|
Copyright © 1998 Sara-Jayne Townsend.
All rights reserved and reproduction without written permission expressly prohibited.
Trio
"A brother," Alison said confidently. I saw her looking at me with a half-smile on
her face, pleased with the answer. "Yes. I see you as a brother." She was answering a
question I had asked her over ten minutes ago.
It was the answer I had been more or less expecting. We walked side by side
through the dry leaves littering the pavement. It was getting on for winter, I thought
fleetingly as I stuffed my chilled hands deeper into the pockets of my fleece-lined jacket.
Above us the bare branches swayed with the weight of the wind that blew starkly about
our ears.
"David?" said Alison.
"Mmm," I responded absently. I glanced at her, and saw she was studying me
curiously. She was shorter than me, and I found myself wondering when that had
happened. She was eighteen months older than me, and at first she had been taller. Then,
for a long time we had been the same height. Now, suddenly, I was a couple of inches
taller.
"What do you suppose would have happened if our relationship had developed
into something else? Something more than friendship?"
I looked at her for a moment, trying to visualise her as someone else. I watched
her long brown hair blowing about untidily, and the buffeted ends of her ridiculously long
scarf. The complexion of her face possessed a pallor that emphasised the thin red scar on
her cheek. She turned her head, sensing me watching her and smiled again, a Mona-Lisa
type smirk that was neither a grin nor a frown, and showed none of her teeth, which I
knew to be crooked. Her face, straight on, was not unattractive, but was too flawed to be
beautiful. The scar was a little too noticeable, the nose slightly too large. On some days,
though, she could look pretty -- when she spent time doing her hair, applying make-up,
putting on a nice dress. Even so, I could not imagine her as a lover. I could not
remember much about the day we first met, but it was back in the days when football in
the park was more interesting to me than girls. Over the years our friendship had grown,
but if I had ever loved her as more than a friend, it had been as a sister. Yes, the mere
though of Alison being anything else seemed incestuous.
I realised with a start that she was still waiting for my answer. "I don’t know," I
said finally. "I just can’t imagine it."
"No," she replied. "But I think things would have been different."
[End of this extract. The full story was published in Gravity's Angels]
|
