Imagined Slights

by James Lovegrove

  Rosemary for Remembrance

  At nine o'clock every morning, in scorching sunshine, in freezing rain, in sickness and in health, Rosemary would go down to the old brick bus shelter.

  In the sixteen years since the routes had changed no buses had plied this street, but still Rosemary walked down to the shelter every day and sat or stood peering out along the long straight stretch of road, waiting for a certain green bus to draw up and a certain man to disembark. In winter she would be there in her overcoat and the peculiar woollen hat she had knitted for herself (it resembled nothing so much as a tea-cosy), stamping her felt boots and clapping her mittened hands. In summer, wearing sandals and a plain cotton dress, she would sit where the sunlight reached in through the doorway, inching herself in one direction along the bench as the sun rolled in the other direction across the sky. She never brought a book or newspaper with her, occupying herself solely with the act of waiting. And after a day of waiting she would go home again. And every day for fifty-two years she had done this - even after the buses stopped coming, the buses she had never once climbed aboard.

  People called her mad, and Rosemary would have been the first to admit that this wasn't exactly normal behaviour. But she was not mad. Oh no. She knew that the bus she was waiting for would come eventually, and on that bus would be the man she loved. She was perfectly clear about that. She had been perfectly clear about that for fifty-two years. And when children streaking by on their bicycles caught sight of her lurking in the shelter and screamed, "Mad Rosemary! Mad Rosemary!", she would grimly shake her head (her heart was too callused to be wounded by the words of babies). No, not mad. Not unless believing a promise was a form of madness.

  There had once been a line of shops on the opposite side of the road from the shelter - an ironmonger's, a greengrocer's, a bakery - but when the first big supermarket opened in the city centre the shops had died, one by one. Rosemary had watched as the Closing Down signs were replaced by For Sale signs and then by broken glass and then boards, to which children had quickly added signatures and obscene slogans. Finally, in a long deafening month of demolition, the shops had been erased altogether, and now there was just a patch of hummocky wasteland littered with oildrums and tin cans and rotting lengths of two-by-four and broken chunks of brick and breeze-blocks and nettles and foxgloves and the occasional poppy. From this minor apocalypse Rosemary's bus shelter had for some reason been spared. Perhaps it was too small, too insignificant. Beneath the demolishers' notice.

  The loss of the row of shops had brought with it a gain, for it had revealed a view of the city beyond - rooftops and factories, railyards and copper-green steeples - a view which had entranced Rosemary and which had not staled with familiarity but had over the years become a part of her inner landscape, so deeply ingrained in her imagination that she could lie in bed at night and conjure it up, perfect down to the smallest detail. Rosemary had witnessed the rise and fall of tower blocks and the rise again of shopping centres and multi-storey car parks and eight-screen cinemas. Over the years she had watched the skyline fluctuate like a sea in motion. The city was never still. It was restless and ever-changing - something that could only be perceived by the eyes of a constant, faithful observer.

  And each day at dusk, when the bus had not come, Rosemary would sigh and brush the dust from her skirt and say, "Maybe tomorrow." And home she would go to the small, neat, scrupulously clean flat the council had appointed her, and there she would peck at a bird-sized meal before turning in for the night. And the last thing she said before she fell asleep every night, her private prayer, was: "Maybe tomorrow."

  And so it was for fifty-two years, until the day tomorrow came.

  It was a gusty November afternoon. Tramps had used the shelter the night before, and Rosemary had to huddle in the doorway, her face out to the wind, to keep the smells of urine and cider from her nose. Black-bellied clouds flowed overhead and there was the taste of rain in the air. Grit swirled along the pavement and sheets of newspaper turned cartwheels in the roadway. Rosemary had endured colder weather than this, but still the wind reached fingers through her flesh and twanged her bones like harp strings. She had never yet missed a day at the bus stop through illness, although there had been many mornings when she would rather have stayed indoors and in bed, when opening the door to her flat and walking down the stairs had been a mental as well as a physical effort. One of these bitter days might see her sicken for something serious. Sometimes she could feel an ache deep within her, like iron, like knives. What if she should be laid up in bed the day the bus came? What if she failed to keep her half of the bargain? Please God, no.

