knock on my door. I was sending mental signals. Did you feel them?”

“I...I think so. I could barely sleep, and when I did I dreamed I’d asked you out. I kept waking up feeling so happy because I thought I’d finally done it, and then realising I’d only dreamed it. That was the longest night of my life.”

“You prat,” she answered. “Why didn’t you come? Shit, you could have asked me my middle name!”

“I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know what I would say. I wasn’t even sure how you felt about me.”

“What?! After a letter a week for six months? You are kidding!” She laughed again and turned back towards the fire. I thought I saw her cheeks redden slightly but it may just have been the heat. As ever, I was lost for words. I felt like steering the conversation towards other safer, but less important matters, but for once my heart wouldn’t let me. I felt an unaccustomed resolution racing around inside me, driving me onwards. I’d let so many chances slip by my in my life. This was not to be another.

“And now?” I said finally. “Are you...attached?”

She wrinkled her nose in distaste at my choice of words and took a deep gulp of wine. “No, my dearest Mark. There’s been some, but no one I really cared deeply about. And no one for ages for ages now. I’m lonely. My parents left me so much money that I’ll never have to work again, but I seem to spend my whole life moping around inside this house thinking of what might have been. You were never really part of those thoughts. You were for years, all through uni and even for a bit afterwards. But then your letter came last week and...I remembered how happy I felt when we were together, how I felt when I woke in the morning and knew there’s be a letter from you waiting for me.”

She turned back from the flames. I could feel the heat she’d absorbed from them pulsing from her in time with her heart. A drop of wine glistened on her lower lip. I reached and brushed it away. For a second her eyes closed. When they re-opened they were moist and brimming with tears.

Kissing her was like no dream of her I’d ever had. There was no summer sun glaring against latticed windows, no shimmering water, no warm, still night. Only heat, the blaze of the fire against our skin, the warmth and taste of her mouth, her soft, urging tongue. It was over soon. We lay together amongst our scattered clothes and talked softly. I stroked her skin, kissed her mouth, her breasts, her belly as it rose and fell and glistened with sweat. The words we spoke were as that first day; interspersed with gentle laughter, made almost unbearably happy by the closeness of our bodies.

“You can stay for as long as you want,” she said, when we finally rose, unashamed of our nakedness. “Nothing much changes around here and there’s nothing much to do except...”

Something flashed deep within her eyes and, holding hands, we climbed the stairs.

Outside, the storms finally stopped circling and settled above the house. The lightning flashed and her body glared whitely beneath me, her back arched.

In the early hours of the morning I awoke, cold, as if drenched in freezing rain. Outside was a cacophony; twigs scraping windows, rain showers pelting down through wildly twisting trees. I shivered and reached for Helen, touching her skin and finding it as cold as my own. Then she slid closer to me and was warm again, and enveloped me with her warmth. She muttered something. It might have been “wake up”, so I did and we made love again, our own sighs blending with the dying breaths of the storm as it soaked itself into dripping nothingness. Our lovemaking was slow this time; the chill of my first waking was burned away by an all-encompassing heat. I felt almost afraid to touch her body as it moved beneath me, in case I should scald my fingers.

Then we slept again, and unlike the thousands of nights I’d lived without her, my sleep was dreamless.

“I’ll show you the garden,” she said the next day as we lay in bed.

A few moments later and we were strolling across springy, still-soaked grass. The air was fresh; when the breeze blew it was as cold as midwinter and we wrapped our arms around each other as we walked. I turned and stared at her in silence, taking in every feature of her face, hoping they wouldn’t fade and blur when she was away from me. Many had been the times when I’d closed my eyes and tried to picture her in my mind, seeing only a mop of yellow hair and an uncertain, white smudge of a face. In the crisp morning air the outline of her face was now sharp against the greenery around us; her curving, elegant nose contrasted as much with the waving leaves as a gaunt, wintry tree against a blazing evening sky. I felt the same pang as I gazed into her eyes as I always felt, yet now the pain was not because I feared I would never have her, but that I would lose her again. She would fade again from my memory, more vivid in dreams than in the drab realism of waking hours.

The lawns around her house were mown neatly into stripes of darker and lighter green; colour blazed in the surrounding borders. Mallows flared like beacons, roses preened themselves and boasted of their heady scent, hanging baskets creaked and rocked gently, trailing colour like comet tails.

She must have read my thoughts. “I know it’s a lot of work, keeping all this neat and tidy. But remember I’ve got nothing else to do.”

We rounded a corner of the house and I noticed one patch of lawn had been left untouched. The grass had grown up tall, yellow and straggly. Here and there thistles toppled over with their own weight, and oil seed rape burned like candles. I thought it strange, this patch of wilderness surrounded by such order. For a moment she seemed embarrassed when I mentioned it, and something grey flickered across her clear blue pupils.

“You’ve changed,” she said. We had sat down on a wooden bench in the centre of one of her extensive lawns. A twisted old apple tree overhung us like an aged guardian angel. I looked up and saw the window of our bedroom at the top of the house reflecting a bank of incoming thunderclouds. “What happened to all the jokes, all the laughter? Do you remember walking back from Pleasurewood Hills, back to Lowestoft train station because we couldn’t get a bus? We talked and talked. I don’t even remember what about now, but I know it was the sort of thing you find it harder to talk about the older you get. Films, music, teachers at school. You don’t talk about things like that anymore, and you don’t laugh much. Have I changed as well?”

“Yes,” I replied. She had changed little in looks over the years, but the smile that used to fill her face and make her eyes sparkle was less frequent now. “But you...you’ve been through a lot. Living here on your own must be hard.”

“Oh Mark, you sound so grown-up and understanding. If that had been you fifteen years ago you’d have made some facetious remark and we’d have had a good laugh. We were so...dazzled by everything when we were together then. We used to look up at the sky and talk about it for hours. About how some clouds were so high up they were made of ice. And now here we are trying to be all adult and talking about ‘being through a lot.” She tried to laugh but it sounded somehow false, empty.

“What happened to your parents?” I tried to make the question sound interested and compassionate but in the end it just sounded flat.

“Car crash. Hit by a lorry on the motorway and both killed instantly. Not that long after I replied to your letter.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know,” she answered quickly. “I wanted to move on, I suppose. You were too much of a link with the past.”

“But you haven’t moved on, have you?” I countered. “You’re still living in their house, surrounded by all those memories.”

She smiled, and despite its sadness it still made something burn warmly inside me. “Shall we...shall we retrace our steps?”

“What?”

“Shall we go back in time, and visit all the places where we were together? Starting with the most recent first. That means going back upstairs and making love again. Then, technically, we’d have to wait another fifteen years before seeing each other again, but I don’t think I could cope with that.”

We chased each other upstairs, ripping off our clothes as we went, and this time, enthralled by her idea, we laughed as we rocked on our bed and I imagined the hands on her juddering alarm clock winding backwards while the sky outside darkened towards morning. Sprawled together we slept the afternoon away and woke up fifteen years ago.

It was time to revisit our past.