New Cardiff

by Charles Webb

  ‘Not this morning.’

  ‘This is what I felt so badly about all night.’ She twisted the cap of the bottle and there was a crackling noise as the seal broke.

  ‘Peach brandy.’

  ‘It’s something I have to do,’ she said. ‘I have to go back into the past.’ She turned to look at him again.

  ‘Right now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Colin nodded.

  ‘But that’s what I lay awake about,’ she said. ‘I have to apologise to you for this, but once I start doing it I’m afraid it won’t seem like my apology was very sincere.’

  ‘Apologise for what,’ he said.

  ‘Inviting you to see the monument and then getting drunk.’

  Colin shrugged. ‘You’re on holiday,’ he said. ‘It’s not up to me to criticise you.’

  ‘But I was telling you all that stuff about cannons and soldiers charging up hills to get you here. Then I do this.’

  ‘Maybe you’re afraid of heights,’ he said. ‘Some people need a few drinks before flying. Maybe you need to steady yourself before going to the top of the monument.’

  ‘It’s not that.’ She unscrewed the lid from the bottle, but then sat quietly holding it.

  ‘Look,’ Colin said at last, ‘you don’t owe me an apology. I’ll enjoy myself in any case.’

  ‘At least this shouldn’t take long,’ she said, putting the bottle to her lips. ‘I haven’t been drunk for years.’

  He watched her take several gulps.

  ‘You’ll probably have to drive us back though,’ she said.

  ‘I will?’

  ‘After we visit the monument.’

  ‘Well that may not work out,’ Colin said.

  ‘You don’t drive?’

  ‘Not on the right-hand side.’

  ‘Oh, I forgot.’ She looked down at her bottle for a few moments. ‘Well look, I can keep my eyes out and let you know if you’re starting to veer over to the other side. But if it’s me driving we’ll be on the wrong side of the toad the whole way.’ She took another swallow.

  ‘You said this had something to do with your past?’

  She nodded. ‘My past,’ she said. ‘And you.’

  Colin’s attention was caught by a man who had come to stand on the grass several yards away from their car and who was aiming his camera up at the top of the monument.

  ‘Me and your past.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘How do I fit into your past.’

  ‘You just do.’

  ‘A past life?’

  ‘Oh no. I don’t believe in anything like that.’

  ‘Because it’s not like we go back.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If we wanted to sit around reminiscing,’ he said, ‘we shouldn’t really bother to sit down.’

  The man on the grass snapped a picture of the towering obelisk as Mandy took another swallow of the brandy. ‘Colin?’ she said, lowering the bottle. ‘You know yesterday when Joanie was telling you about me?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Did Joanie tell you I’m depressed because I don’t have the job to keep me busy at the moment?’

  ‘She said she hoped I would provide a care-giving challenge to lift your spirits.’

  ‘Because that’s not what I need,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not.’

  ‘No. I need more than that.’

  On the other side of the windscreen the man was motioning for his wife to stand in front of the monument.

  ‘What more do you need.’

  She held up the bottle to see how much was left. ‘I don’t think I can put it into words.’

  ‘Try.’

  ‘I mean I really feel like I’m helping people over at the Shores. And I’ve never had that feeling before. Which is really good.’

  The man clicked his wife’s picture, then she walked to him, took the camera and waited as he went to stand where she had been before.

  ‘God! You came here for a historical reason. How can I be doing this. How can I be getting drunk when you just want to experience the historical atmosphere.’

  ‘I’m experiencing it.’

  ‘How could you be. With some crazy getting wasted beside you in her car.’

  ‘It’s seeping through.’

  Suddenly the man whose wife was preparing to take his picture fell down on the grass as he walked backwards to get closer to the monument.

  ‘Oh Jesus.’ Mandy came forward in her seat.

  ‘He’s okay,’ Colin said.

  His wife laughed as the man got to his feet.

  ‘He just tripped.’

