A Meeting

Dawn was breaking, and she was sitting on the bench beneath the yellowed trees, oak and beech, their boughs drooping fingers, like the nicotine-stained hands of a long defeated addict. She looked at her watch; wriggling in her thick fleece, she knew it wouldn’t be long before he arrived. She hoped Michael would hurry; the sky was just beginning to lighten, birds were beginning to stir, the great behemoths that rolled across the sky would become lighted, changing from red to purple to white – red to purple to white, she thought, putting all the emphasis on that last word, with all its unseen shadows and dark places.

            Helen wore a scratchy woollen skullcap. It felt like some fuzzy little creature enveloping her head. These days, she never took it off – whatever the weather, she’d be wearing something similar. Her husband, Paul, had left her three months’ previous. He’d come home some barren hour worked up with whiskey on his breath, berating and shouting at their bedroom threshold, bellowing like a mad engine, not making a great deal of sense. But she could draw from the random nonsense he spewed a code, something she’d done throughout their marriage.

            After a few minutes, he’d collapsed at the top of the stairs crying, and she could make out the words ‘can’t do this anymore’. He garbled and fumbled over these words for some time, gasping and choking on tears, before finally saying sorry. He looked to the dark doorframe of their bedroom, but she lay despondent on her side. Then the front door slammed, and Helen knew he wasn’t coming back. She knew she would never see him again. She lay there on top of the covers and looked at the dark hole of the wall, the darkness total, and she felt consumed within a great blank ocean of night.

Helen sat there on the bench listening to the birds. She always liked sparrows – black ones. Their neat little wings, how they flocked; so much like swifts. How they could dart with all the precision of something mechanical. And yet all that vigour – it could never be possessed by any machine. Life, it seemed, was a complex patchwork of interconnections, reducible to several laws, several powers – cause and effect, all that; and yet it was so incredibly complex and chaotic that all one could ever make of it was a haze – and that was good enough.

            It was approaching sunrise now. But where was he? She’d got up when the first stars in the east were dinted by the sun’s arrival. She walked to the park, taking the old familiar route to meet Michael, hands in pockets, staring up into the night, that hat seeming to dwarf her otherwise tiny proportions.

            She’d met Michael at a meeting several weeks after Paul had left. Michael had told her that he was sick – that it was pancreatic. ‘Don’t worry,’ she’d told him, and he’d smiled, but she could sense his quiet concern – and he could sense hers.

            After a few minutes of waiting and staring with trepidation at the smoky glass of her watchface, she heard a slight rustling sound, continuous and muffled, like slippers trudging flatly across a worn carpet. In the half-light she could see the figure of a man, slightly hunched, approaching, his small white face peering out from a shroud of blankets, underneath which he was snugly nestled within the huge bulk of his parka jacket.

            He approached, shuffling towards the bench, and sat, a pained sigh escaping from his lips. ‘Hello, Helen,’ he said, looking plainly across the park to the brow of trees cresting its edge.

            ‘Hello, Michael,’ she replied.

            ‘How are you?’ he said.

            ‘I’m well, thanks,’ she replied. ‘And you?’

            He was looking straight ahead at the trees, almost dazed, before he snapped back into life. ‘All the better for seeing you,’ he said, and he rubbed his chapped hands together. ‘I’ve been feeling better recently. I really have.’

            ‘Oh, yeah?’ said Helen.

            ‘Yeah, really,’ he said, halfheartedly. ‘I’ve been able to keep my food down a lot better on this new drug – Diaxiprix, I think it’s called. It stimulates the appetite – amongst other things.’ He paused. ‘But there’s no substitute for a bit of herb.’ She could see him smiling coyly through the layers of his clothes, his face a pale rock gleaming from folds of soft hills. She could sense from his demeanour that he knew his time was limited. She held his hand, squeezing gently.

            ‘What about you?’ he said. ‘How are things looking?’

            She looked downcast at the question. ‘Oh, I’m dealing with things as best as I can.’ She looked to the trees. ‘It won’t be long now,’ she said, smiling.

            They sat quietly for what seemed an age, listening to the birds, watching the sky peel blood red from the horizon’s lip, and then Helen piped up: ‘Michael, do you love me?’

            ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and I’ll love you for the rest of my life.’

            Helen laughed. ‘Okay,’ she said, and she leaned in, carefully pulling back his hood to kiss his forehead. She held his hand once again, and the two of them sat there quietly.

            ‘You know,’ Helen began, ‘This reminds me of a painting I once saw of two Japanese lovers sitting beneath a cherry blossom. They were watching a pair of cranes, sitting beside one another.’

            ‘That could’ve been us,’ Michael offered.

            ‘It could be us,’ Helen said.

            ‘We could be Japanese,’ he said.

            ‘Could be,’ she replied.

            ‘We could be in a work of art,’ Michael said.

            Helen looked at him with playful scorn: ‘Don’t be daft!’ They both laughed.

‘We could go to Japan,’ said Michael. Helen looked at him, her eyes almost swelling with a mixture of love and pity. ‘We could, Helen – we could!’

            Helen wrapped both her hands around his right hand. ‘No, we couldn’t, darling. You’re in no fit state. Besides, how could we get there? It’s so far away.’ She rubbed his hand, feeling the soft skin, almost luminescent, and the two of them once again sat in silence watching the changing sky. But then Michael said, in a quiet and yet emphatic rasp, ‘Helen, will you take it off for me?’ She looked to Michael, and she could see him gesturing feebly at her cap in the half-light.

            Helen looked searchingly into his swollen face and could see the earnest look he gave her. She removed the coarse cap, revealing her small bald head, feathered with soft tufts of hair like down, baby-blonde, like ostrich fluff, and she hoped he could imagine her with her once lush mane. Does he see me? she wondered.

            He paused to take her in, his bright eyes staring from two sunken holes. ‘You look beautiful.’ He paused. ‘No – radiant,’ he said.

            She smiled. ‘The doctors have given me a year,’ she said. ‘It might go into remission, but there’s a 60% chance it’ll spread to my left lung.’ She paused, briefly closing her eyes, trying to imagine the concourse of her damaged body laid out before her eyes. ‘It’s in my lymph now. Or so they say.’

            He squeezed her hand. ‘Be strong,’ he said weakly. ‘If you have hope, then gold can stay – Frost was wrong. Frost was a fool!’ he said, and Helen laughed to herself.

She put her cap back on and the two of them sat there quietly, as children do when consumed by some mysterious and secret interest.

‘Look!’ she said. ‘There it is!’

‘I see it,’ he said. ‘Here it comes!’

‘Remember this moment,’ she told him, but a quiet voice in the back of her mind told her that with each dawn, dusk could only increase its hold. But maybe – just maybe – after all, dawn and dusk were merely the opposite sides of some great ineffable coin. She squeezed his hand tighter, and the two of them watched the sun burst through the trees on the other side of the park.

***

               As they watched this spectacle, warm and safe in the chill morning air, a man walked past the two of them, shrugging off bad feeling, heading to some bright point of darkness, not noticing the two enfeebled frames sitting there staring out at the rising sun, half expecting to be met by two pairs of change-hungry grubby hands. But if he’d turned his head, he’d have seen a small universe of suffering, a small speck of beauty on the lens of existence – and it’s the same all over the world.