of champagne, one approaching me... offering me a drink... just a little drink...
But nothing so impossible materialised. The room, if indeed it could be called that, was walled on three sides by broken stone no more than eight feet high, lower in places and adorned with brambles. The floor was grassy, except for a spot opposite where a gap in the wall spoke of a once grand entranceway, where, perhaps, his lord and ladyship made their regal entrance, followed later by troops of cart wheeling jesters.
“Mary.”
The voice came from beyond that door, its tone more insistent now, though not impatient. Nor threatening at all, but full of desire and longing.
“Hello?” I called, and as I did, the singing returned as if drawn by my voice, powered by it, somehow. Its melody had changed too, more sonorous now, more possessing, deep and manly and full of power, but sad too, as if the bed of bass tones were lost by themselves, seeking a complimenting melody.
I crossed the grassy floor towards the door but paused as if awaiting an invitation, perhaps expecting the approach of a plumed incumbent in bizarre costume to drop his hand and the mask it held from his face to reveal handsome eyes. I put my hand on the left wall, shocked by its unnatural cold.
The singing drifted around me, elusive yet more real. I saw myself in the eye of a storm of powerful song and felt protected by it, insulated from the real world – any world in which pain reared its ugly head. I walked through this innocent gap in the wall, confident, unafraid... and almost fell over when I saw what lay beyond.
The young man sat cross-legged on a small dune of sand surrounded by gorse. He was staring at me from wide, teary green eyes that at once reminded me of forest pools caught by sunlight. His pale face and short, black hair enhanced those magical orbs, framed them in context, set neatly above a measured nose and delicate lips of carmine. He wore a plain, white T-shirt and starched long johns that both seemed to glow of their own accord as if powered by some internal force. He was barefoot.
“Mary,” he said, standing, smiling now, offering me his hand.
“Michael? Michael , is it really you? What are you doing here?”
He arrested his approach, said, “It is me, Mary. Don’t be afraid.”
Afraid? I thought. Afraid of what? I wasn’t at all afraid until he suggested I shouldn’t be. I was surprised to see him, amazed, overwhelmed at the coincidence of it all, but not afraid. The singing persisted, more distant now, but still filling me with confidence, calming my beating heart.
He laughed, as I remembered he did so frequently, as we both had done in that glorious spring of ’87 when we had first met. When I had first loved and been loved.
“My car broke down,” I said, and laughed shortly at the seeming insignificance of the statement. Laughed for the first time in... in a long time. It felt good, brought tears to my eyes. Tears of joy. Relief. Happiness.
“You always had a great laugh,” said Michael, moving closer to me now, reaching out and wiping a tear from my cheek. A tear I hadn’t consciously released nor even been aware of. He left his hand on my face, stroked it gently, staring intently at his own act as if mesmerising himself as much as he was me.
When he dropped his hand I could feel a tingling, tickling on my cheek, as if many feathers rested there or the essence of Michael persisted, lapsing behind his true form as if this strange place affected time.
“I’m not afraid,” I stated, smiling courageously as I had done the second time we had met, I recalled now. Met properly, that is; the first time had been an orchestrated collision in the hallway outside the high school library. Silly little Mary, two years his junior, dropping her books on the floor and raising her hands in well rehearsed surprise.
He looked at me now as he had done then, penetrating, reading me easily, somehow aware of my thoughts, my intentions, my little game so many years ago. When he knelt, my plan had been to drop and help, hopefully catching heads – not too heavily, of course, just enough to break the ice, not the cranium. But I just stood there, watching, thanking him with an imperceptible nod when he returned my belongings, opening my mouth to speak, to say hello, but only managing to utter something when he had turned the corner at the end of the corridor. I remember crying in the toilets throughout English class, fearing my chance lost forever.
Forever? No. Here he was again, a little older – fourteen years older? Yet he still retained the boyhood charm, the wicked glint, the endearing dimples when he smiled.
“I’m not afraid,” I said, realising I was repeating myself. I could not believe that after all these years he could still have the same effect on me. Why had I dumped him after only one year for want of kissing Tony Small? Why?
