The Betrayal

I remember that first day – in the full flush of youth. I remember it well.

There’s a whole pile of photographs somewhere logging our rose-petal journey into oblivion. To this day it takes my breath away to think how fragile life can become when someone like me opens their home or their heart to anyone other than family.

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Time is before all this began.

Just before that, although there is no picture taken to record it, you found me jumping and cheering his team along. You had walked into my life with such boyish sure-footedness that you almost instantly belonged. I still remember how I had moved up so that you could sit rather than stand as you were so intent on awkwardly doing.

It was you that had insisted on taking the picture of Nevin and me. We sat, the three of us, cheering and booing the other teams along. After that you seemed to turn up every Sunday, regardless of how unimportant the game, and I began to look out for you. Finally, I had a friend: a foreigner in a foreign land, I had finally found someone other than my beloved husband who could speak my own language to me.

You listened to me, to my husband, tirelessly. You read my stories and you supported his new team as often as you questioned his every new theory on why a New Yugoslavia might be formed. He knew all too well that I lived so far from anything I could call home that he was only too happy to know there was someone there to take up the slack while he was training or travelling.

Here’s another picture. This one was taken on one of those rare afternoons when Nevin was free and not out playing 'soldiers' with the boys. We are messing about in the woods by some stream; you stand, balancing on one leg, looking impishly silly. You were trying to touch the far bank of the river with a bit of dead willow. You quote some long dead poet and talk about all the muscles you have to use to hold this pose with hilarious sincerity.

I have an image of us the night before; you and I talking in some small candle-lit Parisian-like café. We discuss art and literature, life and love. You asked me if I would go to some obscure photographic exhibition that a friend of yours had mounted – pictures of some of the, as Nevin put it, ‘alleged’ atrocities that seemed to appear with frightening frequency. I laughed to be asked so officially and teased you about your ‘friend’ until I saw the tears well up.

We spent too many days together but I was lonely and he could see I needed a friend. It made him feel less guilty when he had to go to camp for weeks at a time. He liked you because, as he saw it, you adored me. It is only now that I think - how strange.

My mother came to stay for two long, long weeks and took an immediate view to anything Croatian/Serbian – but most especially toYou. She loathed your presence, she derided our friendship and said that we were infantile in our attachment. She tried so hard to get Nevin to forbid you from coming round. He laughed at that even though he spent forever on the phone nodding seriously at every impassioned plea my mother could slip into the weekly, then fortnightly phone-calls.

This, as opposed to your mother – our co-conspirator – who packed our picnic lunches and lent us her car so that I could at least see Nevin when camp was only four or five hours away. She sent him home-made wine and strange salty biscuits along with some horrendously smelly cheese: cheese that I made you hold out the window that long song-filled drive there; your sweet mother, who lied as often as not to your father when asked why it was that yet again your bed was empty.

How angry I was at him for leaving me alone so often and for so long. It was a slow invisible anger that crept up on me, one that hid its thoughts of revenge until they had all but taken over. My loneliness left a pail, thin patina on my lips. It broke into my dreams and left me in a sweat.

And there you were - you had waited, although I didn’t see it, until I was well and truly hooked; until I couldn’t imagine or even remember our life without you. And then I kissed you - quite unexpectedly. It was me; it was I - I that broke the distance and changed the view. But it was you that laid the ground and lay in wait.

‘There woke in me a demon that stalks my conscious still.’


Ireas Jones

One stupid afternoon, walking by the sea, something tipped the balance and everything was changed. I sent you away; I stopped eating; I could’t speak for days - I could hardly breath and then, then the tears came… rolling down my cheeks one after the other. And that life in me that I was, until then, unaware of, that promise of a real family - the dream that ends with ‘and they lived happily ever after’ left the same way it came.

He hadn’t come home, and wouldn't, he said, not until your mother had called and arranged for you to look after me. He seemed so distant and afraid - a stranger almost. He spoke through you; he tiptoed round my bed and escaped for fresh air whenever he could. He had that hound-dog look he gets when he is out of his depth. Poor Nevin, trying to find his way though something neither of us was prepared for in the first place.

So much had changed. That last summer when the silence was strained - I could not look at you and he could not look at me. He tried, for as long as he was able - he held my hand and prayed that I would not drown in the river I had made out of my own tears; him not knowing then that in a single kiss I had betrayed all that we held dear. I pushed him further still – away from me and into your soft consoling arms.

If I could have a last picture it would be this: I, wrapped in a blanket, come out onto the decking of your family’s summer home to find him kissing you. I stopped and watched only to see all the tenderness I had lost be lavished onto someone I had now somehow claimed as my own. The day was drawing in, the rose coloured sky greying; I could see it all etched out against that sky; hear it all – amplified; your mother’s favourite old rattan love-seat creaking under the strain; I tip-toed back from whence I came and fell into a dreamless sleep broken only much later by the strange muffled sound of his relentless sobbing.

We moved, the three of us, wading through the mire that had become our existence. We talked, but nothing was really said. A new season was about to begin and suddenly there was the threat of war. I could not face the thought of going through the whole thing again: the farce. He loved you, it was plain to see; and I loved him. You, you said, loved us equally. What a mess!

So I left.

I left the summer home your parents had built to retire in. I left the man I had promised to stay with ‘for richer, for poorer, till death us do …’ I left my books and I left you. I took only the clothes I was standing in - taking little else but the pile of pictures of our brief encounter – pictures left haphazardly piled on a kitchen shelf by the back door.

And then there was no basketball, no summer hikes, no lightness in the laughter - only talk of war. My dreams of death became a desperate bid for life as your beautiful country followed us down our rose-petaled journey into oblivion.

My mother begged me to leave, saying only that my place was either by my husband’s side or with her at home. So many of our friends were on the verge of leaving but having nowhere else to go they stayed and prayed thinking only that it couldn’t get any worse.

On the drive to the border I tried to close my mind to the haunting presence of the dispossessed. They lined the roads - what little left of their lives in-tow, but all I could think of was that you and Nevin might not yet have got out.

I can not bring myself to say your name. I have cursed your very existence but it is you not he that I write about. Because, on that awful day, when I was leaving, I glanced into my rear-view mirror and could swear I saw Nevin in a uniform, his gun slung carelessly across his chest as he worked his way through the last possessions of the dispossessed.

The End.