When Life Was Simpler

Memory is like a fading photograph. We would like it to be a crystal clear retelling of our former glories, a rendition of our past played out like a film in our mind’s eye. To sit down in the lofty theatres of our souls and to press play before reliving our greatest moments in near-perfect recollections. But evocation is not the pristine roll of film we would like it to be. It comes with its own layers of misinformation. The edges are blackened and blurred by time, by age, by our own iron grip, that desperate grasp of sweating, scrabbling fingers trying to hold onto the past, not letting it go, holding on so hard and with such frantic grabbing that we snuff out any semblance of clarity.

He snaps out of his daydream with a suddenness that would usually accompany deep sleep.

She has been speaking to him, extensively and at length and he has not been listening. Her, with the dark raven coloured skin, the hazel eyes like twin orbs and her white, unyielding skin, with the delicate mouth which can turn from a beaming smile to a look of burning hatred in the time it takes for his heart to skip a beat.

She sighs. “It could all be over, you know? In a flash… You haven’t been listening have you?”

“Yes, I mean no I’ve been listening.” He takes a sip of that grey, slightly burnt tasting liquid which the waiter had called coffee. He remembers his father telling him, a long time ago now, that paying for coffee in any high street café was a complete waste of money. “You might as well piss it away,” his black eyebrows had met in a perfect “V” shape, like migrating swallows, as he spoke. “You get a better flavour with instant.”

“Hello?” She’s been talking again and his mind has wondered like the scudding clouds overhead on the English sky, that pale blue of mid-June, the heyday of home counties living.

“Sorry,” he says, taking another sip of his drink and regretting it almost instantly. “What were you saying?”

She breathes in another deep long sigh. To him, it sounds like a death rattle, but one given voluntarily, the sound of someone so exasperated with life that they exhale their way towards the grave. “It doesn’t matter.”

She looks away, eyes fixated on the green, on the white-clad village cricketers about to begin their first innings. A pigeon, with its scruffy mass of turquoise and green feathers in amongst the grey squall, lands nearby, pecking hopefully at the pavement, picking at abandoned crumbs.

“I need to talk to you, about us.” She is still not looking at him but the words are like a death knell, the tolling bell, welcoming doom and despair.

He thinks instantly of a medieval priest, his hands bloody with the corpses of plague victims, wielding a cart through the mud-soaked streets of some village, calling out the words “bring out your dead.” She is calling for the death of them, of their togetherness, for their relationship to make its final walk to the yawning mass grave which all other pairings descend to one way or another.

“Sounds ominous,” he jokes. Another move he regrets when she shoots him that look. It’s a look that he seems to be on the wrong end of a lot recently, that venomous look, that look which had suddenly appeared in the last year or so, the one that had not existed between them before then.

“For fuck sake, everything’s just a joke to you isn’t it.”

“No it isn’t, Jesus, don’t bite my head off.”

She finally tears her eyes from the cricketers, the pigeon takes flight, a cloud passes briefly across the sun, absorbing those golden rays for a flickering moment, casting her face in shadow. Those deep brown eyes look at him in a way he has come accustomed to. But being acclimatised to unpleasantness makes it no more enticing.

There is a silence between them. She stares, that mouth, so capable of pageantry smiles, so capable of wit and laughter, of jokes and compliments, is tight and cold.

He remembers kissing those lips for the first time. How she had not just looked into his eyes but looked through them, into him, had buried her sight in his being. He remembers how they had held onto each other with that impassioned and visceral need for one another, just like the desperate grip of one’s fingers on those fading memories. Was it really as sweet as he remembers? Or are those cracks, the black lines running like crooked roots and tangled branches through each frame, each moving image, are they blurring that reality? Are they clouding his recollection of her?  

“What are we doing?”

He shrugs, “that’s a bit of an open question, we’re sat here having coffee, in the sun, it’s a nice day.”

“No what are we doing, me and you, us.”

Us. The singular entity that he has become. No more her and him, just them. Two becoming one. He tries not to shudder at the word before he finds a reply. “I thought we were doing well.”

“I suppose we are, it’s just…” she looks back at the green, looking for inspiration in the dog walker who is bumbling idly by, her Labrador sniffing at the grass, her sunglasses catching the sunlight like a mirror. “Don’t you want more?”

Another man has appeared at the end of the green. The man is handsome; he can see that even from their café table. She looks too, looks at his chiselled face and slab jaw. The man’s face reminds him of a 1950s puppet, square and mechanical, like Scott Tracy about to take Thunderbird One out for a spin. He used to love that show, used to love it but for the actual puppets. The Thunderbirds were all well and good but Tracy and his family were nightmarish. Their glassy eyes and jerky movements had always put him in mind of a Victorian mental patient hooked up to electrodes, twitching and jerking under some barbaric treatment. He shivers at the thought.

