The Long Ride Home
She kissed him goodbye, knowing he wouldn’t remember her tomorrow. That was what she was
hoping for, but after so many years of marriage, she knew it wasn’t true. He said:
“We loved each other. We’ll always love each other.” The light summer breeze swept against their faces, soothing like a moisturiser of the soul. Sarah gazed out over the pier. She looked at a ship gradually getting closer, as it moved effortlessly towards the harbour. A gentle smile on her freckled face betrayed the solemnity of the situation. The ship was like a metaphor to her. For by the end of today the journey would have ended. Her hands were clasped, prayer like, as if in final agreement with herself that the right decision had cemented itself and she could move forward.
David, his back facing to the sea, had the heel of his shoe locked on the bottom rung of the pier rail and he squinted into the July sun as his elbows rested on the top rail. He looked like a teenager trying to impress a new girlfriend. But they were too far gone for that. He tried to absorb Sarah’s words. Not processed yet. Still pouring through his brain’s troughs and valleys, an imaginary gatekeeper holding them at bay. It had been weeks since she had spoken to him first and now…
A child, only about three years old, ran past as her father trotted beside her, one of his hands a close distance to her shoulder. The little girl giggled uncontrollably as her father, looking at David, threw his eyes to heaven. David, who was no longer part of the masonic group of young fathers felt no natural requirement to reciprocate, but smiled limply. A nod to his past, a signal to acknowledge somewhere deep within, the bond of protective fathers never left. What would Amy think of the news?
Sarah turned around, not alert to the child but to a flock of seagulls which circled above, screeching vociferously. Their “Yaw yaw” and then, fast intermittent cackling bursts like a Tommy gun firing volleys above their heads.
David watched her. One hand to her brow, blocking the piercing sun. A swathe of curly hair swirled over her fingers as she steadied her position.
“Jeepers, they’re noisy!”
He marvelled at her. The things he loved. Her beautiful fair hair. As soft as velvet. The way she never used bad language, her calmness. Even now.
“If we love each other…” he started to ask. The question lost substance and waned. It had been asked too many times before. Sarah’s sympathetic look made him feel like a schoolboy who wasn’t allowed go out because an aunt was coming to tea.
Two of the seagulls landed and stood solemnly, as if to show their allegiance rich in the knowledge of the couple’s gloom.
“Would you eat chips?” Sarah looked at him. A peace offering smile adorning her un-hateable face.
He smiled back at her. Resigned to their fate. Even now he knew she was doing the right thing. How could she be so perfect?
They ambled back along the pier. Sarah, arms folded around the elbows. She gazed at the ground before her, a soft smile, showing contentment. David pressed his hands into his jeans, his body language betraying his efforts to be cheerful for their “day out.”
He couldn’t give up like this, and despite his mind telling him to be quiet, the nerve that connected his heart to his tongue exploded.
“Twenty-five years is a long time.”
It was a statement more than anything. A point of fact that could neither be denied nor disputed. It was a metaphorical stick being poked at a sleeping bear. Something to stimulate some dormant morsel of love, trapped, deep somewhere inside Sarah, that perhaps she didn’t realise existed.
In reality, it was a desperate last throw of a worn-out dice. Sarah looked out to sea. Her face grimacing. He tried to decide if it was from the sun or from him. Perhaps even she had limits and his persistence was now a burden. ‘Every hero becomes a bore, at last.’
In the distance, some clouds were forming. Not storm clouds. Just a simple mass of summer clouds that would shortly block out the sun.
“Looks like a change is coming.” Sarah said, never taking her eye from the sea.
It was only as they approached the chip van that David realised, he was nodding.
************************
They sat on a low wall eating chips from a carton. David hated how Sarah always put her ketchup on a hankie or serviette instead of smearing it wide like he did!
“Ho’…ho’…They are very hot!” Sarah’s feet danced as she sat, trying to cool her mouth and talk at the same time.
“You don’t see these anymore.” David held the chip carton in her direction and held a red plastic fork erect. He was leaning back on an elbow and looking up at her. “Like being back in the eighties.”
“Seventies.”
“What?”
She finished eating a chip, gingerly. David looked at her in expectation.
“It was more the seventies than the eighties when they were out.”
“You only think that because you’re older.”
Sarah kicked his ankle, smiling.
“I love the smell of chips. Especially outdoors.”
“It’s the sea that makes it special.” David added.
Sarah lay back and placed her head on his shoulder. “Love makes everything special.”
