Beneath the warm sunlit white plastic garden chair, set in concrete, was a single paw print. His eye took it in. A cat, back in the sixties when this ‘ugly’ estate was constructed (at least that’s what his own parents would have thought of these rectangular sets of identical houses) must have tentatively placed its paw in wet cement, and then in shock, retreated, inadvertently making its mark, if not for all time, then at least longer than it thought. Longer than its own existence. The shock of the unexpected. He looked up at her, as she swung out the kitchen door. She lurched, grinning, really drunk now, and holding another bottle of ’fizzy’ wine.
"Just another, little tipple me thinks," she said, laughing.
Her laugh sparkled and danced, slightly off kilter like a talented ballerina, with an injury that would not, could not be completely healed, though she dances bravely onward, looking for a partner to catch her when she falls.
"Only twenty minutes until tutorial" he noted, still glancing down at the paw print, as something seemed to set in his own mind.
"We’ll be fine," she purred, pulling out the plastic topped cork with determination, froth oozing over the rim, then sloppily directed into two chipped cups. She handed him one, and clinked the side.
"You know, you’re nearly there, don’t you," she said, in a quizzical voice, as though she herself wasn’t sure what it meant. Sitting down on the grass that bordered the small patio and table, she stared and drank. A train from the tracks that bordered the car park lurched in from London, the Woking line, like a breath from the City that has already dissipated into almost nothing.
"There? Where am I?" he uttered, sipping at the cheap fizz, that had been given to her tea-totalling mother by someone or other, and placed, like all the bottles given to her, in the cupboard in the ‘lounge’ (a word his parents didn’t use, which they also would have seen as ugly). He pulled out a cigarette from his pack of ten, and looked at her, squinting in the sunlight.
"Nearly, where I could say that we could be together."
He wasn’t expecting this. He hadn’t seen it coming. The train rattled and he looked at her again, as he inhaled his first drag deeply and didn’t know what to say, but stumbled into a statement that attempted to convince her of his confidence, though he knew she knew his lack of confidence better than he himself.
"We are together, right here, right now." He smiled nervously, knowing that she knew that he knew this wasn’t what she had meant and the cheapness of the statement even in his ironic tone, was still disposable.
Awkwardness was somewhere high above them in the blue sky now, wheeling down like a tossed Frisbee that was getting closer and closer by the second and if one of them didn’t catch it, they would feel it pretty badly, soon enough.
She continued to drink and stared up at the sky, as if looking for its progress, like only girls can and then she turned back to him.
"That’s what I mean, when I say nearly, because if you can’t figure out what that means, then you’re always going to be nearly." She emphasised the word sharply, but with regret in her throat.
He knew he thought in riddles, but he didn’t like it when she spoke in them.
By the time the cups were drained and they were walking back up the hill, having cut through the hospital, they were both feeling the effects. It wasn’t even one o’clock and they had drunk a bottle each.
As they reached the bus shelter, that bordered the school, having said little on the walk, she turned to him, clasping his hands, and biting her lip she said, in a deliberate way, nothing at all. She just looked at him.
"What?" he said, knowing that if he didn’t do something, or say something else, then it would be gone, but not knowing whether he wanted whatever it was or not to occur.
That’s when she ran, laughing at the top of her voice, through the gates and in through the double doors of B Block, which housed the Art Department and the sixth form classrooms. She ran up the stairs, and shrieking all the way, tore all the posters off the wall as she ran down the corridor. As he tried to hurry after her, he found ‘Drug Awareness’ posters fluttering to the floor, the raised voices of students and the grey figure of Mr Smith, head of sixth form, walking purposely towards the common room, where she must have headed, like a guided missile.
When he got to the top, he stared at her distant figure, at the end of the corridor, being confronted by the teachers, and knew that she had drawn a line between them, that she was daring him, for one last time to cross. She looked a long way off, and he saw her as if through a tunnel from a completely other place.
He turned away, entered Room 32, sat down in the classroom, and waited for the bell to go for tutorial. Years later, he would go to concerts with her husband, send her children birthday presents and weep when she announced her diagnosis, over the phone from her large house far away, but nothing seemed to move on from, or change and there was an ugliness to what was never really said and he felt this himself, more than anything else in his life…