Before next Tuesday.
There are 3 people involved in this relationship; my wife Alison, her friend from years ago, Pat, and myself. Because I’m the deceased one, only I am aware not just of the relationships past and present truths; but its future realities as well, and it’s those aspects of the relationship I’m precluded from revealing.
********************************
Alison and Pat are sitting at a table in Murray’s restaurant on Ashleigh’s High Street. Alison is trying to decide whether to order any food from the menu and barely listening as Pat fills her in with all her news. In fact Alison is already beginning to doubt the wisdom of having agreed to meet her old friend for coffee and a chat at all. It is almost 40 years since they sat together like this. There are just so many memories on both sides to be recalled and Alison never was either as quick, or as accurate as Pat at remembering things.
Pat’s phone call had been a total surprise.
“ I’m back,” she had exclaimed, “ Back in England for good… We must meet…. Same place as always, Murray’s on the High Street… It is still there isn’t it? … Now don’t be late!”
Typically her tone had been so firm, so intolerant of refusal that even after such a long separation, Alison had felt the easiest course was just to accept. It had been that way right through grammar school and university. Pat had always been the one who proposed and decided, usually at one and the same time, and Alison had always,…. well, always found it simplest to agree.
Suddenly she forgets the menu and remembers the day, shortly after they both graduated, when she told Pat that she would not be accompanying her across the Atlantic to accept the two teaching posts they had been offered near New York. Pat had stared at her in disbelief.
“ But we always agreed that we would go together, use our qualifications to travel and see the world.”
“ No,” Alison had said, “You decided and agreed for both of us. You never actually asked me whether I wanted to go, and I’ve decided I’m happy where I am teaching here in Ashleigh.”
Initially Pat ascribed Alison’s change of heart to nerves, timidity, and an unwillingness to face the prospect of leaving her mother.
“You can’t live your whole life tied to your mothers apron strings,” she commented, “ No matter how wonderful a mother you think she is. It’s not natural.”
Pat had never pretended that her own mother was anything but a hindrance, but eventually Alison found the courage to admit the truth.
“I’m not tied to my mothers apron strings. I’ve met somebody … and I don’t want to leave him.”
“ A man?” Pat was not just astonished but shocked. Her own father had left her mother when she was in infant school; consequently men never figured in Pat’s calculations of anything. “ You want to give up your independence to stay with a man?”
“ Not just stay with him, … marry him!”
Pat had thrown a farewell party some nights before she flew to New York but she didn’t invite Alison who, in any case, had already decided she wouldn’t attend even if asked. Instead she spent he night with me…
“ Do you remember Jacinta? … Jacinta Whelan? “ Pat is asking.
Alison replaces the menu onto the table having decided not to prolong things by ordering food, and readjusts her spectacles onto the bridge of her nose. The two gestures buy her a few seconds while she decides how to respond. She remembers Jacinta very well, but frowns as if trying to recall somebody she has forgotten so Pat decides to prompt her memory.
“ She was at St. Elizabeth’s with us, and went on to University with us as well. … Her main subject was Drama. …. Well she was very good at it. She had beautiful eyes…. very expressive. … She graduated with us…. “
Alison nods and interrupts, “ And she dated Shamir for a while.”
Pat had always intended to bring me into the conversation at some point, but my arrival courtesy of Alison, prompts her to hesitate and wonder how far she dare go with her recollections. She even wonders how much I might have told Alison in the twenty odd years we were together in life but, in fact, I never told Alison anything about the night after the farewell party.
Pat arrived at my door obviously the worse for drink, and accuse me of stealing the only thing that meant anything in her life.
“ Alison isn’t a thing,” I told her, “ She’s a person with feelings and a life of her own.”
“And you’ve bloody well stolen both,” she sobbed.
I could have invited her in, given her coffee, and tried to sober her up, but Alison was out at a school function, so I decided that wasn’t the wisest course of action. Pat was already somewhat dishevelled, and using the door jam to keep herself upright. Her car, out in the roadway, was parked up onto the pavement, it’s front door wide open, it’s radio on full blast, and it’s headlights illuminating my front garden and porch like a stage set. So I offered to drive her home in my car, suggesting she collect her own the following day.
“ When you’re more fit to drive,” I explained.
She spat an obscenity at me, but let me take her keys, bring her car off the road and lock it, then almost fell headlong into the front seat of my car.
As I drove her to the pther side of Ashleigh her mood changed. She stopped crying, dropped the foul language, and even started to smile a little. When we reached her apartment block she turned to face me.
“You don’t love her Shamir do you? Not really…. It’s just the prospect of having an obedient, malleable little woman in you bed that attracts you isn’t it?”
I shook my head, told her she was wrong, and told her I didn’t want to hear her talking like that, but she began to fumble with the buttons of her blouse, tearing and pulling them open. Her speech was becoming more slurred and I wondered if she had taken drugs with whatever alcohol she had swallowed.
“ What you really want Shamir is a woman like me isn’t it? Jacinta’s told me all about what you really like…. What men like you want. You’re an Arab, and underneath this ohhhh sooo sophisticated solicitors façade you’re just like all Arab men…..”
I had to laugh.
“I’m not an Arab,” I corrected, “ I’m from Birmingham, and whatever it is that Jacinta has told you I like… it’s a lie. Jacinta Whelan lives in a fantasy world of her own, and she wouldn’t recognise the truth if it stepped up onto a stage somewhere and slapped her in the face! That’s why I stopped going out with her. Now Pat, for heaven’s sake just leave the car, go up to your falt, … and go to bed. You’re making a fool of yourself.”
