Mr Chambers

by Tammy Bench

  Did all roads lead here?

  One thing he was sure of she wouldn’t be taken from him now. If he had to sell his soul to the devil to make it happen she would never be with another man ever again. Fuck goodbye and fuck doing the right thing, from here on out it was only about them.

  Calm down.

  She had said to him the other day she was afraid that he would tire of her in the real world. He wondered if she would ever understand how wrong she had been. How could he ever feel anything but love when she turned her big emerald eyes on him and playfully smiled?

  She pulled at his arm.

  ‘Give me a minute, baby,’ he touched her lips with his own.

  I just need a minute…

  The simple things he knew he would relish in their everyday relationship, like silly mundane arguments, wouldn’t be tiresome to him, it would be foreplay.

  ‘Tom, tell me what you’re thinking?’

  I will.

  And as time passed, years rolled and the lust gently ebbed away from them, he would watch the lines around her eyes deepen and still think she was the most beautiful thing he had ever witnessed.

  She in turn could tease him about his greying hair and plans for retirement that he refused to face. He could maybe even, at a push, imagine trips to the local garden centre for coffee on a Sunday morning as they grew much older – and he hated those places.

  A normal life with her and all their children, however that worked out and however many they had of their own or didn’t have for that matter, would be the purest kind of happiness he could think of.

  ‘What is it, Tom?’ she said again pushing at his shoulders, ‘Talk to me.’

  Okay baby…

  How was he going to say what he wanted to?

  ‘I asked you earlier this evening and I meant it,’ he said. The words catching in his throat, ‘…in the heat of things, but I was serious. Probably out of order but when aren’t I?’ he gently stroked her cheek and her eyes moved quickly over his own, searching for answers, ‘I swore I wouldn’t ever do it again after it all went to hell last time…’

  ‘What, Tom? You’re making no sense?’

  He grabbed her face in his two hands now, ‘Marry me, Alice.’

  ‘What?’ she stumbled over the simple word and looked away from him in confusion and fear, ‘I thought this was it? I thought you and me –’

  He tightened his grip on her smooth skin and made her look at him.

  ‘No baby, this time we have to stop playing.’

  Tom lifted her up quickly with his two hands like she weighed nothing and pulled his wallet out of his pocket. She looked shocked and her shoulders shivered. He placed her back down on the seat next to him.

  ‘Tom…’ she started.

  ‘Before you answer…’ he handed his wallet to Alice, ‘look inside.’

  Her small hands opened the brown leather slowly and peered in, ‘what am I looking at?’ her voice trembled.

  ‘The back section,’ he nodded for her to continue.

  Alice pulled out the small strip of card, two pictures of a younger them, his half of the set she had given him. She studied them for a long time and said nothing. A large tear fell from her cheek onto the well-loved photographs and he nodded.

  ‘Look in the coin bit,’ he said then.

  She un-popped the soft material and tipped it out onto her open palm.

  A small band of gold. A diamond. A question.

  ‘I’ve had that for fourteen years,’ he sighed, ‘I wanted to ask you when it would have been so wrong to. All of the nights we were together it was on my mind. Keeping you. Telling you. I wanted to ask a seventeen-year-old girl to marry me and that was the sad and scary truth that ultimately drove me away. But it’s yours. Baby, it’s always been yours.’

  ‘You’ve kept this ring with you for that long?’ she looked up at him and her eyes were full of tears.

  ‘The same length of time you’ve kept my heart.’

  EPILOGUE

  Sometime in the future

  June was hot, not that he was complaining. Peter ran out of his front door shortly after supper carrying his army style water bottle filled with orange squash and ice cubes. In his hand he had three homemade shortbread biscuits his mum had given him. One for himself and one each for his two best friends, Luke and Warren. Whom he called for on his way to the back fields.

  They often got dubbed the three musketeers by their parents and although they liked it – they didn’t really understand what it meant. They were ten-years-old so they would have preferred to be called the three Power Rangers or Ninja Turtles, something cool like that.

