Snapshot Part III

The following day she drove us back down to Suffolk, where the storms
had mercifully passed and the air was fresh and clean. In the late
afternoon while Helen bathed I wandered into the gardens again, my feet
leaving imprints in the soft grass. I marvelled at the work she'd put
in to keep them looking so pristine. In her parents' time I remembered
battered outbuildings surrounding the main house, their wooden walls
cracked and slanted, overgrown with weeds. Even these had been tidied;
they had been painted a glistening blauck, and the equipment stored
within them had been stacked neatly into place. I looked in each
building in turn, seeing glistening spades and forks hanging from
shining nails, lawnmowers polished and immaculate in their corners,
logs for the coming winter in symmetrical piles and smelling of rain
washed mountains.

I came to a building that looked a little less well kept than the
others; one wooden sidewall was torn by a gaping rent that revealed
only petrol-scented darkness within. Yellowing bracken gathered around
the structure, rustling in the breeze. I found the door, which was
secured by a heavily rusted padlock, and as soon as I pulled, the lock
snapped and the door swung open, creaking like a horror movie clich?.
When the sunlight flooded in, I gasped.

Space inside the building was completely taken up by an estate car. It
may once have been white, but rainwater must have linked in through
chinks in the roof above and rusted it away. The car's roof had been
smashed in by some immense weight; the window frames had buckled
outwards while its top had been pressed down almost to the level of the
steering column. There was no glass in the front windscreen apart from
some jagged shards around the edges; all the other windscreens were
criss-crossed with tiny cracks, like leaves. I stepped carefully into
the building, my feet slipping on the oily floor. There was scarcely
room to move, but I edged myself between the car and the walls to peer
into the front passenger window. Both front seats were sprinkled with
glass fragments. The window frames had buckled so much that I had to
bend down to peer inside, grazing my back on the uneven walls behind
me.

I sniffed and smelled something salty and unpleasant. Just as I noticed
dark stains covering both the front seats I heard footsteps approaching
the building and jumped. "Mark? Mark, where are you?"

Stumbling, I edged around the car and found myself back out in the
daylight. The air smelled as sweet as honey after the stifling
interior. Helen was still some way off just appearing around the side
of the house. I was glad, because I was strangely worried that she
would disapprove of my entering the battered building. I picked up the
remains of the padlock and thrust it back into the door where it
dangled uselessly. And then, looking up again towards Helen, I gasped
again.

The patch of lawn she was now crossing had been the area that was
desolate two days before. I had clearly seen the overgrown grass, the
profusion of weeds and the tangled remains of once well-tended
rosebushes. But now the grass was as neat and green as the rest of her
grounds; the weeds had vanished; the rosebushes stood in rows around
the lawn, garish in alternating shades of red and yellow. Scratching my
head I looked back towards the building I had just left, and wondered
whether I had also imagined its contents.

I was silent and uneasy over dinner, even after several glasses of fine
wine from her father's cellar. Helen tried to talk, but after
discovering her answers met with little but monosyllabic answers, if
she was lucky, she gave up and took to staring at the contents of her
glass, twirling it in her fingers.

"Tomorrow?" she said finally.

"Tomorrow?" I said, perplexed.

"I was wondering if you wanted to continue our journey into the past
tomorrow. Since we got back from Durham you've behaved just like you
behaved there before, so distant. Did it remind you of being unhappy?"
She lowered her glass and leaned forward, staring into my eyes. "I love
you," she said. "Always have. Thought it was just a schoolgirl crush at
first, but it was oh so deeper than that. I never wanted to lose
you."

"But you haven't lost me," I replied. "We're here together. Now.
There's no reason why we should ever be parted again. I'm sorry if I've
behaved strangely today. I saw something..."

I looked towards the window. The night was so black its panes could
have been made from ebony.

"In the garden?" asked Helen.

"Yes."

"You saw my parents' car?"

"What?"

"I kept it," she said, and took a deep gulp of wine. "I know it's sad.
I know it's sad still living in the house that they used to live in,
drinking their wine, keeping their garden the way they used to keep it,
better even. Oh Mark, I just can't let go of them."

"I can understand that," I said, feeling appalled. "But...the car. It's
different. It's morbid."

"Yes, I agree." She turned away from me, and for a moment I thought I
saw a smile flicker across her face. She looked again out into the
night, towards the outbuildings, the wrecked car, the stains on the
seats.

I felt scared of her when we made love that night. She rode me, and dug
her fingers into my cheeks, drawing blood. She tossed back her halo of
golden hair and laughed as we came, before collapsing sweat-drenched on
me.

So the following day we took the train down to London and paused for a
moment by the ticket barriers at Liverpool Street station.

