WINGS

I climb the steps in the cliff to the seat at the top, overlooking
the bay, where we always sat. No ordinary seat, this, but a flat rock,
weather worn and smooth, cold in the winter and warm as silk in the
summer sun.
It had been our seat since we were children, escaping from our parents
to climb the hill, out onto the cliff top to watch the gulls circling
on the thermals over the water.
We came on our last day at school, to toss our schoolbooks out over
the edge, into the wind where the torn pages climbed like ragged wings
into a clear blue sky, and we came late that winter when his Mum died,
to sit in silence with our fingers linked so tightly that it was hard
to tell where his hand ended and mine began.
That was how it started. He was like a big brother, guardian angel and
best friend all rolled into one,and over the years the friendship
turned into love. We saw each other every day and spent uncounted hours
talking of the future and our hopes of how it would be.
College or University, a house overlooking the sea somewhere, a dog, a
car, all the things that young people talk and dream of.
When we were not at the seat , we were in bed. I watched him sleep,
long hair trailing over the pillow, smooth skin and the face of a
fallen angel. He reminded me of those pictures youn sometimes see in
Art Shops, the Pre-Raphaelite warrior angels with stern faces and huge
folded wings like swans, and I watched him as if by watching I could
imprint him on my memory forever.
He went away to University and I started at the local art college, and
the letters flew back and forth between us like winged birds, carrying
our news. Letters full of love and hope, that I read on the stone seat
with the gulls calling overhead and a picture of him in my mind.
He came home that first Christmas, but he was quieter, and our
conversations seemed distant. He turned restlessly in bed and the
muscles on his spine twitched as if he was flying in his dreams.
Sometimes, I would wake to find his arm round me and his hand in mine
as if he were holding on to safety, like a life line.
The letters still came, but less frequently now, and he talked of
exams and nights spent in the pub with friends, but never of the
future. He came home again at Easter, and after a couple of days, he
called to see me. We walked up onto the cliffs as we always did, and
sat on the stone. The weather was cold and windy and the sound of the
waves at the foot of the cliff almost drowned out his voice. Did I ever
want more than this, he asked, and he gestured at the the bay and the
little red houses as if they had become less than he remembered.
I tried to remind him of the things we had spoken about, before he
went away. The house, the dog, the dreams I thought we had shared, but
he shrugged his shoulders and slumped down on the rock, hunching inside
his long coat. I looked back as I reached the steps and saw him
standing at the cliff edge, leaning into the wind as if he would take
wing and leave me behind and I left him there, not knowing what I could
say to make things right. He would come and find me when he was in a
better mood, running down my street, feet hardly touching the ground,
leaping over children's toys as if he would launch himself into the air
to get to me faster.
I never saw him again. He failed to return to University and his
father reported him missing, but he was never found. There were rumours
that he had jumped from the cliff due to the pressure of exams, and
talk that there may have been a girl at the University who had broken
up with him before the Easter holidays, but this is a small town and
the stories soon stopped.
Sometimes I would think that I saw him, just a glimpse in a crowd, but
the person would turn and I would see that it was not him, not even
like him. I waited for the post in the hope that he would send me a
postcard from some exotic place where the sea whispered on silver sand,
but he never did.
In my dreams I see him standing on the cliff edge, hair flying in the
wind and his coat billowing open, like some huge black gull ready for
flight, but mostly I remember him in my bed, solemn and sleeping like
an angel, the quilt wrapped round him like folded wings.
So I sit on our seat every day and wait. He wouldn't even recognise me
now, so many years have passed, but I would know him anywhere. People
in the village look aside as I pass them on my way to the cliff steps
and some of them think that I must be mad, but I am only waiting. I
wait for the wild days, when the wind from the sea sounds like the
wings of a huge bird. He will come back one day, I know he will. He was
my angel, and angels are immortal. And so I wait.