Read by Sophie Morris-Sheppard
“Gis a kiss!” the third of the trio of dinner jackets hollers as I pass. I pause, my stiletto staccato silenced. Pause and turn.
I’d ignored the wolf whistle from the shortest of them, hair thinning, face gleaming with an alcoholic sweat despite the cold, dress shirt open at the neck to reveal, of all things, a vest. Gave a small smile at the caddish “Hello!” more for the nostalgic echo it inspired than because of the easy-on-the-eye black guy who probably doesn’t know who Terry Thomas is. Was.
They’re staring back at me, these three over-dressed goons, the Northerner to the fore, half surprised I’ve stopped, half expectant. Expecting what? A put down? A casually thrown expletive? It’s more than a month after Christmas, New Year is a distant memory. Why the monkey suits? Do they work for some company saving money by having their annual bash in the cold, grey beginnings of the year? Or perhaps they’ve been to some industry award ceremony, the free alcohol cutting through the tedium of the speeches, before continuing on at a pub that doesn’t allow vaping, forcing them outside to ogle girls walking by?
Doesn’t really matter. But why tonight, of all nights?
“It’ll cost you,” I hear myself say.
His friends leer as he reaches for his wallet.
“Not money,” I shake my head.
He looks confused. No doubt he’s the sort of man for whom money is always the correct answer. “What, then?”
“A day.”
The leers return. I should be in an Uber, right now. Should be sailing past all this late night crap. But I’m on an enforced economy drive and it’s an hour before the tubes stop running. Who do they think I am? The long winter coat covers the shimmery cocktail dress but not the glimpse of stockings, not the high heels. Does the Northerner really think I’m offering twenty four hours of unbridled passion as a reward for heckling me in the street?
In his fucking dreams.
I spell it out for them, for him. “We kiss. You get a day older, I get a day younger. Deal?”
They don’t believe me. Why should they? They wouldn’t believe me even if I showed them my passport. The one that shows my date of birth, the one that says I’m fifty seven in a couple of week’s time. It’s in the old navy blue style and is pretty much useless as a form of ID, as I’ve not been able to renew it these last three decades, for all that the photo is very clearly me.
I’m cursed. Might not sound like that, but I sure as hell am. Cursed on my wedding day. Who does that? I still don’t know. Did they even realise what they were doing? What the consequences would be? What it would do to me, to us?
The curse was left along with all the other gifts, the toasters, the crockery. Written down on a piece of stiff card, though not in English. Not even in the alphabet I learnt at school. Something Slavic; but not, apparently, Russian. The card was initialled rather than signed, the initials telling us no more than the indecipherable scrawl. A mystery, to both of us; to my newly wedded husband, Alfred, and I.
It became a challenge, by the end of the evening, did anyone recognise the language? Could anyone tell us what the cursive, unfamiliar letters said?
In this modern day and age, someone would have snapped it with their smartphone, used Google translate or something. Laughed at the mangled sentiment that emerged. In the end, one of the wait staff thought it might be Romanian.
“Um, I think it says ‘May your beauty never fade. May you get younger with every kiss’?”
We laughed, plied the embarrassed waiter with drink, danced the rest of the night away. The card was lost in the chaos of our midnight departure, lost and forgotten.
For a while, anyway.
Alfred and I, we were young. We kissed a lot. Kissed when we got up. Kissed as one of us handed the other their breakfast. Kissed before we went to work. Kissed on our return, before sex, during sex, after sex. Kissed last thing at night.
It was half a year before we noticed something odd. That Alfred was going prematurely grey. And that while fine lines were appearing and thickening around his eyes, around mine they were vanishing.
Looking back, there were other signs as well. My erratic periods, something we at first thought might mean an unexpected blessing. Later, they became the only way we could track, and work out, what was happening to me.
My curse; revealing that I was cursed.
I have to assume what was happening to Alfred was an unexpected side-effect. A need for balance, in whatever magical system that card, or the message on it, pertained to. A day, for a day, for a kiss.
It was three more months before we pieced it together. By then, according to my best guestimate, I’d stolen a decade from Alfred. He was 37, and I was 17.
And there was no way we’d ever close that gap again.
The Northerner laughs. Shrugs. Looks nonplussed.