  ‘I thought he had a heart attack.’ Mandy sat back. ‘That’s what I’m like now. I always think everyone’s going to die. Someone will cough behind me in line in the supermarket and I’ll expect them to fall over dead. The other day I turned around and said, “Are you all right?” in this real serious way to some woman who had just cleared her throat and she thought I was a total nutcase.’

  ‘It’s hard to leave your work behind at the end of the day,’ Colin said.

  ‘It gets harder and harder.’

  The woman finished snapping her husband’s photograph and they walked away. Mandy looked at the bottle in her hand. ‘If you put all of this stuff I drank during high school in one place,’ she said, ‘it would fill up a lake. People I see from those days still call me Brandy Mandy.’

  He watched her take another swallow.

  ‘God, what we used to do up there.’ She leaned forward so she could look up through the windscreen to the top of the monument.

  ‘Non-historical things?’

  She laughed, then covered her mouth to stop herself. ‘What didn’t we used to do up there is more like it.’ She burst out laughing, but then stopped suddenly again, again covering her mouth.

  ‘You know something,’ Colin said, watching a group of older tourists coming out of the monument’s entrance, ‘I wonder whether this is really the best time to take this in.’ Up at the top he could see the heads of several visitors looking out through an opening in the stone.

  ‘Oh Jesus, I just remembered what Randy Carr and Kathy Lewis and Frankie Overmaster and me did up there one afternoon.’ She tried to stifle another laugh.

  ‘Mandy.’

  ‘I’d forgotten that time,’ she said, looking over at him. ‘I’d forgotten what Frankie Overmaster did to me up at the top.’ She held up her hand. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell you.’

  ‘That’s probably best.’

  ‘I’d never tell anybody that.’

  ‘Look, here’s my suggestion,’ he said, reaching for the bottle.

  ‘There’s just a little left.’ She raised it to her lips.

  ‘We need to start planning our return to the motel,’ Colin said.

  ‘We haven’t gone up yet.’

  ‘The historical moment has passed, Mandy.’

  ‘You know something?’ she said, holding up the empty bottle. ‘If I was back in high school I’d just heave this thing out the window on to the street. Somebody running over broken glass? You think I would have cared about that back then?’

  He reached for the bottle.

  ‘Oh I wouldn’t throw it out there now,’ she said, moving it away from him. ‘I’m just making the point of what an incredibly irresponsible person I used to be. And how I’ve changed.’ She tossed the bottle over on to the back seat. ‘But in a way I’m not happy to be responsible.’

  ‘Listen, Mandy,’ he said, reaching back for it and setting it down on the floor, ‘if I drive slowly enough, we may have a fifty-fifty chance of getting back to the motel without becoming statistics.’

  ‘But the monument.’

  ‘It’ll be here.’

  ‘I used to get drunk really fast—I just remembered that—but then I’d sober up again just as fast. It must be metabolic’

  Colin rested his hand on the handle of the door beside himself. ‘Let me collect my thoughts here a minute.�
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  ‘Everyone else would still be staggering around, yelling and pissing on trees, and I’d be sober as a judge again. Maybe that’s why I drank so much of it.’

  ‘Here’s what I think we should do,’ Colin said.

  ‘I loved my high school years. I don’t remember them, but I loved them.’

  Colin opened the door. ‘I’ll get in the driving side, and you slide over here.’

  ‘My brother’s in high school now. God—can you imagine having a brother ten years younger than you? He was unplanned.’

  ‘Mandy.’

  ‘I told him about you, by the way—I hope that was all right.’

  ‘Told him what.’

  ‘That you’re an artist from England,’ she said. ‘For some unknown reason Rob seems to think he’s good looking. So now he wants me to find out if you’ll draw his picture.’

  ‘Why does everyone over here feel they have to be good looking for me to draw them?’

  Mandy sat back in her seat. ‘Two years ago,’ she said, ‘Rob went born again on us. It’s really sad. Wasting your high-school experience as a born-again Christian. “Rob,” I tell him, “you’re only young once. You have your whole life stretching out ahead of you to be a Christian.’”

