The Light We Make

In England, time is like a debauched socialite. She rises, each year, late and frosty headed from her bed, douses herself in brief, cool showers and decorates herself with pale lace undergarments and delicate perfumes, then dresses up in so-this-season fashions, flashy with heat and hue. In the warmth and golden light she dances with the air, then becomes drunk on heavy over ripened summer fruits, abandons modesty, frivolously divests herself of her clothing, a suspenseful striptease. She is unashamed of who will see. She lets her admirers peer up her skirts and rustle her scarlet petticoats.

Finally, when all are tired and bleary eyed, she becomes grey, exhausted, dark, uninspiring, she slinks on hands and knees towards her bed, crouching beneath the horizon. She sleeps. Visions of sugarplums dance through her head. And next year she will arise late again, only when the rainy complaints of her denizens begin to give her a headache.

And after us? What then? Will she keeps peeling the seasons away, with no one to relish the change in temperature, in colour? Will she perform without an audience? But it is not wise to think of the future, not healthy. So he says. It weighs you down, stops you moving forward. Today, then. No other. A perfectly still day. Autumn. A postapocalyptic sky. A rich, hyperbolic sunset. We never had sunsets like this before. We wouldn't have believed in them. We would have called them garish.

A reminiscence of Guy Fawkes clings about my scarf. Even now I can smell it, sparklers and bonfires, my mother's jacket potatoes, a cold nosed kiss with the boy next door. When did we learn to be afraid of fireworks?

I carry silent messages like this about my body. Secrets in the seams of my skirts, memories in the stitching. My name is embroidered in my mother's hand in the neck of my old school sweater. My shoes are star shot as they were the day I bought them, fizzing hot after an electric row. I find a way to polish them every day. I am afraid of forgetting.

I turn to him. He stands behind me; a respectful distance. He can see the view over my shoulder. There was a time when I would have worried what I looked like- frizzy hair and torn school jumper wouldn't do. He thinks it strange, the way I carry my luggage with me everywhere. There are clothes to be found wherever we go. But clothes are memories, they are stories- I want my own, not someone else's. He carries with him a stick, and every night he takes his knife and carves a stripe into it. He's running out of room. I think that strange. When I asked him about it, he turned his head and wouldn't speak.

We are the survivors. To one another we look like delicious meals. We would consume each other but for the fear of having nothing left to consume. The skim of skin, the misplaced touch must last a week and more.

There are stories as we walk, what we cannot say about the present we make up for by talking about the past, who we were, what we did, who we loved and who we were loved by. We must repeat their names, for fear of forgetting. I wonder if we would have cared for each other, before. I suspect I would have thought him gauche.

He wouldn't tell me his name. He said we wouldn't have need of names, now. And he never liked it anyway.

Last night we slept in an old farmhouse. There were vegetables, still, buried in the soil, he dug them up and peeled them sitting on the porch, I started a little fire and stewed them up, so we're quite a little family, really, in our way. We never stay in the same place for more than one night. We've found that's the longest we can forget about the owners' absence.

We slept in the bed beside each other, our auras blushing, so close my inhale was his exhale. At night our shadows do what we dare not, uniting in the darkness beneath the sheets. And in this house, more than any other, I am home. After the deepness of dreams, heavy as dust, had descended on what little life remains here, I rose and stepped out into the corridor. There were moonbeams slicing the windowpanes, I wouldn't need electricity, even if there were any. I would always have done what I did then, padded out on silent, naked feet, hoping to avoid the creaks and moans stored up in the floorboards of an ancient house. And the geography, strangely the same as my parent's house, many, many miles away, perhaps no longer standing, perhaps blown away or buried with all memory of the little lives that it contained. I stood still. Had I gone back I could have made this journey there, the night time trip for a pee and a glass of water, with my eyes closed. I closed my eyes. One, two, three, four, five steps, and there, the door handle just as I expected it. I didn't open my eyes. Only to turn it, and I would see them lying there, with the sheet tucked under their chins, I'd hold my breath for a moment, for one moment thinking they might be¦pausing for one moment and wondering if they might be, before cracking their dreams with a whisper:

'Mum, Dad, I had a nightmare.'

