Triptych

Their conversation had tightened into its usual spiral, from which it would never be unwound. There were moments of silence then.

"Make love to me like you used to," she whispered in the dark.

He didn't say anything. He moved his hand onto her breasts for a while, felt her heart beating, then stroked down her stomach, then lower, parting and touching in the way he knew she liked. Finally she gave a soft sound of assent, and he rolled his body to face her. They kissed.

He moved into her and they worked together, a dance they had performed a thousand times before, each move reciprocated, each practiced shift complementing the other.

They rolled at the usual time, she straddling him, her breasts dancing beneath his hands, their tips brushing his palms. She ground gently against him, and their rhythm increased until the familiar pulse of the muscles in her thighs let him know their mutual end was approaching.

The feeling was sharpened and polluted. As they came, he could sense the imprint of someone else's hands on her freckled shoulders.

He moved out the next day into a room in a friend's house. In her absence, a roar of pain had begun surging through him. He smashed a picture, kicked a door, howled into a pillow. He grabbed a bag and stuffed clothing carelessly into it and set off into the morning light, walking fast.

They met two weeks later in a café, calmer.

He had wanted to give the sugar lump back to the waitress, but a drip of coffee had run down the side of the cup and stained it.

He looked at her eyes, a dam between seven years of thoughts, and the present. The words he wanted to say would take seven more years to come out.

Speaking tied them into knots. Their feelings were bound so hard they could never untangle them. Instead, the distillation of all he wanted to say burned into a single tear. Months of arguments and pain, condensed into a hot point of liquid, rolled down the right side of his face.

He looked up at her. A tear was running down her left cheek. She grabbed two of his fingers across the table and held them angry and tender until they went white. She cared, but she could not cope.

A Romanian beggar had come in from the street. She came to their table, muttering pleas and holding out her hands.

She had the beggar's trick to cry. Sensing no response, she began to wail gently, and tears streamed out of her eyes, soaking both sides of her headscarf.

She stood between them and they ignored her, each staring into eyes that spoke what their mouths could no longer say.

A month on he needed to tell her he was leaving.

They arranged to meet in the park. She cried properly when he told her. Put her head on his shoulder and sobbed for a long time. He looked dry-eyed, over red sparks of light in her hair, at shafts cut shallow and harsh from the dropping sun, making long shadows on the grass.

They embraced for half an hour, chaste, their hips not touching. "Goodbye," he said without choking. The low light shone into her eyes, and he saw time in them, and a new hardness.

"Goodbye." And she was gone. He stood for a long time as the evening got colder, watching the shadows move and dissolve.

The city had become hollow. The streets they had walked together echoed with meaningless noises. The essence that made a tree a tree had gone, and only its shape remained. Birds flew haphazardly towards anonymous deaths.

He walked slowly out of the park gates, and left himself behind.