"I bet you can remember what happened here," said Helen.

"I actually managed to ask you out," I replied. You'd spent the whole
weekend at my house, but I never managed to ask you until just before
we parted. I'd sat opposite you in the pub and been so preoccupied with
telling you how I felt about you that I was too tongue-tied to say
anything at all."

"It was this very place," said Helen. She turned and looked up towards
where steps led up to a higher level overlooking the main station
concourse. "I remember looking up there and seeing a policeman looking
down, smiling at us."

"I was in a complete daze on the way home," I continued. "I couldn't
stop smiling. I thought that was finally it, and that we'd be together
forever. But nothing really changed, did it?"

"My feelings had changed," said Helen. "I think maybe just after we
first met, I could have coped with going out with you but only seeing
you during the holidays. But this was a year on. I loved you, but...I
wanted to have some fun as well. Oh Mark, if only you'd told me before.
Things might have been so different."

"But why the regrets now?" I said, holding her hand and leading her
away from the ticket barrier towards the Underground. "I still can't
believe it's really happened, but we've come together again.
Why..."

I glanced at her and saw tears welling in the corners of her eyes. She
slowed and stopped and I hugged her while crowds of strangers flocked
past, their voices and the clattering of their footsteps merging into
one dreary, endless hum. Their lives continued, flowed with time, while
ours stopped, as if we were on a cinema screen and their imagines had
blurred while ours had become sharper, more distinct. And then we
continued moving backwards in time as Helen has suggested, and I became
more and more confused because her unhappiness seemed to increase the
further we retraced our steps. On the train journey up to my former
home in Denton she drew away from me and stared out the window, wiping
away the condensation from time to time to stare at the green fields
slipping past. I tried to ask her what was wrong but she merely shook
her head and hid her eyes from me.

When our taxi drew up in front of my parents' old house the only
emotions I felt were those caused by memories of Helen's associations
with it, not those of my parents and my growing up there. The rose
bushes that my father had once nurtured so lovingly along the side of
the house had withered and become choked by creeper; all its visible
walls were blanketed in foliage, a contrast to the bright pink walls of
Helen's house. Black paint had flaked off the gates; patches of rust
covered them like lesions. It seemed as we sat in the taxi that time
had moved on for me; the place I'd once called home had fallen into new
hands who cared little for the hard work my father had done there.
Helen was still in the same house where she was born; she still clung
to the relics of a life that no longer existed. Her parents'
bloodstained car still rusted in its garage; the gardens, unlike the
tangled mess of my parents' house, were as immaculate as when hers had
been alive. I began to feel something strangely wrong in the events of
the past couple of days. Coming here, and then planning the following
day to revisit the places where we had first met, was to delve into a
past that was just that. Past. Finished. We had somehow managed to
revive our relationship, but turning and looking at Helen, who could
barely hold back the tears in the seat beside me, I realised that even
that wasn't right. Wasn't meant to be.

Back at her house in the evening her spirits revived somewhat, helped
along their way by the glass after glass of wine she consumed before,
during and after dinner. Afterwards, with the sun plunging below the
horizon and a chill descending over the house, I lit a fire and we
curled up on the rug before it, talking quietly, not of the past, but
of our plans for the future. I was right, she said. It was time to move
on. She'd start by getting rid of the car, and then she'd put the house
on the market and we'd buy somewhere together. Perhaps somewhere more
urban. Because, as she put it, the fields and the open sky and the
scent of wood smoke made her feel so sad. She could think only of the
past in this place; tending the garden, fighting back the weeds, she
felt as though she was fighting an unstoppable force. Everywhere she
looked she saw ghosts; sometimes she imagined her parents faces, gaunt
and bloodstained, stared down at her from the highest window of the
house, mocking her, chiding her for not letting go. Sometimes she
thought she thought she saw her sisters wandering along on the other
side of the fence ringing her property, half invisible in the corn,
gliding like spirits. She thought they were beyond the fence because,
unlike her, they had moved on and no longer grieved for what was
over.

She eventually fell asleep in my arms and I carried her upstairs. I lay
beside her and lapsed into a strange broken sleep full of the sort of
images she had been describing. I woke with a start and the room was
awash with moonlight. It drenched everything with its mercury
brightness; even the dark mahogany wardrobe that loomed in one corner
seemed to shine with inner light. Hearing her breathing softly beside
me I rose silently and padded towards the window, wanting to see the
earth bathed in white. Opening the curtains my breath stopped in my
mouth and my heart jigged.