  As she shivered painfully, over in the wasteland on the other side of the road a flutter of black caught her eye.

  It was a magpie, resplendent in piebald livery. Perched on an outcrop of rubble, it was cocking its head this way and that, the blue glints in its plumage sparkling with each twist and turn.

  Rosemary watched the magpie, waiting, listening. The bird did nothing, merely stood and eyed the unpromising sky. Then a second magpie arrived, swirling down on splayed, gust-buffeted wings, to land beside the first. The two birds ignored one another for a while on their rubble island, with just a contemptuous flicking of tails to show that either acknowledged the other's existence at all. Then one opened its beak and let out a cry - ak-ak-ak-ak-ak! - to which the other replied in kind, and their chatter whooped and skirled in the wind. All at once, as if on a prearranged cue, both birds took flight, allowing the wind to lift them and carry them away and away until they were no more than dots on the horizon, twin specks circling one another into oblivion.

  Rosemary smiled gently to herself. Smiled knowingly. Perhaps today, after all...

  Now another sound drew her attention.

  It came from the west, and at first it seemed to be the noise of an aeroplane swooping in low to the airport that lay a mile or so out of town, beyond the ring road. Sometimes the prevailing wind blew sudden demented bursts of reverse jet-thrust clean across the city, the distant brays of gargantuan beasts.

  But this wasn't an aeroplane. The sound was too precise, too near.

  She had been fooled before, had let her heart leap with hope only to plummet when what she could have sworn was the diesel engine of a bus turned out to be that of a lorry or a taxi or a goods van. Nevertheless, bearing the magpies in mind, Rosemary listened intently, canting her head and squinting. And hoping. Dear God, hoping.

  There was nothing.

  Then there was something that shimmered into existence at the end of the road as though from a desert heat-haze: a green rectangle, growing larger, coming closer, gaining size and solidity.

  Suddenly trembling from head to foot, from scalp to bunions, Rosemary clutched the wooden frame of the shelter doorway. Yellow teeth crawled out to bite her lower lip. Straining old eyes, she made out smaller darker rectangles inset within the green rectangle; now what looked like a downturned drooping chrome-plated mouth; now two white eyes. It took her a moment to identify these as the windows, the radiator grille and the headlights of an old green bus. Now she could read the number on the front of the bus, although it wasn't any number she recognised. It looked like an eight on its side. The destination board below was blank.

  And she could hardly bear to believe it, and yet there it was, plain as day, trundling towards her. The bus she had waited fifty-two years to meet. Fifty-two years! Here it was. At last. Good Lord, shouldn't she be happy? Delighted? Delirious? After all this time? Instead, she was only apprehensive.

  The bus approached at a furious pace, racing the clouds. When it was less than fifty yards away and showed no sign of slowing, Rosemary was gripped by a sudden panic. What if it didn't stop? What if she had waited all these years only to have the reason for that wait whoosh past, leaving her waving and begging vainly in its wake?

  She stuck out her hand.

  The bus loomed.

  She gesticulated.

  The bus drew level with h
er.

  She yelled, "STOP!"

  And with a momentous groan the bus jammed on its brakes and, wheels locking, tyres screaming on the tarmac, white smoke billowing out from under its wheel arches, shuddered to a halt, lurching forwards on its suspension so violently its body seemed in danger of breaking free from its chassis and skidding on down the road.

  Rocking back on its axles, the bus came to rest. The tyre smoke drifted on.

  Ten seconds ticked by, ten seconds in which Rosemary had time to note the long narrow poster advertising Craven 'A' cigarettes and the fine film of dirt that coated the bus's bodywork like a second skin. Then, dimly through the smeary windows, she saw in silhouette a man rise to his feet and make his way down the aisle. He seemed to be the bus's only passenger. He exchanged a word with the driver, whom Rosemary could not make out at all, and then with a pneumatic hiss the doors of the bus concertinaed open. The man stepped out. The doors closed behind him.

