Wednesday Morning, 03.00

Lydia’s breathing is soft – she doesn’t snore like she tells me I do. As I listen and count her breaths, I try to calculate how many nights we have spent together. I think it is nearly four hundred. No, not quite that. I murmur the numbers of days in each month: “Thirty days has September, April, June, and November…” Not-quite four hundred, then. And it will be the last. So I must savour every moment.

I turn on my pillow and open my eyes. There is a crack in the curtains and the full moon bathes her hair in a silver, winter light. She is asleep on her back. I can never sleep that way but I turn over, now, and imagine we are back on the lake, at the beginning.

We had met through a mutual friend. (I forget his name, so he couldn’t have been a very good friend. It was something like Simon but not Simon. He wasn’t really a friend, anyway – more of an acquaintance). She was studying fine art and I had just begun working for the paper. She oozed talent. Something in the way she carried herself across the room: I think I could tell from the very first moment I saw her, standing with Carol and Julian, a long, navy, cardigan hanging off her left shoulder, exposing the freckle on her shoulder blade. I heard her laugh before she turned around and I met her eyes. It was soft and low and rich.

Neil’s house (not Simon. I just remembered) was a short walk from the lake. Somehow, through the bumbles of my small-talk, Lydia had accepted my invitation for a moonlit stroll (or perhaps it was she who suggested it. I don’t remember, as I watch her breasts gently rising and falling, now, on the cusp of spring). We spoke about music and politics: she listened almost exclusively to Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff (preferring the latter); she “tolerated” Beethoven but could not abide his subito pianos. I knew little about classical music. We had to agree to disagree about most of the President’s policies. Even after his assassination, in the following November, when he seemed almost destined for canonisation, Lydia painted him as Fagin for one of her installations.

That night, though, the world was simpler and, when we came to the edge of the lake, we instinctively reached for the other’s hand.

“Do you think it will take our weight?”

“Ice looks pretty thick to me. Besides, I don’t think you weigh very much.”

“That’s always the right thing to say to a girl. But I don’t fancy an ice bath. Do you?”

“Not really. Though warming up might be fun.”

She looked at me and, for a moment, I thought she was going to kiss me but she just turned the left corner of her mouth up and, releasing my hand, charged out onto the frozen lake. Partly in fear, partly in joy (mostly in drunkenness), I ran out after her. It didn’t crack but my soles were worn and I slipped over, skidding towards her on my knees and knocking her over onto her back.

Still, nothing cracked. Instead, we lay on our backs, in the middle of the lake and stared up at the night sky.

“I’m terrible at constellations. Do you know any?”

“The plough.”

“Well, yeah, I know that one. Everyone knows that one.”

She took my finger and began to trace out bears and belts.

“‘When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,’” I began to recite. I didn’t get to the next line; Lydia began kissing me.

Now, in our bedroom, I will myself back to that moment. Why is it that that moment seems so earthy and this evening, so ethereal?

I turn on my side again and a mist of her hair tickles my lip. My heart begins to thud. It is keeping a secret from her. If she knew it, she would not be sleeping so soundly. She would be awake, like me. Perhaps she would have thrown me out.

I wonder how two people so close – who know each other so intimately, can have this great unknown between them. Because she does know me – as I, her:

Lydia is unlike me in all the right ways: she is the caution to my wind, the believer to my sceptic, the sense to my sensibility. If she had known what I was planning, she would have stopped me. Why didn’t I let her in?

I tell myself it was for her sake. I tell myself it was supposed to be a shortcut – to shave three years off our courtship. Now, I have trebled it – if not expunged it completely.

I long for the lake again. I long for the second kiss – after we talked about Cuba and she told me how afraid she had been that we might see the end of the world. I want to throw my burden onto that lake. I want it to crack the ice and sink down, into unfathomable forgiveness – or forgetfulness at least – but I can’t. The scene is set and I must play it out.

Perhaps if the paper had done better; if I had got the raise I was after? Perhaps is easily said: Perhaps we will put a man on the moon. Perhaps the Russians will not blow us till kingdom come. Perhaps they will not find me. Perhaps I can stay here…

I did not expect to go through with it. The memory is fresh, but illusory. Even at the time, the gun in my hand did not feel real. I heard someone telling the man behind the counter to enter the register but it wasn’t my voice.

Lydia stirs for a moment and my heart skips a beat. Does she know what I’ve done? No, of course not. She wouldn’t be here. We would not have made love.

I brush her hair, gently, and wonder whether it makes a difference to me that I came away with so little. If Matt was right – if they were keeping thousands in that liquor store, would I now be lying awake planning the ring I would buy and the moment to ask her? Does failure compound the sense of my sin?

I know it was wrong. I knew it the moment I saw the last customer leave and walked up to the counter. I knew it as I pulled on the balaclava and brought out the gun. I knew it as I saw the look of familiar exhaustion in the cashier’s eyes.

“You’ve come at a bad time,” he said. “I went to the bank this morning. There’s barely thirty bucks here.”

I think I must have hesitated. I think I said, “That’s no good. I can’t get an engagement ring with that.”

He took the bills out of the till and handed them to me, along with a couple of nickels and a single dime.

I regarded him for a moment but it was too late: I was committed.

I muttered an apology, thanked him, and ran out of the door as fast as I could, over the road and into the woods, panting.

No one followed.

I didn’t even hear any police sirens.

I stumbled home, counting my spoils on the way, fighting back the tears and hoping someone would call for the curtain to fall or the scene to be cut but each step brought me closer to Lydia and further from our bliss.

$25.20. Enough for a pair of handcuffs. The pieces of silver do not even total the thirty befitting Judas. They are still over there, in my jeans. Perhaps, if I leave now, and turn myself in, they will take pity on me. Perhaps I can be here again, tomorrow night.

My heavy heart does not let me hope for as much mercy. I savour Lydia’s scent and wait for the dawn: my cock crow. Perhaps I am Peter, not Judas. Perhaps I will be forgiven.

I cannot pray. I cannot sleep. I gaze at Lydia and memorise her face.

I know the morning is just a few hours away.