  ‘I’ll get out,’ Colin said, ‘and you slide over.’

  ‘Right.’

  He put his leg out of the car.

  ‘Joanie’s great, isn’t she?’

  ‘Joanie. Yes.’

  ‘God what a good friend she turned out to be.’

  ‘Here I go out.’ He moved farther out of the car.

  ‘But you know something? As great a friend as she is—and she’s the best one I have in the world …’

  Colin reached back in and removed the keys from the ignition switch, then got all the way out of the car.

  ‘As wonderful a friend as Joanie is,’ Mandy said, looking out the open door at him, ‘she still can’t see all the way to the bottom of my heart.’

  ‘Just move carefully over the little gearshift there and to this side.’

  ‘But you know why that is, don’t you, Colin.’

  ‘Why what is.’

  ‘Why Joanie can’t see all the way into my heart.’

  ‘Actually I don’t.’

  ‘It’s because two women’s friendship with each other can only go so far. But hey, that’s nothing against Joanie. It’s not her fault.’

  ‘This way, Mandy.’

  ‘Let’s face it. Fisher can see places in Joanie’s heart that I never will’

  ‘I’m coming over there, Mandy, I’ll help you from your side.’ He closed his door and started around the car but by the time he reached the front she had opened her door and was climbing out.

  ‘Go back in, Mandy.’

  She came all the way out, turned around and with her back to the car pushed the door shut with her foot. ‘Have you ever heard the song called “A Woman’s Heart”?’

  ‘Okay, come around to this side then.’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘“Woman’s Heart”. No.’

  ‘God it’s beautiful,’ she said, as he took her arm and helped her around the back of the car. ‘Let me think how it goes.’

  ‘Step up over the verge.’

  ‘Now I remember.’

  ‘Up here.’

  ‘“My heart is low”,’ she sang, stepping up on to the grass. ‘“My heart is so low. As only a woman’s heart can be”.’

  Keeping hold of her arm, Colin opened the door on his side of the cat again.

  ‘Whenever I play that for them at the Shores, everyone just weeps.’

  ‘Here we go.’ He moved her toward the door.

  ‘We didn’t see it yet,’ she said, pointing at the monument.

  ‘Another time, Mandy.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It has to be now.’

  ‘Mandy.’

  ‘Please. Really. I’m sober.’

  ‘We’ll come back tomorrow.’

  ‘You don’t understand.’

  ‘Mandy.’

  ‘Please listen to what I’m trying to say,’ she said. ‘Please.’

  ‘Well I am listening to you, Mandy.’

  ‘You are?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And I can say this?’

  ‘I want you to.’

  She took in a deep breath, and then let it out again. ‘Yesterday,’ she said. ‘When you came here yesterday. Or I don’t know what day you came, but when I saw you yesterday. When I came over to the motel—Joanie told me about you on the phone and I came over there and she gave me a key to go in your room and I went in there and I saw you sleeping on your bed.’ She took another deep breath. ‘I’m out of breath for some reason.’

  ‘Mandy.’

  ‘You said you’d let me say this.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I saw you sleeping there. And you were from England. I just knew it was my last chance.’

  For a long time it was quiet as she stood looking at him. She stepped back slightly, then forward again.

  ‘Last chance,’ Colin said finally.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘For what.’

  She turned her face up toward the monument.

  ‘Last chance for what,’ he said again.

  ‘I can’t even say it,’ she said. ‘I got drunk so I could say it, and I still can’t.’

  ‘Just blurt it out.’

  ‘I want someone to kiss me up there one last time.’