She asked me why men were always attracted to Alison, but not to her, and I made the mistake of telling her it was because she obviously didn’t find men attractive. I shouldn’t have said that of course, it was cruel; but I was angry with her for coming on to me like that, imagining she could ever take me away from Alison. For a few moments she sat in silence staring at me and then, without even rebuttoning her blouse, she scrambled out of the car.
“ The trouble with you Shamir bloody Hassan,” she screamed from the footpath, “ Is that you’re a waste of space… a useless bit of arab shit…. I hope you and Alison rot in whatever hell it is you believe in!”
Well, I’m certainly not in any ‘sort of a hell,’ although, at present, I am at an unwelcome distance from Alison.
“ I was sorry to hear Shamir had died,” Pat is saying. “ Was he ill for very long?”
Alison shakes her head. She’s never been comfortable sharing her memories of me with anyone. Yet, every morning when she wakes up, she faces my photograph on her bedside table and wonders aloud how long it will be until we are together again? My pain, of course, is that I’m precluded from letting her know!
“ He was ill only a short time. Once diagnosed, lung cancer can be very quick.”
“ And you just have the one child, a daughter?”
“ Yes, Elisha. It means ‘ God is gracious.’ It was Shamirs mothers name. It is in the Bible.”
Pat is surprised. “ Shamir was a Christian? I thought…. Well I assumed…”
“That he was a Muslim?”
Pat nods. “ Well his name… his appearance… everything really!”
Alison suddenly decides to set the record straight, once and for all, irrespective of the consequences.
“ I have a grandson called Charles. You can’t get any more English and Christian than ‘Charles’ can you? …. And why did you mention Jacinta Whelan? Is it because you think I didn’t know that she and Shamir slept together before he met me?”
“ No… oh no, nothing like that, though I did think you might not know. No, it’s because I met up with her again in New York just after you and Shamir got married. In fact it was she who told me. I hadn’t seen her since my farewell party and she was a little surprised you had managed to hook him at all. She always maintained that he would jump into any skirt that was offered. In fact, at the party, she even suggested I do you a favour and put him to a little test…. Anyway she was working in a theatre out in Long Island and, eventually, we became good friends, …. and I mean ‘good friends’”
She waits for Alison to react. “ You mean….?”
“Yes, I do mean. I understand ‘partners’ is the current euphemism over here for a lesbian relationship. Well, I’m gay and I see no point in denying it. Did you never guess?”
Alison genuinely hadn’t guessed, and I never told her. I just hoped, with the passing years, that she would accept that Pat’s failure to answer any of her letters was because Pat too was making a life for herself.
“ What happened?” Alison finally asks.
“ Oh, we were together until a couple of years ago… very happy I thought… but then she moved to the west coast with a model half her age… somebody I couldn’t possible compete with.”
“ I meant what happened with the little test?”
“ I didn’t go through with it,” Pat lies.
After a few moments of awkward silence Pat suddenly blurts,
“ I‘m thinking of throwing a party on Tuesday night.” Then, recalling a conversation from years ago, adds “ Will you come?”
Alison pretends to consider the request but, in her heart, already knows what her answer must be.
“ I’m sorry but I baby sit my grandson on Tuesday nights.”
“ Friday then? I can easily arrange it for Friday night.”
“I’m sorry…. I can’t do Friday nights either. In fact, at the moment, most of my evenings are spoken for.”
Pat tries to keep the disappointment out of her voice, but can’t help remarking,
“ Still tied to the families apron strings then?”
Alison stands up suddenly and prepares to leave.
“ I’m very happy tied to them, and Ill never allow anyone to untie me. Now Pat, I’m sorry, but I simply must be going… there is somebody I have to meet…. It’s been lovely seeing you again….”
Then, because she doesn’t want the relationship to end on a sour note, she adds, “ Look, I’ll see what I can do about next Tuesday, but please don’t be annoyed with me if I can’t make it.”
Pat watches her friend move away and realises with a shock that they are no longer ‘friends.’
‘In fact,’ she thinks, ‘ I no longer have any real friends.’
She pays the bill at the till and, turning, watches Alison leave the restaurant, cross the pavement and stand at the kerb. But she does not see Alison cross the High Street because what she is seeing is no longer reality…. at least not yet.
Instead she see’s Alison pause and become distracted by a push chair on the opposite pavement containing a child who is waving to her. There is a young woman with middle eastern features standing beside the push chair. Pat see’s Alison’s face light up with recognition and watches horrified as, looking neither right nor left, Alison steps out into the busy roadway.
Pat also see’s, as if in a dream, the white truck approaching at full speed trying to beat the changing traffic lights. She tries to cry out … “ Alison, the traffic…. for God’s sake look out!….”, but the warning is pointless because it isn’t ‘now’.
She is aware of the sound of screeching tyres, the dreadful sickening thud, but she’s powerless to prevent the horror she is witnessing because.. again, it isn’t ‘now’
It is before next Tuesday…., but it isn’t ‘NOW!’
*****************************
As I said earlier, I’m precluded from revealing the future myself; but premonitions? … Oh, they’re something else entirely. They aren’t within my realm of competence to control. I’m simply not responsible for any future realities that premonitions may reveal!
THE END.
