C - Snapshot

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 me, 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.

Durham was first. The following day Helen drove us up there, and it
seemed that the thunderclouds I'd seen reflected in the window followed
us north. I rested my hand on her thigh and turned to face her until me
neck ached while the car was buffeted by the wind.

It seemed that the muscles in her face relaxed the nearer we got to the
university city, the faster the fifteen years passed. By the time we
caught our first glimpse of the ancient cathedral, almost white against
the storm-black and sky and lassoed by the Tees, the sad smile of the
previous day had been replaced by a broad grin.

"Things were odd here, weren't they?" said Helen as we sat in a
tearoom. "You'd changed. You seemed nervous and somehow...distant. Why
was that?"

I was silent for a few moments. I sipped my cup of Earl Grey, and its
flavour seemed to float around my brain, lulling me. "I don't know. I
think that the older I've got, the shyer I've become. I know it's
normally the other way round, but I guess I'm just twisted that
way."

"Don't be stupid," she replied and rested her hand on mine. "You
certainly weren't shy coming to see me after such a long time. Most
people would just have ignored my letter."

"How could I possibly have ignored a letter from the person who's
filled my thoughts all these years? There was something else as well
though. Durham was weird that time because I'd realised it was too late
to say what I wanted to say to you. I'd missed so many opportunities.
That first night in your house stands out. And you'd been seeing other
people at uni. I just wasn't sure what was between us anymore."

We walked out into the crowded streets. A chill wind blew in from the
moors to the north. Back in our guesthouse we lay silently in the dark
until the early hours of the morning, stroking our bodies while the
moon gushed through our thin curtains. Eventually I heard her breathing
settle down, and in its sound I heard her voice, all the things she'd
ever said to me, and the happiness we were experiencing seemed so
ephemeral again. I drifted into sleep and woke only minutes later,
drenched in sweat yet shivering with cold. I listened in the darkness
and heard nothing than the odd car cruising past, the creak of boards
somewhere else in the old guesthouse. I could no longer hear Helen
breathing.

I looked towards her, and for a moment it seemed the moonlight had
blanched her face, changed it to a ghastly white. My skin bristled with
goose pimples; reaching out I feared that as soon as my fingers touched
her cheek her skin would crumble away until there was nothing left of
her on the bed but fine, white powder.

I touched her and yelped, withdrawing my hand. Her skin had felt so
cold that it burned my finger, and I grasped it with my other
hand.

"Mark...what?" She rose, and against the fluttering curtains I could
see only the strands of her hair. Her features were dark and
indecipherable. "Oh Helen!" I exclaimed, and hugged her. She was warm
and firm again. I had suffered only from the after-effects of some
nightmare.

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 black, 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 ate 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
our 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.

"Yes," I said, and we both clambered inside just before the travelling
log climbed up a steep watery slope and wound its way through the
trees. In silence we held each other. Only the steady rush of water and
the distant hum of voices disturbed our reverie.

"It's time to let go, Mark," she said, turning awkwardly and kissing
me.

"I know, sweetheart," I said, and, bending forward, I buried my face
in her hair. Within seconds she had gone from me forever. I cradled
empty air, and cried painfully as the log teetered on the edge of a
precipice before topping over and splashing me with warm water. But the
tears had faded by the time the artificial river had led me back to
where I started. The woman stared suspiciously at my bloodshot eyes,
but I merely smiled weakly at her, and, dripping, started the long walk
back to Lowestoft and the train ride home.

Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out the crumpled newspaper cutting,
reading for a final time the headlines that I once thought had ended my
life. PARENTS, DAUGHTER KILLED IN ROAD ACCIDENT, they said. I turned
away from her golden-haired image, crunched the brittle paper in my
fist and hurled it into the nearest wastepaper basket.

She was right. It was time to let go, time to move on. I had always
lived with the awful pain and regret that we'd never be able to know
each other the way we were supposed to know each other. Yet somehow we
had been given that chance, and while I knew that if I returned to her
house at that moment, it would be lying in ruins and its gardens would
be choked with weeds, I realised the regret had gone. Only the happy
memories, the snapshots in time, remained.