  He stood before her.

  "Hello, love," he said.

  Rosemary hesitated, then said, "George," breathlessly, like a schoolgirl, like a giddy little schoolgirl.

  George braved a smile. "How are you?"

  "I'm..."

  Whatever she might have been going to say was lost - mercifully, perhaps - in the growl and churn of the bus's engine starting up.

  Exhaust pipe spouting black fumes, the bus lumbered off, and Rosemary looked worriedly at George, who was still struggling to make that awkward smile fit.

  "Don't panic," he said. "It'll be back."

  When it occurred to her to look for the bus again, it had disappeared from view, the sound of its engine mingling with the wind and fading.

  The wind dragged a strand of George's hair across his face, and Rosemary reached up to push it back into place. Her hand, brushing against his skin, felt its coolness.

  She said, "I hoped ... I mean, I thought you'd look older. I don't know why. I thought you might at least have aged along with me."

  "You look fine," he said. Irrelevantly, she thought.

  "No, that's not it at all. It just doesn't seem fair that I should have dried up and wrinkled and my fingers have grown gnarled - I've even sprouted a moustache, for heaven's sake! - and you've stayed, well... Perfect."

  He touched his moustache self-consciously, as if by wearing it he had inadvertently insulted her. "There are certain rules..."

  "I'm not blaming you," she said. "I'm happy to see you, George, honestly I am. It's been quite a wait." And with that, and a light laugh, she dismissed fifty-two patient, seemingly interminable years.

  "You didn't have to wait."

  "Yes, I did. What else was I supposed to do? Marry?"

  "I wouldn't have minded."

  "And who was I to have married?"

  "There was that Blakeney chap, what was his first name? Christopher?"

  "Charlie. Charlie Blakeney."

  "That's the one. He was sweet on you, I seem to recall. And he had money. He'd have made a good husband."

  "I didn't want a good husband, George, I wanted you."

  George raised an eyebrow in an immaculate arch and the smile settled more comfortably on his face. "Oh, you're a one, Rosemary. How I've missed your sense of humour. You wouldn't believe how boring it is where -"

  "No," she interrupted, cupping her hands over her ears. "I don't want to hear about it. I don't want to hear anything about it."

  "I'm sorry. How about we just kiss?"

  "I don't want you to kiss me either. It'd be revolting for you."

  "I've so missed kissing you."

  "You're looking at me. Don't you see me? Don't you see what I am? I'm an old woman, George! I'm old enough to be your grandmother!"

  "That's not what I see. Are you cold?"

  "No."

  "You shivered. Shall we take cover?" He gestured at the shelter, taking her arm to guide her in. She stood her ground.

  "No, not there."

  "Is there somewhere else we could go?"

  "How long have we got?"

  "A while. Enough time."

  "Oh well, in that case - there's a café at the end of the road."

  "May I?" George crooked an elbow, and Rosemary slotted her hand through it, and like that, like a grandmother and her grandson out for an evening stroll, they set off down the road.

  She was eighteen and a shop girl when George waltzed into her life at a tea-dance at the Hotel Grand; he was twenty and a bank teller. When he first asked her if he might have the honour of the next dance, she refused, bending down and pretending to adjust the seam of her best (her only) nylons. He insisted, she refused again, at which point Maureen nudged her in the ribs, hard, and whispered in her ear that she would have to be doolally to let this fish slip through the net. He was devilishly handsome, Maureen added. And so he was, and that was what worried Rosemary. Why should so handsome a man pick on so plain a girl as her, not least when there were a dozen prettier among those lined up along the wall? Might he be doing it for a bet?

  Nevertheless, she accepted George's third request. It meant something, that he had asked three times. She let him take her hand and lead her out on to the floor, and as the band warbled through a glutinously slow version of "My Blue Heaven", a muted tenor saxophone carrying the melody, she let him draw her around the ballroom until they were directly under the large crystal chandelier. There, beneath that glittering man-made constellation, he asked her name and told her his, and then they moved off again into the slowly spiralling flow of dancing couples.