“I didn’t think you would be afraid, but we’re encouraged to put visitors at ease. Do you remember the lake?”
Visitors? At ease? The lake? I would never forget the lake. So often, towards the end with my husband, I had immersed myself in that old world fantasy with Michael while my husband writhed around on top of me, moaning, groaning, lost in his own little world of Baywatch.
I knew he had a thing for young Pammy and frequently teased him about it. The fact he got irate simply encouraged me to continue; always the bitch. His increasingly frustrated responses helped me laugh away his denials, to raise my arm and sink another double. We eventually drifted into separate rooms, but had long since drifted into separate lives. I was so convinced it was his fault. Everything I did seemed to anger him, instigate pointless arguments that rarely developed into anything meaningful, anything helpful.
But it had all been my fault, of course, my over self-confidence, sitting on the fumes of a thousand gin bottles, my moral high ground built from whisky tumblers that cracked and smashed into a million pieces when, one fine, spring morning, he left me and took the girls with him.
It was three days before I even noticed they had gone.
On the fourth day I stopped drinking, promised myself I would never start again, that I would start again with Nathan. Do everything I could to get him back. Get my girls back.
But it was too late.
Too late for me.
“Yes, I remember the lake,” I said, but must have sounded terribly sad because Michael’s head dropped and tears ran down his cheeks. He was never the crying type, from what I remember. Except once when his cat died. But then we had only been together for one glorious year – what could you learn about somebody in one year?
My gaze refocused then, snapped back to the present. My memories faded, returned to their beds in the back rooms of my mind.
Michael took my hand, urged me forward, led me across the grass-floored room to a gap in the wall. A gentle breeze blew through it, carrying the scents of spring, all pine needles and blue bells. The tinkling of a distant waterfall first merged with the singing, then replaced it altogether, growing louder as we slowly approached the gap. As we passed through it the day brightened and the mist dispersed, revealing a well of sorts in the floor surrounded by strange, bright light that shone down on an image of the lake far, far below.
Our lake.
I was not scared or even surprised. It seemed such a natural thing. At that point, the way I felt, I would have been more surprised to have seen gorse and sand.
Instead I saw the lake and as I watched, my fingers tensing slightly in Michael’s gentle grip, I saw a cavorting couple run naked into its icy waters, swim around in ever nearing circles until finally embracing, kissing, spinning around like dolphins in the clear water.
It was me.
And Michael.
In the summer of ’87.
I’m not sure how long we watched ourselves, nor did I care. It was blissful, entrancing, joyous to be so free and so loved. So in love.
Breakdown guy had long since left my thoughts and such dull practicalities as the meeting I had been driving to before felt so intrusive that subconsciously I must have repressed it and everything relating to it.
I had given myself over wholly to this magical place and
to the man, the eighteen year old, holding my hand.
My first love.
“Remember this when you wake up,” Michael said, his voice soft and gentle. “Remember what you used to be,” he said, even more quietly, his hold on my hand relaxing, his fingers no longer making the effort to hold mine. “Remember what you must become again.” That was the last thing I heard him say.
When I turned, just slightly, I could no longer see him. What I thought was the last, lingering, soft caress of his fingertips was in fact a rod of twisted metal, sticky with my own blood. The soft, cold sand was a black car seat, bent and twisted and thrown on top of me as I lay beneath it, trapped between it and the dashboard.
I couldn’t see my legs. I couldn’t feel them either. I prayed they were still there, still joined to me in all the right places. I could only see through one eye, and with this, followed the path of a thin, yellow wire from the dark belly of the engine to the speedometer, twitching like a dying animal at the 140kph mark. Had I really been going that fast along this old, quiet road? What a fool! What a stupid, drunken fool! I stared at the circular dial like a window onto another world. A world with no pain. No breakdown guy. No roads. A world with no other smashed up car intermingled with mine. A world where the faces of two dead children do not leer at you from broken little faces so bloody and still. A world with no good morning G & Ts to get