The bath chairsby Dorothy Helm

WE HAD always said that we would meet at the bath chairs. Years before, when we were young, before time had sagged and darkened, when we were shiny and new. We said so what, make up or break up, at the end of our lives, when all was said and done, be that time together or apart, we would meet again. Whether on the Riviera or in some old folks’ home, we would pull our bath chairs up together and we would talk and laugh each other to the grave.

I walked into the bookshop, in a city, thousands of miles from where we made that promise. I had on all of my finery, and as I made my way through the bookshelves I saw him again. After 40 years, I saw him again, leaning against a pillar, book in hand, head down.

My breath caught in my throat and a sudden pain clutched at my chest. I stared at him and remembered that seeing his face was in fact a coming home all of its own, years after I could call any place home.

I tried to call out to him, to raise my hand, to summon the bath chairs, for I had come home to rest. Instead the pain in my chest was crippling me and my legs turned of their own accord and I left.

I did not see that man look up from his book with relief that the elderly bag lady who had stumbled into the bookshop, staring at him, had chosen to leave. He failed to recognise the old woman with a book.

That night as I lay in the cold miserable shelter full of down-on-their-luck, bad-luck, no-luck, once-had-luck people in that city so far from where I started, the pain came back.

That night as he lay comfortably in his hotel room, he looked out from the balcony and waited for sleep to come. All that day he had been remembering her. He had spent years scanning crowds for her. He remembered the bath chairs and fell asleep remembering their promise.

He breathed his last that night and in the homeless hostel her heart stopped and somewhere on happy clouds were placed two bath chairs and in them sit the old companions talking and laughing each other to eternity far above the mystery of life.

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