A Million More Tomorrows

Chapter 19

CHAPTER 19

A musk of grainy blackness was already threading itself among the blue outside by the time they woke, like photograph noise blotting the sky. There was some improvised food, and then some gloved talking for a while, and then it was almost entirely dark outside.

"What is it?" Lola asked, finding Paul holding one of his canvases aloft in the hallway. A lone candle lit the length of it.

"Remember this?" he asked, inspecting one of his older works. It was a watercolour of the Dover cliffs; a tribute to a photograph he'd taken himself, though it wasn't quite right somehow. The alabaster sky met the sea all too sharply. The perspective was noticeably off.

As a slightly younger and much more self-assured man, Paul had ventured to take up painting semi-seriously. It had paid some of their way for a while, though not by enough as their needs evolved. Eventually he dismissed the canvases and brushes as folly, and had found gainful work as a designer of sorts, manifesting logos for companies he did not care about. He loathed it, and rarely spoke about it even to Lola; it was pushing digital pixels around inside a grey box, tweaking them endlessly to someone else's whim. It wasn't art. Painting was different. It was freeing.

"Dover?" Lola said. "That's my favourite one, you know. I bet you don't even remember why you painted that."

"We went there, didn't we?" He didn't look up. Something that was supposed to be a furrow of sea protruded outwards from the canvas, thickly. He picked at it critically with the tip of a finger, peeling the acrylic.

"Well yes, but we've been lots of places."

Paul lowered the picture and arched an eyebrow. "We certainly have," he replied with a grin. He didn't understand his own innuendo, but he hoped at least that the inflection made clear his intentions.

"You don't remember, do you?"

He said: "Nope. Not at all."

"That was where we were when you told me you loved me," Lola insisted. "On that boat to France."

"Was it?" Paul looked down at the painting again, tilting it in every direction as though doing so would unlock some extra knowledge hidden beyond the edges. "What about Laos?"

"No I think..." She paused. "Oh. Oh I don't rem–" She screwed her face inwards. "This is weird; I don't remember."

"Same," he said, putting the picture down. He took a step back and admired the extent of them, all leaned against the hallway wall, each one a window to elsewhere. There were 17, and they were supposed to have been hung a long time ago; the good ones were supposed to be in view. She put her hand on his shoulder from behind, then shifted it to rub the back of his neck, pushing the skin across itself. He faced the wall, still peering at the row of pictures, and asked: "Are we still going to have the party today?" Lola removed her hand from his back; he spun and caught it as it sailed back to her body. She had put makeup on for the first time that week, and a summer dress with a floral pattern on. He couldn't believe how much she still looked like the 20 year-old he had met 16 years prior. She was beautiful. "I think we should," he said.

She exhaled: "Paul," sadly, but without any end to the sentence.

"I mean, not the same party we were going to have, but I'm here, and you're here, and that's, I dunno; that's something. Isn't it?"

He moved in to take her other hand, but she freed them both to hug him, sliding her head into his collarbone. In a suppressed tone, which resonated through him, she agreed. And they stayed there like that for a while, before eventually he pulled her back away and walked into the kitchen, saying that he had to 'get things ready', and that Lola should rest.