  Colin kept holding her arm as Mandy’s eyes remained on the openings at the top of the grey stone obelisk. ‘If I asked anyone I know to do it,’ she said, ‘I’d be the laughing stock of the town. But if I could just go up there one last time and have someone kiss me, then I could quit thinking about how my life’s over, how it used to be so much better, which I know isn’t even true, but that’s all I ever think about any more when I’m working over at Shining Shores, how I wish I was back in high school again. I don’t even know what’s wrong with me, but I don’t want to go on feeling this way the rest of my life, and when I saw you sleeping there I just thought maybe this is the last chance I’ll ever have, and then when you said the monument was the whole reason you got off the bus in New Cardiff, I just felt sure it had to be fate or something.’

  She stepped backwards, pulling her arm out of his grip. ‘Oh God, I didn’t think this would sound so fucking dumb.’

  She pushed some hair away from her face. Then they stood quietly several feet from each other, Mandy looking down at the grass as Colin looked at her.

  ‘I don’t know if I could compete with Frankie Overmaster.’

  ‘You don’t even have to kiss me on the mouth if you don’t want. Just on the cheek would be all right.’

  At an observation slit at the top of the monument someone was standing behind one of the mounted telescopes, moving it slowly back and forth to scan the landscape.

  Colin held out his hand.

  Mandy had forgotten there was road construction closing one of the streets between the monument and the motel, so as they approached the barrier she had to tell Colin to go all the way back to the monument and start over. He pulled to the side of the road and stopped.

  ‘What are you doing.’

  ‘Just resting a moment.’

  ‘Resting.’

  ‘Please, Mandy.’ He raised his hand for a second, then took a deep breath.

  Mandy shrugged. ‘You can go left up ahead, or make a U-turn and go back the way we came.’

  ‘Which has the least traffic’

  ‘Turning left, but that’s the longest.’

  Because he had almost hit a dog, and two cars had come up behind him and flashed their headlights into his rear-view mirror, Colin waited beside the road nearly a full minute till no other cars were in sight before driving up to the intersection and making a wide left-hand arc into the other street.

  ‘I have the same initials as Marilyn Monroe,’ Mandy said.

  He pulled up his le
g as a car suddenly sped across the highway in front of them.

  ‘Just keep going straight now,’ she said.

  He leaned forward as he drove, keeping both hands on the steering wheel. ‘Try and tell me a little sooner next time we have to turn.’

  ‘You’re doing fine.’

  ‘Why don’t you poll some of the other drivers on that subject.’

  ‘I just hope we get back to the motel by this time next year.’ She reached over with her leg, pressing down on top of his foot with hers.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said, as the car lurched forward. ‘Seriously.’

  Mandy draped her arm out the car window, looking at the passing trees and houses as they drove along. ‘Do the trees change colour in England?’

  ‘Not like this.’

  ‘What’s the difference over there.’

  ‘Not as many trees. Not as spectacular.’

  ‘It is spectacular,’ she said. ‘You kind of forget that when you live here and see it year after year.’

  Colin veered to the left to correct for driving too close to a cat parked at the side of the road.

  ‘What happened.’

  ‘I was drifting,’ he said. ‘You’d think the problem would be wanting to go into the opposite lane, but it isn’t. It’s overcompensating and drifting over to the right.’

  ‘Colin?’

  ‘What.’

  ‘What were you thinking about up there.’

  He slowed for a stop sign, waited for a car to pass in front of them, then slowly drove forward again. ‘What was I thinking about up in the monument?’

  ‘While we were kissing.’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know if I was exactly thinking of anything, at least that I can remember.’

  ‘Did you notice that little girl up there?’

  ‘Which.’

  ‘A little red-haired girl. She kept coming over to watch us. And then her mother would pull her away and tell her to look back out at the battlefield.’

  ‘I did notice her.’

  ‘I don’t think she’d ever seen two people kissing before.’

  ‘Or that her mother had.’

  Mandy pointed ahead. ‘Turn right up ahead.’

  ‘By the petrol station?’

  ‘No, the gas station.’

  Colin put on his blinker and slowed.

  ‘And you shouldn’t get so close to the kerb this time. You went up over it on your last right turn.’