Dueling

So it was love at ten paces.

Because it was dueling he was used to, before the war taught him better, like his father making him smoke the entire pack of cigarettes, just like they told you to. It was easier now, here, with her. He could forget, then choose to forget, and remember what he had to.

She chose the weapons, which was only right. There was even a mist in the Melbourne night, a kind of charcoal edge to the Princes Bridge cityscape that suited a London gentleman's brawl. The Yarra was glass beneath them, dirty and blithe.

You have no right, she said. And she faced him down, took three steps away. Oh God, those were marksman's eyes. She was a sniper on a bridge! He couldn't help but smile, but he revealed to her no teeth, no stark aiming mark. He remembered her lips far more vividly than his own.

I have no right, he repeated, teasing her, making it sound a little like a question, but not enough to receive the mark. What do I have?

She took another step away. Someone was playing the bagpipes at the railway station, and the sound was more lonely and haunting than ever. This would set the scene for a great short film, he thought.

Don't be such a wanker.

Wait for the tenth step. Be fair, Lord Byron. Wait.

You called this love? he responded, ducking, weaving, angling: the experience of urban warfare giving him an instinctive edge.

What did you call it? Too quick this answer, she took two more paces away.

What does it matter what I called it. It was always yours. I was only renting. There, that suburban blemish, a kind of real estate death.

You weren't here. She was shouting now, like a drunk bitch, two more steps away. You weren't anywhere. Where were you? And she fell apart, she was on the chair in Orpen's Night, but he was cast as the foreground dead in Zonnebeke, and he conjured up his desolate browns with no trouble at all. He'd been there. He'd died there, surely?

This wasn't fair. He had brought the wrong ammunition entirely.

She staggered one more step, but was that another? The tenth pace had to be the boldest pace of all. Didn't she know it? Where was her education? She'd been to a boarding school.

He closed his eyes and waited for the bullet. He stood still. He listened to the bagpipes. Oh Danny boy? No, not that. Surely. When he looked again, he saw the back of her head in a taxi, more yellow than any coming sun. The world blinked. Disarmed and gunned down, he fumbled in his sweaty pocket for a bullet or a ring, but found only his two-hour train ticket to Belgrave.

Each pace he then took to the station was the first in a new set of ten.

jeremy