I saw you last week. An unremarkable man in a supermarket queue, buying normal stuff that people buy. Toilet roll and indigestion medicine. Ready meals and a bottle of wine. Your shoes were a bit scuffed, your hair brushed carefully but not enough to hide how thin it has become.
You don’t dye it any more, I noticed. It’s just brown. Ordinary. Your eyes have bags under them now, and the front of your polo shirt stretched a little over your belly. But seeing you shook me so hard I froze, one hand on the trolley handle and the other holding my list. When the electric shock passed and I could move again, I ducked down the next aisle and stared at bags of dog food.
I don’t even have a dog.
I kept looking, under my fringe. Is it really you?
While I shopped for my imaginary pets, you paid for your boring stuff and put it in a crumpled bag for life. As soon as I was sure you had gone, I abandoned my list and just paid for what I’d got. The teenage girl on the till looked at me as I pulled a single pot of diet yogurt and three family size bottles of milk from the giant trolley.
‘I have a bad back,’ I lied. ‘I can’t carry baskets.’
She looked at me again, then back at the trolley. She spoke but I was too far inside my own head to hear anything. I still don’t know whether I wanted you to turn back and see me. I wonder if you would have seen me now, or as I was then. Because under the plump little middle-aged man I still saw you and it made my head spin.
You see, that song is still on a playlist, on my phone. I only play it when I am alone because I don’t trust my reactions not to show. I don’t want anyone else to see me remembering you.
Even down all these years, one note of it and I’m back. The road disappears beneath the wheels, and we are cocooned in the back of a friend’s car hammering down the empty three am motorway to Brighton.
I wake up with your arm around me. I can smell your leather jacket, then our teenage mix of sweat, smoke and alcohol. Eighteen and invincible the pair of us, driving into the darkness because we could and there was petrol enough and road enough and time enough for anything.
There’s a twist in my belly every time I hear that song, remembering it. So long ago. All that summer I was sick with wanting you so much. Daytimes while we weren’t together, just the thought of you made my mouth go dry. Then every evening I sat outside the pub, waiting. The first sight of you would make my whole body sing. When you spoke to me I couldn’t breathe. There was never enough air in the room when you were in it.
We met one summer evening, alone at a crowded table, talking only to each other. I drowned in your eyes early on, your voice stabbed me gently and I was done. We both just waited for the end of the night to walk, miles through the suburban night, talking and laughing and all the time I was just waiting for the moment you turned me against a London redbrick wall and kissed me.
That moment, that song, in the car was the height of it. One night of a summer which lives in my memory as if it lasted years but in reality was no longer or shorter than any other. A couple of months between this and that, one life and the next. Somewhere on the road between London and Brighton there I still am, suspended in time with your arm around me and the music in my head as the road spins out behind us.
