The fact of her talent – maybe her genius – played a role, too. It added to the extent of his disbelief, this ability to be more than the thing he loved, and to present to the outside world an entirely different aspect. She was what he knew here and now, complete and rich and measureless, and yet when both of them were dead (and he found he could think about his own death again now, without fear), a world at least – many cultures, perhaps – would know her as something utterly dissimilar, a poet; a fabricator of sets of meanings that to him were just words on a page or titles that she sometimes mentioned.
One day, she said, she would write a poem about him, but not yet. He thought what she wanted was for him to tell her the story of his life, but he had already told her he could never do that. He didn’t need to confess to her; there was no need. She had already unburdened him, even if he did not know quite how. Memories are interpretations, not truth, she insisted, and rational thought was just another instinctive power.
He felt the slowly healing polarisation of his mind, matching his to hers, the alignment of all his prejudices and conceits to the lodestone of the image she represented for him.
She helped him, and without knowing it. She mended him, reaching back to something so buried he’d thought it inaccessible forever, and drawing its sting. So perhaps it was also that which stunned him; the effect this one person was having on memories so terrible to him that he had long ago resigned himself to them only growing more potent with age. But she just ringed them off, cut them out, parcelled them up and threw them away, and she didn’t even realise she was doing it, had no idea of the extent of her influence.
He held her in his arms.
‘How old are you?’ she’d asked, near dawn on that first night.
‘Older and younger than you.’
‘Cryptic crap; answer the question.’
He grimaced into the darkness. ‘Well… how long do you people live?’
‘I don’t know. Eighty, ninety years?’
He had to remember the length of the year, here. Close enough. ‘Then I’m… about two hundred and twenty; a hundred and ten; and thirty.’
She whistled, moved her head on his shoulder. ‘A choice.’
‘Sort of. I was born two hundred and twenty years ago, I have lived for a hundred and ten of them, and physically I’m about thirty.’
The laughter was deep in her throat. He felt her breasts sweep across his chest as she swung on top of him. ‘I’m fucking a hundred-and-ten year old?’ she sounded amused.
He laid his hands on the small of her back, smooth and cool. ‘Yeah; great, isn’t it? All the benefits of experience without the con -‘
She came down kissing him.
He put his head to her shoulder, drew her tighter. She stirred in her sleep, moved too, her arms around him, drawing him to her. He smelled the skin of her shoulder, breathing in the air that had been on her flesh, was scented by her, perfumed by no perfume, carrying her own smell only. He closed his eyes, to concentrate on this sensation. He opened them, drew in her sleeping look again, moved his head to hers, his tongue out flickering under her nose to feel the flow of breath, anxious to touch the thread of her life. The tip of his tongue, and the tiny hollow between her lips and her nose, vexed and caved, as if designed.
Her lips parted, closed again; her lips rubbed against each other, side to side, and her nose wrinkled. He watched these things with a secret delight, as fascinated as a child playing boo with an adult who kept disappearing round the side of a cot.
She slept on. He rested his head again.
That first morning, in the grey dawn, he had lain there while she inspected his body minutely.
‘So many scars, Zakalwe,’ she said, shaking her head, tracing lines across his chest.
‘I keep getting into scraps,’ he admitted. ‘I could have all these heal completely, but… they’re good for… remembering.’
She put her chin on her chest. ‘Come on; admit you just like showing them off to the girls.’
‘There is that, too.’
‘This one looks nasty, if your heart’s in the same place as ours… given that everything else seems to be.’ She ran her finger round a little puckered mark near one nipple. She felt him tense, and looked up. There was a look in the man’s eyes that made her shiver. Suddenly he seemed all the years he’d claimed, and more. She drew herself up, ran her hand through her hair. ‘That one still a bit fresh, huh?’
‘That’s…’ he made the effort of trying to smile, and ran his own finger over the tiny dimpled crease on his flesh. ‘… that’s one of the oldest, funnily enough.’ The look faded from his eyes.
‘This one?’ she said brightly, touching one side of his head.
‘Bullet.’
‘In a big battle?’
‘Well, sort of. In a car, to be precise. A woman.’
‘Oh no!’ she clapped a hand to her mouth, mimicking horror.
‘It was very embarrassing.’
‘Well, we won’t go into that one… what about this?’
‘Laser… very strong light,’ he explained, when she looked puzzled. ‘Much longer ago.’
‘This one?’
‘Ahm… combination of things; insects, in the end.’
‘Insects?’ She quivered.
(And he was back there; in the drowned volcano. A long time ago, now, but still there, still within him… and still safer to think about than that crater over his heart, where another, even more ancient memory dwelt. He remembered the caldera, and saw again the pool of stagnant water, the stone at its centre and the surrounding walls of the poisoned lake. He felt once more the long slow scrape his body had made, and the intimacy of insects… But that remorseless concentricity didn’t matter any more; here was here and now was now.)
‘You don’t want to know,’ he grinned.
‘I think I’ll take your word for that,’ she agreed, nodding slowly, the long black hair swinging heavily. ‘I know; I’ll kiss them all better.’
‘Could be a long job,’ he told her as she swivelled and moved to his feet.
‘You in a hurry?’ she asked him, kissing a toe.
‘Not at all,’ he smiled, lying back. ‘Take all the time you want. Take forever.’
He felt her move, and looked down. Her knuckles rubbed her eyes, her hair spilled, she patted her nose and cheeks and smiled at him. He looked at her smile. He had seen a few smiles he might have killed for, but never one he’d have died for. What else could he do but smile back?
‘Why do you always wake before me?’
‘I don’t know,’ he sighed. So did the house, as the breeze moved its equivocal walls. ‘I like watching you sleep.’
‘Why?’ She rolled and lay on her back, turning her head to him, the hair rolling bounteously to him. He laid his head on that dark fragrant field, remembering the smell of her shoulder, stupidly wondering if she smelt different awake than asleep.
He nuzzled her shoulder and she laughed a little, shrugging that shoulder and pressing her head against his. He kissed her neck and answered before he forgot the question completely
‘When you’re awake you move, and I miss things.’
‘What things?’ He felt her kissing his head.
‘Everything you do. When you’re asleep you hardly move, and I can take it all in. There’s enough time.’
‘Strange.’ Her voice was slow.
‘You smell the same awake as you do asleep, did you know that?’ He propped up his head and looked into her face, grinning.
‘You…’ she started, then looked down. Her smile looked very sad when she looked back up. ‘I love hearing that sort of nonsense,’ she said.
He heard the unsaid part. ‘You mean; you love hearing that sort of nonsense now, but won’t at some indeterminate point in the future.’ (He hated the awful triteness of it, but she had her own scars.)
‘I suppose,’ she said, holding one of his hands.
‘You think too much about the future.’
‘Maybe we cancel out each other’s obsessions, then.’
He laughed. ‘I suppose I walked into that one.’
She touched his face, studied his eyes. ‘I really shouldn’t fall in love with you, Zakalwe.’
‘Why not?’
‘Lots of reasons. All the past and all the future; because you are who you are, and I am who I am. Just everything.’
‘Details,’ he said, waving one hand.
She laughed, shaking her head and burying it in her own hair. She surfaced and gazed up at him.
‘I just worry it won’t last.’
‘Nothing lasts, remember?’
‘I remember,’ she nodded slowly.
‘You think this won’t last?’