Free Spirit of Progress by Steven Carroll Page A

was, but didn’tbecause it wasn’t necessary. Which was all the confirmation she required. In fact, in the years to come, when Tess recalls this afternoon, she will not be entirely sure who spoke and who said nothing in response. And she will conclude from this that either one of them could have. That they were both thinking it, and that it didn’t really matter in the end who said it.
    ‘The last time, I mean.’
    Again, he had stared back and just when she thought he wouldn’t reply at all, he did.
    ‘Yes, why not? May as well be now as later. No point…’
    ‘…dragging things out.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘No.’
    They were both talking at the same time. Even thinking the same thoughts. At least, that is the way Tess remembers it. She’d rolled over onto her back, with a vague sensation of September in August and the sad thought that they’d never share the spring, that theirs had been a winter affair and would stay that way.
    The tram shudders to a stop. Darkness swallows a man in an overcoat and hat.
    They were very sensible, in the end.
    ‘I saw it tonight, a glimpse of the end,’ she’d added. ‘You could have walked right onto the nearest boat. If there’d been one. Couldn’t you?’
    To which, and she read this in his eyes, he silently signalled that they could both walk onto the nearest boat. But they’d already gone over that impossibility again and again, and so he never said it.
    ‘So,’ she went on, filling the silence, ‘as you say, may as well. There’s no point hanging about when something is over. Is there? Not when you’ve known the best of things.’
    She said this, she recalls, the tram now slipping into the quiet inner suburb in which she lives, not so much as a statement of fact, not so much as a rhetorical question, but with the faint, residual hope that there might be. A point, that is. At least this is the way she remembers her tone as she finally steps from the tram and walks towards her street. But he had just agreed. And that was that. The impossible bowed to the inevitable. And she can’t even remember now if she spoke or just nodded.
    That was when she’d got out of bed and dressed. And it was while she was dressing that she caught the faint shadow of regret in his eyes, and knew she was right. This was the moment. Best to part with regret in their eyes. Her instincts were true. Had she chosen to stay he would have followed her. But she didn’t.
    She’d almost cried then. Almost. And feared she might at any moment. And so she spoke to take her mind off the crying, or the possibility of crying. And she composed her thoughts as she spoke.
    ‘It’s right. You’ll always have one eye on the next boat and one eye on me. And I want both of them looking at me.’
    Yes, she nods silently to herself, their little balloon world had been on a string, and she knew she held the string, but she’d let it go all the same. Yes, that had been it. And she’d looked around the room, trying to memorise it all, knowing that this was the last time that she wouldbe his, he would be hers, and they would be theirs. And just as first-time touch is a species of feeling on its own, never to be repeated, so too is last-time touch. As much as they would meet from that point on, even touch with a shake of the hands or a kiss to the cheek, it would always be a different level of meeting and a different species of touch altogether.
    She’d mustered one last smile.
    ‘Now, you just try to be nice when we meet from now on.’
    She still doesn’t know why she said that. Just to lighten things, she guesses. Just to make it easier. It was then that he’d moved towards her, his arms out, and at that point she’d stepped back. No, that backward step was saying, ‘This really is it.’ This really is the end. She knew she could only ever say these things once. And so, having said them once and once only, she had fled into the long, arching street that ran down the hill opposite Royal Park.
    Yes, she was