“Me, too. Maybe you can cover us with another blanket? No, no, don’t move, don’t get up. Everything hurts so bad.”
“Yes.” He presses his cold lips to her warm forehead. He is losing his partial sight.
“I’m the Cheapside girl in silk and gold receding,” she whispers.
“No.”
“It can’t be me,” she says. “I’ve never worn any finery. Except that once. At the ball.”
“You’ve always been that great girl,” Julian says. “Clothed in purple and scarlet, decked in gold and precious stones and pearls.”
Drip, drip, tick, tock. The wind howls outside. Sounds like a blizzard is coming.
“I’m going to close my eyes for a minute,” she says. “I need a short sleep. Yes, a brief rest and then I’ll wake, and make you eggs.”
“Okay, Mia. You sleep if you need to.” His head glides over to hers, and his lips press softly against her lips.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing.” I’m kissing you the last time I see you.
Seconds fly by.
Suddenly, she opens her eyes and stares intensely into his face. “Julian!” She is gasping. Her expression is one of profound, crystal-clear recognition. “I know who you are,” she says in a rupturing voice. “My God, I know who you are! It’s you, Julian. O my soul, it’s you.”
“It’s me.” At the end of your days, the immortal secrets of all hearts are disclosed.
“Oh, my love,” she echoes hoarsely, in red remembrance of things past. “Oh, my love.”
I tried not to walk through life with a downcast face, Mia. Because of you.
Despite our troubles, there was glory in the uplands over the moors.
There was ecstasy. There was paradise.
I searched for you. You gave me shelter.
I may have taught you how to run in the rain, but you taught me how to live forever.
They stare at each other, all their memories entwined.
“You gave yourself to me,” she whispers wrenchingly. “You blessed me with your life.”
He smiles at her, into the face that knows him. “A bomb goes off inside the pub,” Julian says, with supreme effort raising his limp arm and cupping her cheek into his mutilated hand. “They sit and they wait. Ten minutes later, the waitress appears with their food.”
“I’m sorry the lunch is a bit dusty, my love,” says Mia, her voice fading. “The ceiling’s down in the kitchen.”
Part Two
Trace Decay
And soon, too soon, we part with pain,
To sail o’er silent seas again.
Sir Thomas Moore
Illustration by Paullina Simons
28
Morecambe Bay
WHAT WAS JULIAN?
Was he his injured legs, his blind eyes, his missing fingers?
No.
Was he his scarred head?
No.
Was he his empty gut, his grieving heart?
No, none of these things.
Was he his body?
Also no. When the breath would leave it, no one would look at his body and say it was him. They would say the body had belonged to him. It was Julian’s body, his property, but it wasn’t him. Like his house wasn’t him, or his Volvo, or his clothes.
Not his body, not his head, not his heart, not even his feelings were him. The feelings were what the thing that was him felt. They weren’t the man.
So who was it that the body belonged to?
Who was it who felt?
Who was it who mourned, who loved, who was?
Before everything else was his soul.
And what could a man give in exchange for his soul?
* * *
Not his body. Because the body was like London after the war. There wasn’t much left. The body had suffered primary, secondary, and tertiary blast injuries. It had lost half its hearing, half its sight. It needed to be patched and grafted and sewn up. It needed to be surgically renovated. Julian lost the ability to walk unaided and without pain. Most of the bones in his feet had developed hairline fractures. His body was covered head to toe in irregular Lichtenberg flowers, a sure sign of getting struck by lightning. He had scars on his face, on his back, on his arms, on his legs. His body needed intravenous antibiotics and a number of surgeries. Plastic surgery on his face to fix the scar on his cheek and above his eye. Surgery to repair the improperly set forearm, which, instead of healing straight, had hooked toward his body. Surgery for the anterior and posterior cruciate ligament tears that required a knee replacement. The surgery on his left eye that did not return his sight to him. There was light but no detail.
Tama the Maori warrior was wrong. Julian’s body could tell some story.
Too bad the storyteller was mute, on a morphine drip