She stood up suddenly. Brushing salt from her jeans and licking her lips.
“Come on, let’s go for a walk down the beach while it’s still nice.”
“Do you want a cardigan? I can run back to the car”
She looked at the sky as if it would advise her meteorologically on what to wear.
“No. I’ll be grand. Come on.”
“But I’m not finished my…”
“Eat them on the way,” she interjected. An arm beckoning in the direction she had already headed to.
He looked at her. She was smiling as she looked back at him. Half of her face covered with her hair, her body twisted between going forward and speaking to him. At odds with itself. Like they were now. The happy past and the stagnant and saddening present. He knew he would always remember this image. In the years that would follow. Lonely nights waking to see her looking back and smiling. Would it be years?
They strolled along the beach. The wind seemed to usher the waves to become louder and bigger as the clouds gained traction. They didn’t seem as white now as they had earlier.
“Cooler than I thought.” Sarah wrapped her arms around herself. Her hair blowing wildly in the breeze.
“What will we say to the kids?” David put his arm around her.
“They are hardly kids.”
“They will always be kids to me.”
Sarah looked ahead as if searching for something in the distance. “They’ll be fine.” she said. They have their own lives to live.”
David mirrored her as if looking to see what she saw.
“I suppose,” he reflected and withdrew his hand to join it with its match behind his back.
“Will we head back?” he asked, looking at the fast-approaching clouds.
Sarah gave a shiver.
“Yes, it’s definitely getting colder.”
They climbed the few steps from the beach that led to the road. A grass verge ran along the footpath and they politely stepped aside onto it as an elderly lady passed them. She was pushing whom they presumed was her husband in a wheelchair. Sarah and David looked on after them, almost transfixed. Neither of them said a word and continued on back to the car.
“Do you remember the time we came out here and Shane wanted an ice-cream?”
Sarah laughed.
“Yeh and you trying to be the big daddy, not letting him have it because it would ruin his tea. Bringing a child to the seaside and telling him he couldn’t have an ice-cream. Ya big eejit!”
“Then Amy started crying, and I felt guilty and bought them buckets and spades!”
“And ice-cream!”
Their laughs petered out to a companionable silence.
“Have you another fella…?”
“No! I don’t. And don’t be asking me that type of stuff. You know it’s not about that.”
He really had annoyed her now. The silence returned until they reached the car.
****************
“Ooh, it’s good to be back. Looks like there will be rain after all,” Sarah said, fixing her hair in the mirror of her sun visor.
David pulled out into the traffic and they drove in silence for what seemed like forever.
Eventually he said, “I guess life just changes. It’s like, we grow older and we all have different needs.” He spoke as if the realisation to a maths problem had just come to him and he finally knew how to solve it now, he had been shown.
She reached over and placed her hand on his as it rested on the gearstick. She felt the lines on his skin, hardened by the years. Skin that burned on summer holidays with her, skin that had been cut in DIY accidents for her, skin that had caressed her lovingly, tenderly. Skin, soon she would no longer hold.
“What about when we’re older?” he asked. Another question demanding an answer. Making him angry as he tried again, as he had for weeks now, to decipher this bigger puzzle.
She replied calmly, and David remarked internally how she had obviously come to terms with this, weeks before… probably.
“What do you mean?” she said.
“I’m only fifty-three. When I’m seventy-three, eighty-three...Will I still know you? Will I remember today? The walk. The chips the…” He banged his hand on the steering wheel. The build-up of frustration at last exploding like Vesuvius on a bad day.
There was silence again. Eventually she said, “You are only fifty-three, David. That’s the point.”
But inside there was no point. To any of this. Why in the name of God at this stage of their lives would she want to do this? Had they not been working together at all? Maybe after the seven-year itch, but they had two adult children! Was it the menopause? The raging came to a crescendo as it had done for the past week. And would again in the future. Like his blood pressure, pulsing, tormenting and sinking back like a pot coming off the boil.
He gazed ahead and eventually turned to her. He nodded. A new resolve? She couldn’t say.
“Here’s the rain.” A few drops smacked onto the windscreen. Decimating themselves as they hit. Harsh, loud dollops and soon after, a downpour.
“We were lucky,” she said, with a nod to the windscreen.
David smiled.
“We were. But the rain never lasts long before the sun comes back.”
She looked at the side of his head.
“Very deep.” she said, smiling.
He smiled back and looked ahead. And all he could see was a rainbow.
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