The Last Girl Read Free Page B

the clicks receding behind me and the soft thud as the door of the church closed behind her. A sudden panic took me then. I stood up and hurried to the large wooden doors. In the darkness I stumbled on some loose matting and fell with a crash, hitting my face. I sat in the darkness, rubbing my head.
    Outside the church she seemed to have disappeared. My eyes darted around searching for her. And then I saw her. She was pushing a colourful pram down towards the corner of Maironio Street. On this corner was the gated entrance to the park. As I watched she turned in through the gates. I set off after her, not hurrying, comfortable in the assumption that she would be there when I arrived.
    Sure enough, turning through the gates, I saw her kneeling beside the sandpit. A small café was open, but deserted. A middle-aged woman swept the dust behind the building. I wandered to the serving hatch and called into the back. There was no immediate response. Eventually I heard the scuff of old shoes on the tiles. The woman appeared indolently behind the serving hatch. For as long as possible she ignored my presence.
    â€˜Well?’ she muttered finally.
    â€˜Coffee,’ I said.
    She pulled a chipped cup from a pile that was drying and threw it beneath the machine. The machine hissed and steamed as angrily as she did. She slopped the drink onto the counter in front of me. Even though it was nowhere near full, still it managed to spill over the side. She stood there looking at me, not bothering to inform me of the price. I put a Litas note on the counter, which she snatched up. In the Old Town they are politer now. Tourism has forced a change. After all we’re Europeans now, not Russians. It was comforting then to find this woman still serving the coffee as I had always had it served, without the smile, without the pleasantries that mean nothing. I smiled. She grunted. She turned and went back to her sweeping.
    I sat at a dirty table and watched the young woman. She played for a long time. It was difficult to see much of her from behind. Her hair was long and dark, as the Russian girl’s had been. That did not escape me, of course. I saw the meaning in that. I realised what it was that had made me run out into the street, then, to see her. But with the Russian girl it had only been the hair, the hair and the baby. I had started searching for the wrong thing, then, looking for all those young women with their babies.
    It had taken that flash of her eyes in the light of the church. That momentary vision had sped me back across the years, years full of movement, ambition and energy. Full of writing and arguing and desperate forgetting. And I had forgotten. I had forgotten and continued to forget with the same fury. Continued to bury, to cover over, though I was no longer aware why.
    I wanted her to turn so that I could once more see those eyes. Her eyes. To check whether it had been the light, the church, the strange madness that had possessed me for those last weeks. But she did not turn.
    After a while she straightened up and pulled the baby from the sand. She held it up for a few seconds, drawing it close to her face. The baby was moaning. It struggled slightly. against her embrace. She spoke to it in a voice that was no more than the faintest of murmurs. She kissed it and, faintly, I could hear that, too, the smack of her lips on the soft flesh of the child’s cheek.
    Quickly then, she bent and laid the baby in the pram. She did not pause. It was as if she had suddenly remembered something and realised that she had to rush, though she did not look at a watch. She pushed the baby down the path, past the tennis court, back through the green pathways of the park to Cathedral Square.
    I followed her at a distance, longing to see that gaze once more.

Chapter 5
    At the peak of the cathedral, a large new golden cross sparkles in the sunlight. A brighter echo of the three white crosses that top the green hill behind it. These