Strangers. Rosie Thomas

in a suit. Thank you for offering to do it, but I’m not worth it.’

      She hadn’t meant to let him see her crying, but the tears came anyway. Matthew made a little, bitter noise.

      ‘I can’t win, can I? You won’t marry me when I have no prospects. You won’t marry me when I do, because Matthew with prospects isn’t Matthew.’

      A space had opened between them, mocking their physical closeness, and Annie knew that they would never bridge it again.

      ‘I’m sorry,’ she said hopelessly. She felt smaller, and more selfish and more ashamed, than she had ever done in her life.

      ‘Tell me one thing,’ he said. ‘Tell me that it isn’t just because you haven’t the guts to cancel your wedding and send back the horrible presents and shock all your mother’s friends.’

      Annie lifted her chin to look straight at him. ‘If I was courageous enough to marry you, I would be courageous enough to do all that.’

      Matthew let go of her hand. He slid away from her across the bed and lay looking through the window into the trees in the square.

      ‘All the time,’ he said softly, almost to himself, ‘all the time until tonight I was sure that I could win.’

      There was nothing else to say. Heavy with the knowledge that she had disappointed him Annie slid out of bed and put her clothes on. When she was dressed she went to the bedroom door and stood for a moment looking at him, but Matthew never turned his gaze from the trees outside the window. She closed the bedroom door and went downstairs, and out into the square where the day’s heat still hung lifelessly over the paving stones.

      She never saw Matthew again.

      She went home to her flat, and found Martin sitting at the kitchen table waiting for her.

      ‘I’m back,’ she said simply. Her face still felt stiff with dried tears.

      Martin stood up and came across the room to her, then put his arms around her and held her against him.

      ‘I’m glad, Annie.’

      They were married a week later on a brilliantly bright July day. Their approving families were there, and the dozens of friends they had accumulated over the years of knowing one another, and they had walked out under the rainbow hail of confetti to smile at the photographer who was waiting to capture their memories for them. The photograph stood in a silver frame on the bow-fronted mahogany chest in their bedroom. Eleven years later, when she picked the photograph up to dust it and glanced down into her own face, Annie had forgotten how painful that smile had been.

      ‘I had forgotten,’ she said. ‘But it’s so vivid now. I can see his face so clearly.’

      The boat was rocking gently on the dark water, and in that movement Steve’s hand had become Matthew’s, holding hers, pulling her back. His voice was different but she knew his face, and the way he moved, and she could remember every hour that they had spent together as if she was reliving them.

      For an instant she was suffused with happiness. It isn’t too late, she thought. Why was I so sure that it was?

      She smiled, and then felt the stinging pain at the corner of her mouth where the blood had dried.

      Not Matthew’s hand. This man was Steve, a stranger, and now more important to her than anyone. She felt another pain, not physical now but as quick and sharp as a razor slash. It was the pain of longing and regret.

      ‘I wish I could reach you,’ she said. ‘I wish we could hold on to each other.’

      Tears began to run out of the corners of her eyes and she felt them running backwards into her knotted hair.

      ‘We are holding each other,’ Steve said. ‘Here.’

      The pressure of his hand came again, but Annie ached to turn and find the warmth of him, pressing her face against his human shelter. She was afraid that the weeping would take possession of her. It pulled at her face with its fingers, distorting her mouth into a gaping square and the blood began to run again from the corner of it.

      ‘It’s too late,’ she cried out, ‘too late for everything.’

      This was the end, here in their tomb of wreckage. The tidy plait of her life stretched behind her, the stridently glittering threads of the past softened by time into muted harmonies of colour. Martin and she had woven it together. She thought of her husband and of Thomas and Benjamin left to look at the brutally severed plait, the raw ends uselessly fraying. Sobs pulled at her shoulders, and her hair tore at her scalp.

      ‘Don’t cry,’ Steve said. ‘Please, Annie, darling, don’t cry. It isn’t too late.’ If they only could hold each other, he thought, they could draw the shared warmth around them like armour. He tried to move again, and knew that he couldn’t pull his crushed leg with him.

      ‘My mother’s ill,’ Annie said abruptly. ‘She’s got cancer, they’ve just told her. It must be just the same.’

      Steve could follow her thoughts, unconfined, flickering to and fro. The extra dimension of understanding was eerie but he took it gratefully. ‘No,’ he contradicted her. ‘Not the same sense of loss. No waste. Your mother has seen you grow up, marry. Seen her grandchildren. Illness isn’t the same as … violence.’

      He wouldn’t say violent death, but he sensed Annie’s telepathic hearing as clear as his own.

      ‘Perhaps … perhaps everyone’s death is violent, when it comes.’

      They were silent then, but they were unified by fear and they could hear one another’s thoughts, whispered in childlike voices quite unlike their own.

      ‘If they come for us in time,’ Annie said, ‘and there is any life left for us that isn’t just lying here, I won’t let any more of the days go. I’ll count each one. I’ll make it live. I’ve shrugged so many days off without a single memory. Dull days. Resigned days. Just one of them would be so precious now. Do you understand, Steve?’

      ‘Oh yes,’ he answered. ‘I understand. Annie, when we’re free we can do whatever we like.’

      Steve tried to think about how it would be, and nothing would come except confused images of Vicky, and of unimportant restaurants where he had sat over lunches, and of preview theatres where he waited in the dark for clients to watch their fifteen-or thirty-second loop of commercial over and over again. ‘Run it through a couple more times, David, will you?’ His own voice. ‘Did you learn all that at LMH?’ The self he had been. Work and play, alternating, undifferentiated, spooling backwards. And now the tape snapped, and the film he had only been half-watching might never start up again.

      Steve opened his eyes on the real darkness. He seemed to have been groping backwards for hours, failing to find an image that he could hold on to amongst so many that flickered and vanished.

      ‘Annie?’ he called out, seized with sudden panic. ‘Are you still there?’

      ‘Yes.’

      She sounded drowsy, too far away from him.

      ‘Annie?’

      He could hear the effort, but she responded at last. ‘Yes. I’m still here.’

      ‘Talk to me again. About your mother. Anything, just go on talking.’

      ‘I …’ she sighed, a faint expiry of breath and he knew that he was only imagining the brush of it on his cheek. ‘I can’t talk any more. You talk, Steve. I like to hear your voice.’

      When was the last time? That was what he wanted to catch hold of before it was too late, the last time he had felt the rawness of wanting something very much. The last time he had wanted something in the way that he wanted to live now, because he wouldn’t be defeated by a maniac’s bomb. Was that the key to it? Because he wouldn’t be defeated …

      Steve felt his head thickening, the