
One Thursday Evening in Spring
A short story
I MET him in the park.
It had been months since we’d last seen each other. We sat on the first bench you come to if you go in through the side entrance, the smaller one that leads directly off from the main road.
I’d been there for more than two hours when he arrived. Not that I told him that. I pretended I’d only just got there. Just a few minutes before, I said. He was wearing his smart leather shoes and his smart grey jacket, which seemed odd, given the weather. It may have been for my benefit, I suppose. Or perhaps he’s working again at last, I don’t know.
I could have asked, but I didn’t.
I was in my old black jeans and the summer jacket my mother had bought me for my birthday, the day we went to the high street to shop and walked out of the department store to find two haggard-looking men with cans of lager in their hands shouting and spitting at one another. My mother had put her hand on my arm, quite firmly, and guided me away, like I was a child again, protecting me, taking me somewhere safe.
I must have already been pregnant then. Not that I knew. I didn’t even suspect.
It had been a grey day, cloudy, overcast, cold in the shade. But it had turned into a beautiful evening. Warm. The sky pale blue and the sun dyeing it pinks and yellows as it sunk. There was a coach leading a fitness session on the hill, making his disciples lunge ridiculously from one discarded jumper to another. In front of us a group of men were playing football. Some looked Indian, in long trousers and tunics, but the others kept shouting ‘hermano’ and other words I couldn’t catch as they passed the ball between them, so I guessed they were Spanish, and wondered briefly how they all knew each other.
He sat down close to me on the bench when he arrived. So close our legs touched. I felt my body lean in towards him, rebellious, out of my control, but I kept my face straight ahead, my eyes still on the football game. We didn’t say much to each other. There wasn’t much to say. But then I felt the baby shift and move and start to kick. I found his hand without looking. Took it in mine and rested it on my stomach, low, low, down beneath the belly button, laying it on the smooth curved ridge where the foot or hand was pressing out in its other-worldly greeting.
I don’t know how long I held his hand there. Me still looking straight ahead. Him mumbling words to the baby.
I didn’t look up when he left.
But once he’d gone, I realised the football players had gone too, left the expanse of grass bare in front of me, and I couldn’t remember seeing a single one of them go.
Words and photography ©Rachel Crews, July 2017
