His chest heaved as he breathed in the warm air. A long draw of heat that dried the insides of his mouth as his lungs found half of what they needed. The effort exhausted him, and his head fell forward as he drew in another. It was no more fulfilling than the first. He felt the bare brick under his calloused palm. He was accustomed to the outside, but he was not used to the heat. The summers were more oppressive now than they were in his youth.
He was also a great deal older, he admitted, and remembered his father when he had reached fifty. It seemed old to him then, and young to him now, but he now realised that his father was right; it was just a number.
“Just a number,” he whispered so quietly he barely heard the words, and he drew in a hasty hot breath when he remembered it was the first words he had said to her. A shard of pain cut through his heart at the memory.
“Excuse me?”
She had been backlit by the sun, her blonde hair a halo, and her features caught in silhouette.
“I was speaking to myself,” he replied, “sorry.”
“First sign of madness, they say,” she said and stepped to the side. As her features were revealed to him, she continued to speak. “But then, ‘they’ say a lot, don’t they, and most of it isn’t worth listening to.”
She was of indeterminate age, one of those rare creatures who could have been ten years his senior or young enough to be the daughter he would never have. He saw laugh lines at the corners of her eyes, but her cheeks were full and rosy, and the flesh beneath the hollow of her throat was speckled with fine drops of perspiration.
“That’s true,” he said, but he could not remember what she had said, only that it was true, and what he said next surprised him. “My name is Percy,” he said, inwardly grimacing at the name.
“Your name is Percy?” She repeated.
“I know,” he said apologetically, “It’s not exactly Brad, or whatever.”
“My son had a little plush penguin called Percy,” she said as she sat beside him on the low wall that separated the flowerbed from the path. She brushed her dark blue skirt under her with practised ease, and he saw her white blouse was unbuttoned to show a wedge of lightly tanned skin. “He loved that bloody thing, and he never let me forget I killed it when I put it in the washing machine.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, not knowing what else to say. “Are you getting him another?”
“It’s a bit late,” she said, “He turned thirty last year.” She huffed in irritation, “He still brings it up on occasion, though, so perhaps I should.”
“Why did he call it Percy?” he asked.
“He didn’t,” she said, “I did.”
She held her hand out to his, and he grasped it. Her handshake was firm, and Percy realised she was naturally at ease in dealing with men.
“I lecture in Classics over at the University, and I named Percy after Perceval from the Arthurian Romances.” She leaned back on her palms and crossed her knees. He watched as she slipped her heel from the modestly heeled shoe and let it dangle from her toes. “He was always my favourite. In earlier writing, he was the lead in the search for the Grail, but Malory changed that to Galahad,” she grumbled something he didn’t catch under her breath. “I never liked Malory; De Troyes is my man.”
She looked at him and smiled.
“You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?” She said, and he shook his head, “That’s okay, Perceval wouldn’t have understood me either. He was a peasant before he became a knight and probably couldn’t even read, but he is still the epitome of manhood in my eyes.”
“He was real?” Percy asked, his voice quiet.
“As real as time,” she replied cryptically, a mischievous smile playing across her lips. His eyes moved to them, they were bare of artificial colour but still plump and as red as the dawn.
“So, real?” He asked again as the world fell away.
“I don’t know,” she said, “It’s just a number after all.”
“A number,” he whispered as he thought of his father. He smiled at the memory, thirty years gone but still vivid in his mind. “My father used to say that all the time. I’d call him old and…” He stopped as the memory turned sour. “He died when he was fifty, a heart attack, and I thought he had lived a long life.”
“How old were you?”
“Twenty.”
“And how old are you now?”
He laughed and leaned back to mirror her, his hand pushing through the warm grass, gathering the moisture between his fingers.
“You’re fifty, aren’t you?” She asked, and he nodded. His smile didn’t reach his eyes, but hers did. “Ah, you look good for fifty, you could pass for…” she thought a moment, “forty-eight.” And laughed.
“And you could pass for thirty,” he said.
“Flatterer,” she scoffed, “I wouldn’t want to go back there, giving birth to a son who still goes on about his plush penguin while trying to finish my doctorate. I wouldn’t bother and get myself a job as a roller waitress instead.”
“Can you roller-skate?” He asked with a smile.
“Nah, I can skateboard, though, and it can’t be much harder.”
“You can’t skateboard,” he said incredulously.
“I’ve three brothers and a single dad,” she replied, “you bet I can! Are you married? Kids?”
He shook his head.
“Why not?”
“I dunno,” he said, “I never met the right person, I guess.”
“Ah,” she leaned back further, and he watched as her blonde hair fell away from her neck. “What you need is a good woman who reads De Troyes and can skateboard.”
“You think?” He asked mockingly, “Where can I find such a woman?”
“Oh, I dunno,” she replied, “They’re a rare breed.”
And then it had dawned on him. The realisation was a rush that tangled his mind into knots of confusion. It was obvious, but only to a man who might be used to it.
“Are you flirting with me?” He asked with dumbfounded amazement, hastily searching for a fix to his thoughtless faux pas, but instead of blushing and making a hasty retreat, she laughed. Her body shook, and her shoe fell from the tip of her toe. She leaned forward to retrieve it, drawing in a long breath.
“You’re not the sharpest tool in your toolkit, are you?” She said, nodding to the bag of tools at his feet, “But I bet you are good with your hands.” As her eyes met his, he lost the ability to speak. “To answer your question, yes, I appear to be flirting with you, and I was hoping you’d respond before our autumn years…”
“I don’t even know your name,” he quickly interrupted, he was overwhelmed and knew that she was amused by his lack of composure. He glanced up, intending to look into her eyes but instead gazed over the lush grass to the bubbling water of the river yards away.
Percy breathed in deeply, the bright reality still cold without her presence. He looked around him in shock at the sudden passing of years. Little had changed between that day and this. He was twenty years older, and the bed of roses behind him had been replanted, but the place she had sat was still large enough for a woman to recline and soak in the sun.
“I love you, sweetheart,” he said quietly to the place where he had first met her. In all the years they had spent together, this was the place her memory was its strongest.
He stroked the grass where she had once sat, and the sun had warmed it as though someone had been sitting there only moments before.
The old man smiled as he climbed to his feet, his seventy-year-old bones creaking with strain. Each time he sat there, she would return, and in the final days of summer the old man would relive his own private love story.
“See you tomorrow,” he said and walked between the deep shadows cast by the blazing sun.