The moon was huge; it filled half the sky and I could discern its every
future, its ridges of bone-dry, lonely mountains, its huge desolate
plains, its shadow-draped craters. Below it, Helen's gardens had been
laid waste, as if its light had seared and charred them. The lawns she
had watered daily for years were patches of brown; I imagined them
crunching if I stepped on them. I saw dark masses of vegetation
surrounding them that must have been forests of weeds, overhanging what
was left of the lawns and bobbing up and down in the wind. I leaned
out, and the air was chill for late summer. I had half expected the
moonlight to burn my skin like the midday sun. Beyond the gardens I saw
heaps of wooden planks, their edges chipped and scored, covered in
moss. Earlier that day these had been her outbuildings, with four walls
and roofs. Their contents, logs, tools, boxes, had been stacked with
obsessive neatness. They had completely vanished.

"Helen?" I whispered. I turned, and a shaft of moonlight slanted across
her body. Her skin seemed so pale and thin as to be translucent. I
imagined I could see through its layers and that within, instead of
flesh and blood I could see only an ashen nothingness, a barren
stillness as dead and blasted as her garden. "Helen?" I repeated,
louder this time. Her eyes flickered open and she groaned as she pulled
the sheets over her body.

"One more day. One more trip into the past," I barely heard her mumble.
Then...over."

Fearing I was dreaming I climbed back into bed and faced the wall, to
scared of the awful harsh whiteness beyond her window, afraid even of
touching her skin in case it should crumble away beneath me.

All was utterly transformed in the morning. I awoke to feel her naked
body straddling mine. I reached and held her breasts. They were full,
warm and alive and when I pulled her down and kissed her, her mouth
tasted as rich as the majestic gardens I knew were blooming again
outside.

Our final trip into the past involved only a half hour drive to the
coast. Helen was a total contrast to the previous day. She chatted all
the way about the sort of things we used to chat about all those years
before, and the minutes sped past. I forgot all my negative thoughts,
and the scene outside her bedroom window receded in intensity until I
almost managed to convince myself it really was a dream. In fact, the
reality had long since dawned that the things I had seen were, far from
being a dream, far closer to a waking state than anything else I had
experienced that day. Even the wonderful sex that morning, the feel of
her sweat-slippery skin sliding back and forth against mine, the flush
of her pale cheeks, the sense of togetherness as we lay together
amongst the tangled sheets afterwards, still inside each other. Even
that was less real than the harsh, burning white light of the
moon.

At the theme park we tried to retrace our exact steps from that sunny
Sunday some fifteen years before, but the old rides had been replaced
and we found it difficult. I remembered one ride and prayed it was
still there. It was. Two people sat in circular vehicles that whizzed
around each other, narrowly missing. When we'd ridden this before,
Helen had leant against me, trying to convince both of us it was only
'centrifugal force' that pushed her closer towards me. This time there
was no attempt to transfer the blame. We hugged each other tightly as
the wind whipped against our faces, knowing time was short. As we
clambered out of the machine at the end, the attendant peered at me and
frowned. I turned to Helen and we laughed simultaneously. Her eyes grew
so wide they threatened to drown me. As we wandered off I saw the
attendant talking to another, occasionally glancing over his shoulder
at us and pointing. I knew what he could see, and I could sympathise
with his confusion.

The sun arced over the sky, and I began to feel as I had once done
after a weekend at home before going back to boarding school. The state
of happiness was still there, but threatened by its imminent end. The
shadows were lengthening, the light growing darker and golden, and I
began to feel desperately sad again. Helen sensed this and smiled up at
me. "It's OK," she said. "Not many people have been given the second
chance we've been given. You'll survive. You'll be able to carry on
now. You'll be able to forget about me."

We sat down for lunch the same way we'd done fifteen years before. This
was the place we'd first really got to know each other. The first
throwaway, meaningless comments had developed as that day had gone on.
By the end we were inseparable. Our conversation had made the minutes
speed by, yet at the same time had frozen them in place, etched them
forever in my memory. I remembered kissing goodbye to her at Liverpool
Street, waving at her for what I thought was then the last time in
Durham. And then only the previous day holding each other while the
crowds milled around us in London, frozen to the spot while they all
moved on. A series of stills, like photographs in an album. Moments of
sheer, delirious emotion amidst a lifetime of triviality. What happened
between them was soon forgotten. The moments themselves never
were.

Within seconds the theme park was beginning to close, and people were
already heading for the exits. We queued briefly for one final ride, a
log flume that wound through a quiet poplar grove where the noise and
shouts of the park seemed a lifetime away. When it came to our turn to
climb aboard, the woman attendant aid," Just the one, then?",
addressing me. I paused, and turned to Helen, who merely smiled her
brilliant smile and laughed.