I walk over. Place my hands on his shoulders. We’re the same height, he and I. I lean forward, but stop short.
He has to meet me halfway.
He almost pulls back when he feels the spark, but I smother his reaction, kiss him deep. Make sure he gets a fair deal.
Not that he’ll ever really know, ever believe. Who misses a day, in a lifetime of them?
We pull apart, ignoring the crows of delight from his companions. He’s flushed; uncertain. Probably wants to know how it was for me. I can taste the stale biscuit lager he’s been drinking and something vaguely fishy from whatever food went with whatever event he was at earlier this evening.
“Anyone else?” I say, eyeing his friends. I’m not entirely surprised neither of them step forward and I stride away before they have second thoughts.
“Hey!” the Northerner calls after me. “At least give me yer number!”
I keep walking.
When we realised what was happening, what our kisses were doing to both of us... To watch the one you love age before your eyes, to find out you are the cause. It destroyed us.
And seventeen was too young, for both of us. There was only one way to change that; to let nature retake its course. Problem was, it did the same for Alfred, adding insult to injury, maintained a gap that could only grow wider. Unless we never kissed again.
Problem was, Alfred couldn’t stand for that.
Problem was, he hit retirement age twenty years before his pension kicked in.
Problem is, the only jobs I could get were cash in hand, no ID check required, no risk of disbelief when age and looks don’t match.
And the best way to keep earning anything at all was to trade on what I’d not asked for, what I didn’t deserve. My youthful looks. My never fading beauty.
So I’m trapped. I can make enough to survive only if I never get any older. Stay the age I was when I was at my most beautiful; the year I met Alfred.
In the decades since, I’ve had to be careful not to kiss more than 365 times a year, to prevent myself from getting younger. I keep a count, ration them out. Tonight’s ill-advised late night street kiss is my forty-second of 2018. Another stranger who, even though he was warned, will never know what I’ve stolen from him.
I let myself in. I can hear the television, though I know it isn’t being watched. It’s not loud enough. There’s a shuffling and an old man appears, wearing slippers and a dressing gown and a woolly hat. Defence against the heating that’s timed to go off an hour ago, when people his age should be in bed.
Alfred.
My heart stumbles in my chest.
“Been a good girl?” he asks, as he clumsily helps me off with my coat.
I nod, and shiver in the draughty hallway. I don’t tell him about the Northerner.
He pulls me to him, wraps his arms around me. I don’t resist, it really is cold. Plus, he’s more fragile than he looks. He spent two months on the geriatric ward recovering from a broken hip last year. Hated every minute of it.
He’s eying the cuckoo clock on the wall. German, not Swiss. Picked up on our honeymoon.
How many kisses did we exchange in the market as I cajoled him to buy it for me? How much older did he return, and how much younger was I? How many years did our honeymoon cost him?
As if on cue, the clock chimes twelve.
“You know what today is?” he asks, a wry smile lighting up his craggy face. He’s been waiting.
I nod. Valentine’s day. Our wedding anniversary.
His arms squeeze a little tighter. “A midnight kiss?”
I shake my head, firmly. “You can’t afford it.”
I don’t say I want to head upstairs first. Change out of the slinky dress the private members club insists I wear even though I only man the door. Wipe the Northerner from my rouged lips. I can’t show the distaste I feel. Because he’ll think it’s for him.
He smiles back at me. “Oh Deedee. My life isn’t worth living if I can’t kiss you on our wedding day.” He shrugs. “And what difference does a day make?”
What indeed. I don’t know how many kisses Alfred has stolen over the years. More, or less than the ones we traded blithely in the first nine months of our marriage? But, one by one, they all add up.
And though it hastens the end, hastens the day I’ll be on my own in this cruel world of casual curses, I allow him to steal one more.
(c) Liam Hogan, 2018
Liam Hogan figures you already know quite enough about him. If, miraculously, you disagree, you can always check out http://happyendingnotguaranteed.blogspot.co.uk
Sophie Morris-Sheppard has played Rebecca Locke in a series called The Paradox, a project which she helped devise as a short film in 2011. She is involved in several new writing initiatives in London. Her professional credits span the full spectrum of theatre, TV, commercials, film, voice over, rehearsed readings and most recently role play.
Comments