First Person and Other Stories (15 page)

I was in the sun in the doorway, reading my emails. You walked past my door. You nodded hello. You had a case on your back, oblong, longer than your back. I heard you open a door up the road from my house. Then, not long after, I heard someone playing something beautiful on something.

It was a music I knew in my bones. It caught me out. It changed the air. It came into my house and made the room I was in a completely different place.

It was you.

I worked out which door you lived behind. I stood outside it. Something new was making me brave. I knew you were a bit younger than me. I knew I was a bit older than you. I knocked on your door. You answered. You were eating an apple.)

Ultimate liberation, I say now in my old bed with you in my arms. A story with no story. No adjectives. No beginning or middle or end. Ultimate freedom. Ultimate open sky.

No ultimates, you say.

Above our heads through the open dormer window in the slant of the roof of my bedroom: leaves, clouds, blueness, swifts.

Halfway through the afternoon I go into the back room and find you sitting in a square of sun in the window seat. You’re reading a book. You see me and you lower the book.

Just trying to catch up a bit, you say. You wink.

I get it, I say. I’ve finally understood. I’m imagining you. I’m making this all up. You’re not real.

Ah, you say. But what if it’s me who’s imagining you?

You’re not the first person to spin me a yarn, I say.

I’m pre-yarn, me, you say. I’m post-yarn. Yarn.

You say the word yarn like you said the word yawn this morning. I try not to laugh.

It is early evening. We’re in bed again. It is almost embarrassing, going to bed with someone so many times in the one day.

You’re not the first person I’ve ever gone to bed with so many times in the one day, I say.

I hope not, you say.

You’re not the first person I’ve ever felt new with, I say.

Won’t be the last, you say.

You’re not the first person to think he or she could save me, I say.

I’d never be so presumptuous, me, you say.

You’re not the first person to squeeze whatever love juice it is you’ve squeezed into my eyes to make me see things so differently, I say.

Eh? you say.

Then you make the innocent face you make when you’re pretending to be green.

You’re not the first person I ever had really good talks like this with, I say.

I know, you say. Been there, done that. You feel very practized.

Thank you, I say. And you won’t be the first person to leave me for someone else or something else.

Well but we’ve a good while before that, with any luck, you say.

And you’re not the first person to, to, uh, to –, I say.

To stump you? you say. Well. You’re not the first person who was ever wounded by love. You’re not the first person who ever knocked on my door. You’re not the first person I ever chanced my arm with. You’re not the first person I ever tried to impress with my brilliant performance of not really being impressed with anything. You’re not the first person to make me laugh. You’re not the first person I ever made laugh. You’re not the first person full stop. But you’re the one right now. I’m the one right now. We’re the one right now. That’s enough, yes?

You’re not the first person to make a speech like that at me, I say.

Then we’re both laughing hard again in each other’s new arms.

The day slips away without us noticing. It’s summer dark outside. It’s not long, by the looks of it, till the light will come up again.

On my way downstairs to make us some tea I see the dining room table still out there in the garden on the lawn in the moonlight.

It looks unexpected. It looks unsafe, anomalous. It changes the garden. The garden changes it.

It strikes me, as I look at it, that the table is way beyond my control. Up until this moment, I mean, I believed I owned that table. Now, looking at it out in the open air, I know that I don’t. I know for the first time that I maybe don’t own anything.

If it rains tonight, the wood won’t warp immediately. But if we leave it out there for long enough in the open air, it’ll split. It’ll buckle open. It’ll stain. It’ll have little tracks all over it where wasps and other creatures have gnawed at it for nest material. Its legs will sink into the grass, grass will come up and round the sides of its legs. Bindweed will find it. Heat and cold will ruin it. Greenness will swallow it up, will die down and spring back up round it, will make it old, ruined, weathered.

I don’t know what I’ll think tomorrow or the next day, but this is what I think right now.

It’s the best thing that could happen to anything I ever imagined was mine.