Mansfield

I never told you this, of course. I was high on a hill, and could see down towards the town. It had been raining, and I could see from my vantage point that on one side of the town, it still was. That side stood in shadow, but the clouds had parted somewhere above an old church at the bottom of the hill, and on that side there was no cloud, just sunlight and I thin, almost transparent rainbow. Stepping out of the station I could see Mansfield laid out before me. This was where you were from. The accents on the train had been your accent, soft and Midlands with short “a”s that missed out the “r” in “bath” and “path”. I wanted to throw my arms around every person I encountered who spoke like you: one day, I wanted to say, my children will be half this. This was your heritage. It was marvellous; It was grim, and dirty and real and it was beautiful to me that day. I could not imagine not being from London, not being near to greatness. This was near nothing good, and that gave it a charm, not that you would want to grow up here, but it was sweet, this market town with its flagstone square and cobbled borders. I saw hire-purchase shops from the train window and tried, and failed, to imagine a world where you would need such a shop. Not this far into the new century, prospering as we were then, no economic downturn in Essex. I was already storing up my Essex-girl-in-the-north stories for when I got home. I went into a chippy and they asked me if I wanted gravy on my chips. Too cliché. Better was the tale about how I asked for a vodka and tomato juice in a pub and it might as well have been a White Russian. When they located the tomato juice it was past it’s sell by date. I would tell this story in Hoxton with the low chuckle of the Cockney. It was quaint that you were from such a place. I liked it, I wanted to stay.

The hill was steep, and my legs overtook me, used as I was to the flats of the south. As I half ran, half skipped down the pavement on the hill, I saw that the sun was stronger, the rainbow more tangible now, I could make out all of the colours. The sun hit the bottom of the hill in a strange way as I approached it; dark clouds parted to let weak, winter sunlight underneath the black, and it looked for all the world as though the sun really was shining on this market town that had raised you. You told me that you would be at the bottom of the hill and so you were, standing waiting for me in the winter sunshine, smiling and lovely. I threw waved self-consciously, and you waved back. I wished I was the sort of girl who could throw her arms around you, kiss you on the mouth, tell you how glad I was to see you, how happy I was that you were here and that I was here on these streets that were yours but that were ours now. Instead I took your hand and squeezed it, but I know now all these years later that it was not enough, that I didn’t ever tell you how much I loved you and how much you meant to me. It was only there, standing in the lazy winter sunshine that I realised fully for the first time that you had a past, a real and solid past, and that your past was as important as the future I hoped that I was in. Perhaps it would have made no difference in the end, but our whole life together was based on untruths and like a complicated game of chess, and if I could have been honest with you perhaps you would never have left or thought as ill of me as you later did. Certainly I could have made you realise how much I loved you if only I had been less concerned with the game, with the thrill of the chase and the constant need to win. I should have dropped to my knees at the bottom of the hill and made you understand that my love for you was twice as strong as you knew, that it flowed in my blood, that it would transcend death, it would move mountains. Such clichés drip from my pen and would never have tripped off of my tongue, I would never ever have told you how full my heart was of you.