Bill cannot tell her how things went from there like little movements down a mountain, from this pinnacle of breathless, violent joy to some half way limbo and then suddenly it was as if the two of them were home free and there were no more obstacles, except that a crucial, exploratory urge had left them. But perhaps the pretty nurse feels the hurt under his skin in the same, simple way plants pull water out of the earth, perhaps she senses that what he is saying is that this is his one experience of romantic love and after that night, he was all done. That was the damndest part, being done with love so soon and with such permanence.
         The lift turned up, he says, instead. That’s what happened.
         So is that what you wanted to tell me?
         Yeah, that’s it.
         He is quiet for a minute, thinking of Stephen Hopkins in Clare College Gardens. Up until this morning he has only imagined them in the dark, under the trees in the same square foot of decanted light, but now he remembers that before this, at dusk, they were walking along the main road into the city and a dog ran out, a terrier or something equally small and snappy, scared the bejesus out of them. He remembers too that on Stephen Hopkins’ thumb was a wart the size of a small button and all the while the dog was snapping in circles around them it seemed that if Bill pressed the button a connection might be made, a circuit completed. But when the shock died down and the dog ran off into the bushes there was no reason for their hands to be touching in any way. He had not pushed the button. More and more things, he realises, are going to become like this, memories without focus like inexpert photographs with no-one to identify them, just a guessing game of disparate months, weeks, days.

16

  

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