  They sprinted to the first stile and vaulted it. Youth allowed them to support their body weight with ease. Luke, who has leading, started coughing some way in front of him. Biscuit crumps flying from his mouth in all directions.

  Peter laughed, ‘you should have bloody waited,’ his strong Irish accent carrying the comment down the dirt track that was edged with lush grass and regiments of wild poppies, towards his friend’s ears.

  Luke turned around and made some sort of rude hand gesture, smiled and ran on ahead.

  They jogged past a few back gardens, turned a sharp corner and up a little hill. They jumped over the small brook that meandered past the bottom of old Mrs Murphy’s place and picked up the sticks and rucksack they had stashed there earlier in the day.

  Now they had retrieved their kit, they were ready. In the distance he could see their destination beckoning, it was only open fields from here.

  Luke and Warren called for him to hurry up when he stopped for a moment to reposition the backpack that kept slipping from his right shoulder as he ran.

  He waved back at them, ‘I’m coming guys!’

  Peter opened the cap on his drink bottle and took a long swig. He grimaced, it was too weak again. He’d have to tell his mum to put more cordial in next time. He pushed the bottle into the bag and ran on.

  About fifty yards ahead he glanced to the right. A small white house was visible at the top of a sloping tree lined garden. On the deck he spotted Mr Chambers and waved at him kindly. He was going to be his headmaster next year so needed to stay in his good books.

  Mr Chambers waved back, ‘Peter,’ he shouted in greeting.

  Peter waved again before he disappeared out of view.

  It was funny, the last time he had passed by he had caught Mr Chambers kissing his girlfriend. The man hadn’t noticed him though, and Peter didn’t call out or anything. Witnessing any adults ‘make out’ was a horrible thing, but your parents or a teacher? Well that was emotionally scarring.

  He had taken great pleasure in recounting the whole gruesome story to his friends, of course being a young boy he may have added some smutty details plucked from his own imagination to make it sound all the more gag inducing.

  He grinned. It was his little bit of security. He was anxious about starting big school and if Mr Chambers ever shouted at him or gave him detention he would take comfort from the knowledge that he knew he wasn’t just a scary teacher – he was a real guy too – just like everyone else. A guy who sits in his garden at night, drinking and kissing girls.

  ‘Hi.’

  He jumped. A little voice to his right caught him off guard. He looked in the direction of the voice and saw a small blonde girl smiling at him with a wide infectious grin. Her hands were full of the wild flowers that grew at the edge of the garden and her big green eyes studied him intently.

  ‘Hi,’ he replied, staring at her for a moment before a high pitched whistle drew his attention and ahead he saw his friends disappear into the cluster of trees.

  ‘Bye,’ she smiled again.

  ‘Bye,’ he echoed, turning from her slowly and he ran on.

  ‘Luke?’ he said as he neared the den and spotted his friends through the thicket.

  He quickly put all thoughts of girls, snogging teachers and detentions out of his mind. That was for another day, school was still months away and h
e had plenty of time to gather more revealing evidence about his future headmaster.

  ‘Bring the bag over here, Peter,’ Warren called in a hushed whisper.

  ‘Okay,’ he nodded.

  He crept towards them unzipping the rucksack as quietly as he could. He pulled out a small net and clean jam jar that his mum had put through the dishwasher for him.

  It was darker inside the den and cooler. Luke had the notepad and pen resting on his knee as he jotted down the date and time. Warren was gaffer taping his sister’s mobile phone to a nearby tree, so they could record it all on video and upload it to YouTube later.

  The atmosphere was electric. He could sense it in the very trees that surrounded them. The three boys, the musketeers, were poised on the edge of something massive. It was bigger than all of them, so important that they couldn’t speak of it to anyone and it was theirs alone for the taking.

  Tonight was the night they had planned and talked about. For weeks they had watched this place, now they were going to prove the legends true… tonight they were catching themselves a fairy.

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