FUTURE PAST

“Samuel Dean”

The doctor’s voice dragged David out of the dwam into which he’d drifted.
He picked up the National Geographic, opened it at random, and was immediately transfixed by one of those pictures that in reality only photographers see: a scene of such impossible, inaccessible beauty that it mocked the ordinary world around you.

The other patients in the waiting room had chosen Woman’s Realm, Car Mechanic, Golf Monthly and other dog-eared magazines. Anything to kill the time. There was a young woman in a silk blouse, two men who must have come direct and unwashed from whatever manual work they did, four older women, and a mother with a child who read aloud from a book she’d brought with her. Each in his or her separate space.

David was there to get the results of his scan and wondered who was next in the queue. The doctor’s voice answered his question,

“Marjorie Jones.”

The mother fussed to her feet, sweeping book and child together, suddenly awkward with activity, embarrassed to be the focus of everyone’s gaze.

He looked again at the picture. The black ghosts of tree trunks stood like prison bars, helpless against the rising mists. The dying sun made its last failing attempts at folding some warmth into the blue breath of winter. A single escape route stretched away from it into a hopeless, icy distance. To where? What future was it offering?

Suddenly, a memory came to him. Astonishing! He hadn’t thought about it for decades, but it was strong and central. At primary school there’d been a girl called Pamela Baines. She was a year ahead of him and everyone in the school knew that she was the most beautiful girl there. There was no competition. She wasn’t just pretty, she was from another world. Other girls were nice, pretty, fun, but for Pamela you held your breath. She was David’s first experience of the inaccessible. When he started going to the cinema, Maureen O’Hara, Susan Hayward, then, more explicitly, Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe would supplant her, but Pamela, walking and talking in the same playground, living in an ordinary house in the same town, and (on one hotly remembered occasion) brushing his hand with her fingers as she passed him a bottle of school milk, had burned the prototype into his eight year old brain. She was what he wanted in his life. She was where the road in the picture ought to be leading.

He was remembering not just the girl, but how he’d used her image. Lying in bed at night floating on the warm edges of sleep, picturing her, but in a very special way. He would see the playground at St Swithin’s. In the middle of it, Pamela sitting on a small school chair. He saw the brilliance of her eyes, her dark lashes, her brown curly hair which needed words other than “brown” and “curly” and even “hair” to describe it. Most of all, he saw her lips, dark as plums, shining in the sun, and he knew that when his own pushed against them they would be softer than any flesh he had ever felt.

But then, strangely, he constructed a queue of the other boys in the school, all of whom, he knew, were as desperate to kiss Pamela as he was. The line of boys curved from the chair back to the railings beside the steps leading up to Mr Strang’s classroom, but David never put himself at the head of the queue. For some perverse reason, he was always somewhere in the middle of it. Up ahead, he could sense activity near the chair as the other boys took their turn. He knew that whatever they were doing, it was pleasant, and the queue was shuffling slowly towards it. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to jump the queue, (he had formed it after all, it was his disembodied voice that was calling out the names), but he never did and, each night, he fell asleep before he even got close enough to the chair to see what was happening.
What was the queue for? Why deprive himself so regularly of the sublime? Partly it was because he didn’t want to hurry things; he appreciated even then the delights of anticipation. But partly, he now realised, it was because although the boy knew that you had to press your lips against the other person’s and sort of suck, he had no idea what it felt like, so he couldn’t make it part of his dream.

“Eileen Murray. ”

One of the older women was jerked into movement by the voice. she disappeared along the corridor to be greeted by a smiling doctor with a happy ‘Good morning’.

The picture still lay on David’s lap. It held no promise. Quite the reverse: its icy blue road led to a white fog. All around it there was beauty, but it went nowhere. There were no destinations. David had been to France and Spain, where the beaches and all the streets around them had throbbed with gorgeous bare-chested girls and women. But it was ordinary, sexless. In fact, the first time he’d actually touched a breast was when he was playing a game of truth, dare or promise with Billy Green, Colin Bowyer and a girl. He couldn’t even remember her name.
‘Christ, he thought to himself. ‘You’d think I’d have the decency to remember her name’.
No, all that persisted was the memory of Pamela. So much had been possible then.

“David Maguire.”

He closed the magazine, stood and went along the corridor. The doctor wasn’t smiling.

(PS. I know that the magazine titles should be italicized but WordPress makes italics impossible for idiots like me. Sorry if they offended you as much as they do me.)