Page 39 of Never Tear Us Apart
Perhaps, like Sal, I will always be eighty years late now. And what does that mean for the people I have left behind? Would Dad care or notice? What about Kathryn, who gave me so much care from the moment she met me? It hurts that I can’t think of anyone else who would truly notice my absence. Is there a body – my body – prone and empty, waiting to be found? When they find it, will it show all my scars. Not only the physical ones, but the scars of the harm I did.
There is a burden of guilt that I carry.
The name of a seven-year-old girl that is etched on my ribs.
If I were delivered to that moment and given a chance to turn a different corner and make another choice, then this would make perfect sense.
But here? This time and place makes no sense – not for me or for Sal. And yet this is all the sense that I have.
‘Hey there!’ a familiar voice shouts up to me from below. ‘Stitches? Still following me?’
‘Danny?’ I call out, leaning over the railing as far as I can. I see his face in late-evening purple, gazing up at me from a balcony below.
‘Damn, there you are, just like Juliet,’ he says. ‘But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?’
‘Bit old for Juliet,’ I tell him, as surprised and pleased to see his face as he seems to be to see me. ‘Sal and I are having dinner with a count.’
‘Oh,thecount,’ Danny says. I sense a hint of dislike in his voice. ‘He’s a handsome fellow, I suppose.’
‘Is he? I hadn’t noticed.’ In the dark, I can just make out the pale shape of his uniform, the glint of his eyes, reflecting the moon. ‘You’re billeted here?’
‘Yeah.’ Danny looks over his shoulder into an orange-lit room. I can just make out a group of young men standing shoulder to shoulder around a piano. ‘We’re raising a glass to the guys who didn’t make it today. We lost four.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ Even as I say it, I know it sounds empty, meaningless.
Several still and silent seconds pass, and then I hear him say in a soft, low voice, ‘Can’t help but think if I’d been in the sky . . . then things might have gone different.’ And then, ‘Wait there. Don’t move, OK?’
‘Why? I should probably go back to . . . oh!’
Before I can finish my sentence, Danny has leapt up onto the low wall surrounding his balcony and climbed up on the flat rooftop of the building next door.
‘Boghod mieghek, xitan!’ A nun in full habit happens to appear from inside at that very moment and takes after him with a broom. Danny escapes her assault by bounding, climbing and swinging up onto the roof next door with terrifying fearlessness. She shakes her fist at him until she spots me, waiting for him either to arrive or die. Finally, after a suspense-filled second, in which he balances precariously on the low rooftop wall, he jumps down lightly to meet me, and she claps her hands in delight.
‘That was very silly,’ I tell him, smiling all the same. In all the madness and confusion, this man seems to bring a sense of calm and peace with him in every breath.
‘Not dashing, exciting and impressive?’ he asks, a little hurt.
‘What if you’d broken your neck? Then what?’
‘Oh, I wasn’t going to break my neck,’ he says. ‘I know how I die, and it’s not falling off a building while trying to impress a girl.’
‘What do you mean?’
He’s being glib, but there’s a dark undertone to his words, one no doubt coloured by the death of his comrades.
‘Oh, it’s no big deal,’ he says lightly, with a throwaway gesture. ‘It’s just that we pilots . . . we know that when our number’s up, it’s up. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s a way of getting through it, I guess, accepting fate.’
‘I’m having kind of a hard time accepting fate, right now,’ I say.
‘What – dinner with a handsome count not good enough for you?’ he asks, taking a step closer to me. ‘A man risking his neck to come and say hello not satisfactory?’
There’s no way to explain to him that I am lost in time. My fear of fate is incredible; his is made of brutal reality.
‘You must feel awful about your friends.’ I turn away from him, looking towards the pale gold light of the moon.
‘I do, and I don’t.’ I feel the brush of his arm against mine as he shrugs. ‘They were hardly around long enough for me to get to know ’em. And if I’m honest . . .’
We turn our heads to face one another. One side of his face is cast in gold, glowing and full of deep sorrow.