He smiles at me. It's an expression I've never seen before, with teeth. I move closer. The papery red onion skins, discarded at last night's dinner, blow up around us, like whisper weight confetti.

When we met, we agreed to start moving South- because it was not North, or East, or West, though it might have been. No one direction seemed better than any other. But going somewhere became important, we had a sense of purpose. And after all, I'd never seen this part of the country before, or at least, only on postcards.

He touches my cheek, the lightest flutter, almost as if he hadn't. 'We are here,' he says 'where now?'

He touched my cheek.

Another smile and I turn and start to move away from him, I've left my luggage this time, but the door's open so I could come back, but I won't, not this time. He follows me.

The field is spilling out into the road now, chewing up the concrete, and I'm amazed how quickly nature is reclaiming the earth, as if we were unexpected visitors who'd outstayed our welcome and left a coffee cup ring on the kitchen table. Our stain is being wiped away. Now we are gone, the world can relax.

The grass in the field is high, there aren't any cows to graze it and I sneeze as I stir up long lonely pollen, unseasonable rotted seed heads bursting at our brush. Having hayfever seems ridiculous now. 'Bless you'. He says. I start to run.

The way to the beach is gory and dark, we scuff our knees and elbows like school kids. I think I can smell his blood but it is the sea. My brain twists, my vision is white noise and I slip between two rocks. He grabs my arm and rips me out, my leg is torn and I leave some flesh behind. Never mind, what use could I have for it anyway? It's a small price for this vivid tattoo of him.

The sea is not ours to swim in. These were some of the last words on radios, TV screens, tabloid front pages, almost as if this news brought about their demise. The sea is no longer ours to swim in, and the tragedy of it, the weight of memories of all that meant to our little island nation, crushed the reporters and their editors, and they drowned there and then, in their reminiscence of Blackpool and Southend-on-Sea. The sea is not ours to swim in. But the sea has always been ours.

I take my clothes off. One by one I peel them from my body. He doesn't look away. My clothes are a heap on the sand. It will only take one turn of tide to wash them away. We watch each other.

I touch my toes against the line of the sea. How can decisions like this ever be made? And this is Man, standing forever between high and low tide, one foot on the sand and one foot in the surf¦if¦but¦

Decisions like this can't be made. They make themselves. I have lost control, some motor-neuron-response mechanism has kicked in, some pattern of behaviour preordained. I was always meant to end up here. This realisation doesn't shock me, in spite of my years of scorning the sudden conversions of the close to death and old. It drives me forward. I step in ankle deep. He steps beside me, traces his fingers through mine. We go out further, quickly, as if we could overtake the night. There is no pain, just the sharp surprise of the unseasonable water when it spills over your hips, as it had always been. I'd forgotten that. We are swimming. I don't look over my shoulder to see how far from the shore we've come because it doesn't cross my mind.

Life does not belong to dreamers. There must be pragmatists, realists, somewhere, who have survived, for whom life will go on. We are not them. But I bet we had more fun.

Once upon a time there were stars in the sky and now I think I see them reflected on the ocean's surface, but it isn't that. We are stirring up little bursts of light as we swim, marking a trail behind us. We daren't give this phenomenon a name, but when we see it we laugh and splash, and at last we touch each other, press against each other, in the weightlessness of the sea. Our movements create a light so great that if there were men in space ships looking down they'd make it out through their telescopes and wonder what that glowing eruption was. But we are alone. I see nothing beyond the light we have created. And slowly, he begins to fade into it too, I loose sight of his nose, and his mouth, so I close my eyes and watch the colours moving behind them. It is a long time before I start to feel myself disappear, but I do, limb by limb, until all that is left of me, all that I am, is the movement of him inside me.