  He danced well, but that was only to be expected for a man of his polish and sophistication. He led confidently and Rosemary was content to follow, fitting her slingback steps around those of his brogues. She found she was liking the feel of his dry hands and the rasp of his serge trousers against the front of her legs, and just when she was on the verge of enjoying herself, the dance ended, there was applause, and the whole band rose to their feet to hipsway through a faster, jazzier number. George broke contact, stepped back and said, "Only slow dances for me."

  "Oh?"

  "You can lose yourself in a slow dance," he explained. "You can drift out of time and it seems that the dance will never end. The fast ones just make time pass more quickly, and we're given so little time, so few years to live, it seems a shame to hurry things along."

  A few moments later Rosemary was worming her way through the cavorting crowd back to Maureen, who grabbed her and said, "Well?"

  "Well what?"

  Maureen rolled her eyes. "Am I talking to a simpleton? Did he ask you out, Rosie? Are you going to see him again?"

  "Yes," said Rosemary vaguely. "Yes, we're going to the pictures. Tomorrow evening."

  It was a good year for the pictures. Rosemary was especially looking forward to The Wizard of Oz, about which she had heard so much, but as it hadn't yet reached this corner of the world she was quite happy to settle for Wuthering Heights.

  George was late arriving at the cinema, and it occurred to Rosemary as she waited outside that she was being stood up, and just as she was steeling herself to go home, nonchalantly around the corner sauntered George. Catching sight of her, he took the Capstan from his lips, ground it out beneath his heel, then pecked her on the cheek. "Shall we go in?"

  Now that he was here, she was glad that he had been late. She had been hoping to miss the newsreel. He wasn't quite late enough, however, and the few minutes of Pathé they did catch left Rosemary feeling sick and dizzy as the knowledge of what was coming tightened its coils inside her. Not even the Porky Pig short could completely dispel her sense of dread. George smoked his Capstans all the way through the main feature, adding to the wreaths of cigarette mist that floated above the audience's heads, into which the projector shed ghost images - phantoms of Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon flitting across a spectral moor - before the true images finally reached the screen. Towards the tragic dénouement of the film George took Rosemary's hand in his, enclosing her fingers in smooth dryness. She coul
dn't be sure through the blur of her own tears but she had a pretty good idea that he was crying, too.

  He was an unusual man, she thought. He looked like a dashing gay blade - and she had met enough of those to know what a waste of time they were, mentioning no names, Charlie Blakeney - but he had an intelligence and a subtlety, an intrinsic wryness, an inner smile, that you couldn't help but love. Love? Had she just thought the word "love"? Silly thing! Warm to. That was what she had meant to think. Or like. You couldn't help but like. Yes.

  They walked out into the August evening. The entire western sky from zenith to horizon was filled with milky orange light, as though reflecting the glare of a vast furnace burning over the edge of the world.

  "I must be getting home," she said. "My parents..."

  "I understand. May I see you again?"

  She laughed in surprise. "Of course."

  "This weekend?" he said. "What are you doing this weekend?"

  There was not much life in the café. An indolent chef tended chips in a bubbling fat-fryer, every so often giving the basket handle a good shake, the peak of his culinary expertise. A sleepy waitress lounged on the counter watching a studio discussion programme on a portable TV set. The only other patrons apart from Rosemary and George were a pair of grey-headed old men stirring their tea and studying the sports pages. Even the flies circling around the ultraviolet light on the wall seemed in no hurry to close in and meet their deaths on the electrified grille that stood between them and the mesmerising white-purple glow.

  "Yes?" the waitress called over to the two new customers as they settled down at a table.

  "Nothing for me," George told Rosemary.

  "Just coffee for me," Rosemary told the waitress, who repeated the order sardonically (it was hardly stretching her service skills to fetch a cup of coffee). "I shouldn't," Rosemary confided to George, "what with my bladder and all, but then this is a special occasion."