“YOU can do what?”
“I can travel back in time, Francis. Please keep up.”
Francis couldn’t tell if this was the weirdest set-up to a joke he had ever heard, or if she was actually telling the truth. She had this very intense look on her face, like his next words held more weight than he could ever know.
“Ok. Let’s say I believe you… How do you even know that?”
Her expression started to lift, it was obvious she wasn’t expecting him to listen to her so quickly. She took a moment to think.
“What do you mean?”
“I uh… I’ve come back to this day quite a lot… trying to find something…”
“Clara, I feel like I’m going mad here. Explain everything.”
She re-told as best as she could, as their coffees got cold. Apparently, she discovered her power after collapsing on a walk with her sister. She had visions from her past that felt too real to only be dreams. When she came to, her sister drove her home in silence. Her mam then came out to the car and sat with her, she had been preparing for this talk for a long time. She told her this ability was something only the women in her family possessed. It usually started to develop in their late teens as they entered adulthood. They all agreed to keep this quiet in fear of being labelled ‘hysteric’, or as Clara put it “stark raving mad”.
In that moment she asked her: “But why? I don’t understand.”
“We have been blessed with a gift, my dear. You need to protect it… and yourself. You can’t use it too often or you could hurt yourself… or others”
She then explained that her great aunt had a brain haemorrhage trying to relive her last day with her husband before he had passed. For the past two years, this thought scared Clara so much that she hadn’t even exercised her power until after the two had met.
She told Francis the first time she used it was to relive their first kiss again. He took her hand and squeezed it tight. If he didn’t believe her before, he certainly believed her now. Her eyes started to water again. She held her head back and sniffed, trying to stop the tears from falling.
Instead of saying something dumb or meaningless, he decided to sit with her, holding in that moment for as long as possible, drawing it out with a caring, soft smile.
“You’ve had so many different reactions to being told about my power.”
“Oh yeah? Like what?”
“Usually you think I was joking with you, or trying to mess with your head… you’ve never really taken it too well before now. This is about where the trip will end for me. I’d backpedal by saying it was a lame joke and leave you sitting here, only to go home and try again the next day… always hoping for a better outcome. I never got this far before.”
Francis could feel her pulse quicken through her hand, she was squeezing him tighter now, perhaps in fear that if she let go, he’d be the one to leave her there. It began to feel like they could entirely sense one another, both too afraid to speak or even breathe, forcing this quiet moment in time to drift with the browning, weightless leaves carried from the trees around them by the autumn chill.
Then, as if the wind was taking its turn in holding its breath, everything around them seemed to pause when Francis felt Clara stand and lift his hand with hers.
The desire to ask questions was left on those steps, or maybe there were just so many he couldn’t focus on any one thing he wanted to ask. So, with little choice left he followed her with absolutely no clue where they were going.
Through crowded streets, the beating bass of buskers, low gliding seagulls and ever-changing brash window displays. They ended up outside the symmetric face of the Hugh Lane Gallery.
Francis couldn’t help but wonder why she had brought him here, he dared not ask just in case speaking aloud would scare her into dropping his hand.
She slowly led him inside. And then it hit him. This was where they had been on their first date. He hadn’t been there since but it was more or less the same bar a couple of rotating exhibitions and, although these were impressive (admittedly lost on him though) he knew Clara’s favourite piece hung here; Édouard Manet’s Music in the Tuileries.
He didn’t really get why she loved it so much, to him it just looked like a dark painted scene with a bunch of blurry faces. This was the exact reason she loved it so, impressionist works were some of her favourite, the capturing of a moment in a desperation to preserve the unstoppable nature of life – moving onward. The people represented all real life, faces that had seen terrible and wonderful things, such joy and sense of presence slowed as if my magic and frozen on a canvas. “The world’s first time machine,” he remembered her calling it.
The two made their way in front of the piece, Clara immediately absorbed by its texture and colour, then, as if to stop herself from getting pulled in, she finally spoke.
“Do you remember the first time we came here? It had been lashing and this was the only place open with a bathroom we could use to dry off. You stood here with me dripping all over the floor as I told you about this piece.”
“I need you to take me seriously now. Face me, close your eyes and remember that day.”
“Uh OK, can I ask why?”
“I’m going to take us back there.”
Episode 5 will be published in print tomorrow and online.
If you want to begin the Summer Soap, read episode one here.
