The Fullfillment* Centre 5/2

August bank holiday weekend for once the weather was good. We had the heatwave that year, or perhaps the beginning of all the heatwaves to come, early enough still to be tolerable, enjoyable even. Record temperatures again, but still the summers were more or less in place, the seasons still clearly identifiable. We commented on it in passing of course as we went around the arcades and strolled along the front, nervous joking about enjoy it while you can and well, sunscreen companies will do well out of it a least. 

On one level, it lifted everybody's already ebullient spirits but we knew it was a precursor of the future we were already trying to avoid.  

The sands and the front were surprisingly busy, everything gleaming in the sun. Jay had taken to wearing a baseball cap too now, still in his baggy tracksuit, zipped right up despite the heat and looking overjoyed by it all, this sudden revelation that the coast and the beach were ten minutes away.  

I came back from the kiosk on the front with a couple of ice creams, already starting to melt. 

Get yourself a hat, Carl! My mum said, looked stern. You’ll burn.  

Amar offered me his. Take please he said, I am OK. This not so hot. Syria very hot. Dubai, oh my god, very, very, very hot. Please.  

I took it and handed him a 99 in exchange. We were due to convene for an alfresco meet up in the park at 2. It had originally been scheduled for a conference room somewhere but the weather was too good and we had shifted it to Regent park, central, just about big enough. That way the kids could run about, use the swings. Nick and some other council leaders had been involved with the early stages of funding for the North Eden Project, a series of geodesic domes to be built somewhere in the west of the town that would bring the tourists back and we were hoping to get the co-operatives involved in some of the construction and servicing for the project as it started up. 

I left my mum on a bench chatting to another lady who was up for the day with her grandkids and joined everyone in a central square. I saw Chris coming in from the other end of the promenade and we went round there together, feeling unusually w ell-disposed toward each other, Jay and Amar hanging back a bit talking in low voices. It was good they got on, that Jay had found someone around his own age to hang out with though I was still angry with Christine, who was sitting in a mound of rumpled clothing and sweat in the shade of one of the park's few trees as we approached, for forcing him to speak at the last meeting.  

Twelve people all told, the Lancaster inner circle and some Morecambe affiliates including a women I hadn't seen before who I was introduced to in turn, a local doctor, Mariam. We shook hands. She was quite strikingly beautiful. Iranian background it turned out from the dishes she had brought along as a contribution to the picnic. In her late thirties at a guess.  

I tried not to show an inappropriate level of interest in her, spread my engagement fully around the group as we talked but it was hard not to want to know more about her. I don't remember the exact content of her contribution to the discussion but I do recall its effect on me. She was measured, articulate in her speech, an educated professional but also on the Left politically, interested in social issues which she saw as inextricably bound into health-related matters.  

Was I instantly smitten? I suppose I was though I had told myself I wouldn't get involved with anyone again. That it wasn't worth it, that it would only end in disappointment for both of us. I had a pained surge of something like grief suddenly as I sat there that I had grown old enough to recognise as characteristic. Melancholy certainly, but my melancholy as unique to me and as intricate in its whorled complexity as my fingerprints. Attraction and an instant shrinking back from its implications.  Desire and courage that were incommensurate in specific ways, the specific fear and loss that sprang from that, the limit and circumscription set by their interplay, the range and ambit of what I would ever be able to claim for myself. The cramped room I inhabited, the great outdoors gleaming through the impassable, always open doorway.   

You up for that Carl? Andy was suddenly asking me. You are staying overnight, right? 

Sorry I said. Tuned out for a second. Up for what? 

It was Mariam who responded. She was the one who was organising evening entertainment for those who were staying around it seemed. She gave me a broad, white smile I took perhaps as some kind of invitation. 

Cocktails.