AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She peered in again, her head craning forward. Something deep within her, some restless core, yearned to see the secluded place even though she knew she should be getting to her friend’s house.
‘I just climb over,’ I said. ‘Or you can go around. No one bothers. I climb over and walk up and sit on the bench. I call it my bench and I have a little smoke, sometimes a little cry if I’m upset, and I just step off the world for five minutes. I’d go now only I’ve left my ciggies at home.’
Ciggies my foot. I don’t smoke, as you know.
‘I’ve got some,’ she almost cried, her developing crush on me taking full flight. I was so much calmer, so much kinder than her own skinny, Lycra-clad, neurotic mother who wanted only academic success from her so she could bathe in that reflected glory and somehow make up for her own failed promise. I was soft and warm, my promise had never failed because it had never been made, and I didn’t give a monkey’s about her degree, only about her, what made her heart ache, her soul sing. Meanwhile she wanted to stand beneath the spread of my arms and shelter there and be loved.
And there was me with all this love going spare.
I gave her a sideways glance. ‘What’re you thinking, missy?’
She smirked. ‘We could go and see your secret place,’ she said, her voice thin. ‘And I’ll roll you one of mine.’
I smiled at her. ‘Well, I don’t normally share my secret place with anyone. But as it’s you…’
She was excited; I felt the burn of it in my chest, although now, like the hunger, I’m wondering if the excitement was my own. She also really did need a fag but hadn’t wanted to make me stop and wait while she rolled one. I put one hand on the railing. She hesitated.
‘I can only stop for a minute, by the way,’ I said. ‘Literally a couple of minutes. My husband’s expecting me back before half nine.’
Before I could say anything else, she’d climbed over. That put me in a spot. I never climb over the railings; I follow the hedge to the end, where you can just walk into the gardens. But I was here now, caught in my own lie. I had to pick up the dog and hand him to her. She didn’t question how I usually did this on my own; she was too busy laughing at me stuck with one leg one either side of the fence.
‘Can I help you?’ She took my hand and pulled me towards her.
I almost fell onto her and we both laughed.
‘What are we like?’ I said, leading the way up the grass verge to where the trees huddled, whispering in a dark amorphous clump. I was panting a bit by now, because the lawns are on a slope and the walking hadn’t yet got my fitness up.
We reached the trees and I led the way to the pond. It was dark in there, but the moon bleached the tiny path, yellowed the edge of the pond where the water sliced the reeds. And the bench.
‘Shame you lost your phone,’ I said. ‘We could have used it for a torch. Still, we’ve got the moon.’
She pulled a tin from her jacket pocket and sat down. She’d gone quiet. Now we were here, I sensed that she’d begun to ask herself what the heck she was doing, and to feel afraid. But beneath her apprehension she was enjoying herself, enjoying the pull of the fear, the danger. There was some nugget of rebellion in there for her. Oh, I remembered my own youth as if it were the week before. That urge to do something reckless. I remembered a lad with a motorbike offering me a ride one night after we’d been clubbing at Mr Smith’s. No, I’d said, when what I’d wanted but not dared to say was yes. I remembered summer nights roaming the streets with Lisa and our other mates in drunken noisy packs. I remembered a stranger’s face blurring on the dance floor late at night in some seedy dive as it loomed in for a thick-tongued kiss. Wanting to do things we shouldn’t is as old as time.
We sat together on the bench. I waited while she rolled me a cigarette. She handed it to me, rolled one for herself. She lit first mine, then hers. I didn’t inhale, but even so, I coughed.
‘Not used to roll-ups,’ I said.
‘I prefer them.’
Oh, Jo, you funny little soul, with your millennial worries and your self-sabotaging ways. Nothing matters, I wanted to tell her. But it’ll take you until you’re my age to realise that, and then you’ll be free to not give a—
‘It’s nice here,’ she said. ‘Peaceful.’
I took another puff and coughed again. I was enjoying her cigarette more than mine, if that makes sense. She pulled hard; the nicotine relaxed her shoulders a fraction, down from her ears, lowering my stress levels with them. I almost understood smoking in that moment.
I moulded into the bench, stretched out across the back. I wanted her to relax against my arm so that I could comfort her little bird-like frame, but at the same time I feared the connection might be too strong. It might electrocute me. It was exactly like a bond between mother and daughter. That closeness. Affinity. It’s what I’d had once with Katie.
Jo stood and wandered over to the pond. The orange glow of her cigarette tip pulsed in the dimness. I was thinking about what it would be like to drown myself in that pond, how cold the water would feel on my face. ExceptIwasn’t thinking that; she was. Christ on a bike, the way she stared. The longing was written into her body as sure as ink on a page. I tied Archie to the leg of the bench and went to join her. I stood close, felt the pull towards that black mirror. If I pushed her in now, I could drown her – I knew that. I was bigger than her, stronger, and I had the advantage of surprise. All these years I’d existed as water flowing around my loved ones, fluid around their needs, keeping them afloat; now I was water once again and she was a drop, a drop ready to lose its meniscus, to become part of the whole, part of me. That was the ultimate connection: drops together with other drops lost all boundaries, became water. Cohesion, that was the word I wanted. In her death, it was possible I’d experience cohesion. Or at least something real, something important. I didn’t know how that would be, only that I wanted it.
I placed my hand on her back, between her shoulder blades. I could just—
She turned to look at me, stepped back.
‘What do you do with your fag butt?’ she asked, throwing hers down but crouching to pick it up once she’d ground it out with her boot.
I staggered backwards, almost fell. ‘I just put it out like you’re doing.’ I wondered if she could hear the change in my voice. I barely had the breath to say the words. ‘I pick it up and either find a bin or take it home. Doesn’t do to litter, does it? I can’t stand people who litter.’
‘I’d better get to my friend’s,’ she said.
