by Dominic Bell

Dominic Bell is a former oil rig worker from Hull, East Yorkshire, and multiple WM winner. He writes as a break from computer programming and attending to the needs of his teenage children. His main writing project is endlessly editing a series of First World War novels.

I message Dawn.

<< We still going to the coast? xxx >>

<< Yes. You drive. x >>

Less kisses than mine. And I don’t want to drive. But we’re not really like that anyway. We both still live in our own houses. I live in fear she will go into a care home first, that I will be the one having to visit, having to watch her fade. We are – Idon’t know what we are really. Allies against the dying of the light? Friends who sleep over sometimes? Just two people who don’t want to be alone?

We see each other most days. Sometimes just for one of our standard walks, preceded by coffee, followed by a pub meal. We usually walk miles, even in the rain. Sometimes I’ll cook for her, or she for me, and overnight together before the chaos of my house or the neatness of hers drives us apart again. Sometimes, if her son is away abroad, there’s a dog with her, a black and white dog that regards me suspiciously. She is happier when it is there, for it reminds her of other dogs that have been in her life, who have now slipped their leads for good. At mine there is a cat, who lives her own life. She is a welcome source of warmth in the winter, for my house is old. When I leave it it will be ripped apart, the gas heating stripped out, the single walls lined, the windows triple glazed, the roof solar-panelled, a nineteenth century house upgraded to survive the twenty-first like so many others on the street. But it does for me now, even if it is too cold in winter. Like now. We go out because our cars are warm and comfortable, even if they too are relics. The last of the petrol ones, illegal to buy now. Mine is a little more socially acceptable than Dawn’s, being at least a hybrid, but hers is pure petrol, people turning in the streets to watch it go by. She has had it fifteen years and every MOT she says that if it fails she will not get another. But every time the old man at the little garage she goes to nurses it through and charges her almost nothing just, I think, for the sake of keeping it going, and so her little car lives to slowly pull away from the lights while the electric one next to it takes off like a fighter jet.