The Chessmen

IV

He woke up in a panic, sweating. The dream was still horribly vivid in his mind. It was burned on his retinas as if he had been watching a movie and the images had remained even although the light was gone. He fought to remember exactly what had happened. It was fading already, but the sense of his betrayal and Marsaili’s hurt stayed with him like a stone in his heart. For a moment he thought it was Mairead she had found him with. Perhaps in the dream. But then he remembered, with a sickening sense of his own cruelty, the reality of what had actually happened nearly twenty years before. That day, in their shared student lodgings, when she had returned to find him in bed with the girl across the hall. Their bed. Snow falling on the wet-streaked tenements outside. The end, finally, of everything they might have been.

He lay in the dark, breathing heavily, staring at the ceiling. The only light in the room came from the digital bedside clock. He could hear the slow, steady beat of Marsaili’s breath. She was still asleep.

But something elusive remained, just out of reach. Something in his dream that he couldn’t quite recall. He had been in Mairead’s room, he knew. Had he actually kissed her in the dream? Is that what he had wanted, really? Is that what had triggered the awful memory of the fold-down bed in the student flat? Partly, perhaps. But there was something else. He closed his eyes and saw the photo album lying on the bed in Mairead’s hotel room, the whole gang of them standing on the Bridge to Nowhere grinning at the camera, and suddenly he knew what it was. He sat bolt upright and wondered why in God’s name it had never occurred to him before.