13. THE LAST FACE OF ALBERT TENCH

The last ... says it all.

The road was daisy white and green, and buttercup yellow, and it stretched in front of Albert Tench like a winding snake. Familiar yet unfamiliar, he inhaled the freshness of the air warmed by a summer sun.

“Where are we?” he asked.

The we acknowledged that he knew that he wasn’t alone.

“Where we were meant to be,” replied Miranda Tinkle with a girlish giggle.

“And who are we?” he asked, feeling he ought to know.

“I am me and you are you and we are we together,” she told him.

“That’s a bit tricky,” he smiled.

“There were moments when I saw you,” she sighed, “and so I saved myself for you. Remember the bicycle ride?”

He nodded, or rather, they nodded. “I was killed,” he said mournfully.

“I thought my heart would break,” she whimpered, “I thought that everything was over for me when I learned that you were dead. I saw your crushed body...”

“It was a secret stone hidden under loads of dead grass,” he told her. “Who could have expected such a thing?”

She smiled a warm smile. He felt it rather than saw it. “And now we’re back there,” she said, “but the winter frosts have gone away and we’re basking under the summer sun and all is well in the world.”

“But where are we?”

“Don’t you see, Albert? It’s the same path, and we’re the same people riding the same bicycles...”

He frowned, not seeing any bicycles. “That’s too cryptic for me!” he exclaimed.

“It was so unfair,” she told him, “so cruelly unfair! Who can tell what might have been if you’d gone to the trouble of staying alive?”

“I didn't die on purpose!”

“I know that, silly! But I needed to tell you back then, in the springtime of our lives, what I felt for you.”

“When we were thirteen?”

She nodded. “And I’ve done it every year after that, on the anniversary of that day, on Christmas day… I only married when I knew I was dying myself, you know, and I made sure my husband was called Albert so that I could whisper my final farewells to him, to Albert, to you...”

“Who are we, Miranda?”

“I told you. I am me and you are you...”

“And we are we together,” he groaned.

“As we were meant to be, Albert. Think of everything we might have seen or done or touched or felt, moments of our lives that might have stirred our hearts with joy, the children we might have had...”

“Hold on! We were only thirteen! I am only thirteen! I don't know anything about having children!”

“Don’t you?”

Then he remembered the first dream, the first shaping of his death, the birth.

“No!” he declared, positively.

“Then we’d better go back to the start and find out?” she suggested. “Look, there’s your brand new bicycle. And my older one, side by side, waiting for us.”

“What are they doing here?” He shivered, and knew suddenly that nothing under the known arch of the starry universe is necessarily what it seems to be.

“I must change into something warmer,” she said, and for the first time he saw that she was wearing that mini dress, that naughtily short mini dress that caught the least breath of wind and rode up her thighs so teasingly, the one she’d worn back then. And as he noticed the summer sun gave way to winter, and they climbed onto their bicycles.

“What is this?” he asked.

“A second chance,” she said, smiling at him, “a wonderful second chance, so don’t you go falling off that bicycle again!”

He might have replied, probably did, but his words were drowned by the roar of a huge tractor as it plunged along a road the other side of a low wall, and into a different tomorrow.

At the end of their ride they had Christmas dinner and laughed and their parents toasted each other, and the two youngsters went upstairs to get out of the way, and they shared a secret few thoughts like people do.

THE END

©Peter Rogerson 24.05.19