From Here Lies Deirdre Rachel Eames (dream(e)s)
Brigitte came out
the door. Startled she stood back inside.. He turned to assure her,
“I’m sorry for...”
She smiled, “Jack.”
Then following his gaze past her to the painting in the hall smiled
again and asked “Do you like it?”
He didn’t hear
her. This painting couldn’t exist: it could not be. Two young
people had been captured in a dance embrace. The boy back to the
viewer. The girl’s face, chin resting on his shoulder. The short
bouncy fair hair, a soft shadow above and around her closed eyes:
brown eyes, that he had seen open, smiling, full of life and full of
curiosity.
“Ho..how? Where?
How did you...”
Startled by him, by
his colour, and the sadness in his plea, she quickly answered, as if
her answer could change him; pacify him.
“I was sketching
in the wood. In my mind I saw them like this. I think perhaps they
were lovers.”
Softly he added,
“For a while, for a short while.”
They
sat in her kitchen at the back of the studio, the in-blown air
carrying the smells of the garden. Jack sat sipping a second Brandy,
the first had water-fallen quickly: burning then warming, then
soothing. He sat, the painting on a table, propped upward by a
Westminster Chime clock that ticked the seconds and chimed the
quarters and bonged the hours: sharing with a stranger the story he
had to tell; a story that in some strange way she had become part of.
He couldn’t
remember how they met. They drifted into being part of the same loose
collection of teenage companions, who went to movies, to tennis hops,
for countryside walks, for swims in the river and then later they
went to real dances, dinner dances and functions, always a pair
expected to be together.
Many times he tried
to recall the first time he became aware of Deirdre Rachel Eames.
Late at night unable to sleep, he tried to roll back the kaleidoscope
of scenes, searching, examining, discarding, all the time hoping, to
remember that first time: when his heart leaped and his insides
churned and he felt weak with happiness. He was certain that was the
way it had been: perhaps at the tennis pavilion on the Station Road,
or the Hall on Foxcroft Street, across from her Grandmother’s
house.
They would have
danced together: a jive? She liked jiving, her skirt swirling
outward, body leaning backwards, for moments trusting his
outstretched arm, his hand, his fingertips, to balance her and keep
her upright, twirling and smiling, happy and laughing; and then just
before she overbalanced to draw her back, upright and into his safe
arms.
They started to meet
secretly at the pictures: her mother didn’t want her around boys so
soon. She would sneak in just when the film started; wait while her
eyes adjusted to the flickering twilight reflection from the screen,
then vision restored she would find him. They sat together arm in arm
snug and silent and watched the world of gangsters, cowboys and
romance flicker its way into their young lives.
His story telling
was slow, sometimes long pauses held the story traffic-jam bound
while he waited to sort the images and find the train of events. On a
long pause: one that breathed sighs that might end the telling,
Brigitte entered the studio and brought back a small under-elbow of
brown backed frames. “More, I have more. They have been telling me
their story for a long time.”
“No.” Jack said.
“She has been telling you our story.”