“Life’s short,” she’s back with him, her finger lazily tracing the rim of her mug, her eyes lost in the murky depths of her coffee. He steals a glimpse at the cricket, watches a six go sailing into the trees at the far end of the field, strides away from Scott Tracy and his handsome features, his slicked-back hair. He notices absentmindedly that Scott is wearing a floor-length flasher coat, brown, like the ones spies wore in the Cold War. Scott must be boiling in this heat.

“So you don’t want to be with me?” he manages to say. “Life’s too short; that’s it?”

“No… well,” she runs one broken nail over the end of her brown hair, surveying the fly-aways and split-ends with a scowl. “I just think we’ve gone static, you know? We need to do something, we need to seize the day and do something exciting you know? This” she gestures with one waving hand from her to him and back, “could all be over, in a flash, tomorrow, today, done.”

“Life’s too short?” he offers up sarcastically.

“You’re such a bastard sometimes,” she says coolly. Her gaze is back on Scott Tracy who is strolling calmly, slowly, laboriously about the cricket pitch perimeter; his hands sunk deep in the pockets of that flasher coat.

“So what do you want then?” he takes a sip of his coffee, hoping the acrid taste will douse his anger, the anger now rising like the flames of a wildfire, gaining ground and intensity, building to uncontrollable levels. “For me to hand in my notice and for us to go travelling to Vietnam?” He snorts at his own suggestion.

She shrugs. “God it would be better than the life we’re living now. Relentless, monotonous. The office, work, evening TV and weekend coffee.” She looks down at her cup in disgust and pushes it away, as though it has offended her. He tries not to snort again; he should have just stayed at home and followed his dad’s advice; had a cup of instant.

“Relentless? Monotonous? Is that what I am to you?”

“For fuck sake this not all about you.”

“Well if you find this so fucking boring and you’re so unhappy why don’t you leave?”

Scott Tracy is off the green and approaching the café, hands still deep in his brown jacket. He sees that the Thunderbird is sweating, thick beads clinging to his tall forehead, running from the thatch of dirty blonde hair. Perhaps Scott is going to sample the coffee as well, or maybe a pot of tea. Perhaps Scott will sit in the sun alone, enjoying the sunshine and his beverage, without being pestered by the shortness of life. Perhaps Scott will worry less about the running down of the clock and simply enjoy the time he has instead of arguing with his girlfriend; wasting time in a pointless skirmish.

She is quiet.

“Do you remember the first time we went on holiday?” He speaks without thinking. He has the memory in his grasp. He’s holding this one tight, tight enough for it not to slip away, to fade, to succumb to the blackness and the blur, for the colours not to run, to slide right off the canvas and snake away.

“We couldn’t afford to go abroad; we couldn’t even afford a hotel.” She is staring at him, he has her gaze, those two great round pupils are like yawning voids that gape open, ready to swallow him whole.

He continues unnerved: “We went to The Lakes, found the cheapest campsite we could and we sat in your mum’s old Guide’s tent for three days while it pissed it down.”

She nods without speaking, a strand of her hair has absentmindedly found its way into her coffee but he does not mention it for fear of breaking his flow. He vaguely registers the sound of feet on pavement, heavy pounding feet, Scott Tracy is inbound, Thunderbird One do you read me?

“Don’t you remember? Sitting there on the damp canvas; wet arses, wet clothes, rain pouring in from all sides, practically drowning in our sleeping bags but we just kept laughing?”

To his surprise, she smiles. That mouth, that tight-lipped frown, is turning, the shiny teeth peeking through, the cheeks turning rosy and stretched with her cheesy grin.

“We did nothing, we literally did nothing, not even nothing and we were happy weren’t we?”

She looks down, pulls the troublesome strand of hair from its coffee cup confinement, and smiles again. A tear glistening in one eye. “Yeah. We were happy.”

He smiles back. “You’re right, life’s too short. It’s too short to worry about this, isn’t it? You know? To argue and fuss?”

His hand is on hers, the heat of her palm warming each finger, the softness of her skin sending delightful tingles of excitement, of ecstasy, of expectation up his arm. And they look, they watch, they gaze. She is staring through the window of his eyes and into him once again. He is staring right back into her.

A shadow falls across their table.

Scott Tracy has pulled a gun from the pocket of his brown jacket. The looming black hole of its muzzle is pointed right at her and soon it will be pointed right at him. And soon their lives will be cut short.

Thunderbird One do you copy?

Scott Tracy squeezes the trigger.