BY CHRIS COTTOM
First published by Cranked Anvil in Feb. 2025. Copyright is held by the author.
SUZIE’S A snowflake in our nursery school Christmas Gala, petticoat-frothy, with her hair pinned tight. I bash my cymbal when Miss nods from the piano, although I’d wanted to be the King of the Mice.
She’s 14 and back from ballet school for the summer. At the youth club dance, sweaty after Reet Petite, we slurp a shared Tizer. She holds me tight for Unchained Melody and suddenly we’re kissing.
I step out of the queue for ice creams at the Royal Opera House.
“Suzie! It’s really you!” All grown-up in floaty blue.
“Hello Michael. Yes, it’s me.”
“I thought you’d be dancing.”
“I had to stop. Wasn’t good enough.”
Back at my seat, my date looks up. “What happened to my ice cream?”
We’re the only ones under 30 on the tour to the Bolshoi and the Kirov, which takes the midnight express from Moscow to Leningrad. At dawn, we snuggle in Suzie’s bunk, watching the forest interrupted by an occasional squat cabin, smoke rising from its tinpot chimney.
We see Ghost Dances at Sadler’s Wells, with its haunting score of South American folk songs.
“Let’s chuck it all in,” Suzie begs afterwards. “Travel for a year. The Andes. Canoe down the Amazon.”
“But I’m only just qualified.”
“Huh! Yeah, qualified and boring.”
She marries a man who’s big in oil.
“We’re off to Alaska,” she says. “Three-year posting, maybe four.”
“They’ve asked me to join the PTA,” I say to my wife. “there’s a new chair.”
“What’s he like?”
“It’s a woman. Someone I knew ages ago. Very keen on theatre trips.”
By the time I’m 49 and divorced, Suzie’s remarried. He’s a Chelsea season-ticket holder so I become the risk-free balletomane, accompanying an old friend to matinees and premieres from Manon to Petruska.
“We’re Nureyev and Fonteyn,” I say over strawberry sorbets at a Stravinsky triple bill.
She laughs. “You flatter yourself. He was 20 years her junior.”
We’re on the same corridor in our care home and look through old programs together.
“Remember this?” she says. “Marguerite and Armand.”
“So romantic.”
“I was in tears.”
“We ate at Bertorellis afterwards and you missed your last train.”
“You drove me all the way home and we kissed in the drive. Like a couple of kids.”
Our Christmas treat is Sleeping Beauty. Our families visit in the morning and, after a snooze, I press my buzzer.
“Your program isn’t on yet,” says Charlene as she wheels me along to Suzie’s.
“I want to get a good seat. Can you put me right next to her bed?”
“You two lovebirds!”
The overture soars and I slip my hand under the covers to find Suzie’s. She doesn’t say anything; she’s not uttered a word for days. The opening christening scene is glorious, with a dazzling ballerina younger than Suzie’s granddaughter.
I wake as the conductor joins the cast for the curtain calls. I’m still holding Suzie’s hand, but I know without turning that my own princess is sleeping forever.
***
Chris Cottom lives near Macclesfield, U.K. His work’s appeared in 100 Word Story, Fictive Dream, Flash Frontier, NFFD NZ, NFFD UK, Oyster River Pages, The Lascaux Review, and elsewhere. In the early 1970s he lived next door to JRR Tolkien.
