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.”
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