By the time she was forty Sarah knew all about love. It was a fragmentary thing - something you did with someone else for series of moments. Until it all got too violent or lonely or simply too tedious. Sometimes the man left the woman, sometimes it was the woman who abandoned. Both means of separation were painful and guilt inspiring.
At forty, Sarah hated love.
On her forty fourth birthday - a Wednesday in June, Sarah paid fifty pence to join a crowd of ten other middle aged people on a guided walk of the countryside surrounding the rural town she lived in. They gathered in a car park on the outskirts of the town. Sarah arrived early. She had signed up for this stroll on the web and paid her money electronically into a e-Pay account. She wanted to see the crowd before joining it.
A thin man arrived with a placard on a pole. He rested the pole on the ground and began to rotate it slowly so that it could be read from all points of the compass. 'Walking Tour 50p' was written on the sign. Sarah wondered. Her right hand flinched towards the ignition key in her car. She took a deep breath and instead of turning the key, she pulled it from the lock. Sarah walked up to the thin man with the pole and said, 'Hello, I've come to join your walk.'
That must have been six years ago. It was six years since she met Blue, and they first saw each other on that walk. Six years to learn something different about love.
Blue was different from her previous lovers. For a start, Blue was female.
When enough people had gathered the thin man pulled the placard from his pole, folded it and tucked it into his knapsack. Thus his pole became a walking stick. Sarah giggled involuntarily as she witnessed this process of transformation. One fellow walker, a large man in knee high rubber boots, scowled briefly in Sarah's direction as the giggle escaped from her mouth. A woman of Sarah's age - a slim woman with long unkempt hair - moved between Sarah and the scowler. 'My name is Blue.', she said. She too was giggling. 'What a bizarre trick with the pole, eh?'
They met often after that - to share a coffee in town, to go shopping together, to chat in each other's home. Neither of them were lesbian. They grew fond of one another and learnt something of the other's life. They never went on any more guided walks but did sometimes walk together, just the two of them, in the local woods.
Exactly how it happened that they became lovers neither could tell you. It all happened so naturally. There was no lust. Perhaps that was the secret - no lust, no longing, no ego. One morning they woke up in bed together with a memory of the night before and no regret, no guilt, no fear of pregnancy. They just woke up and realised this was love.
And now it was six years since they met.
'Why are you called Blue?' Sarah asked her once.
'Because I blew it.' laughed Blue. 'And because blue is an ocean and I love water.'
And now, past fifty, Sarah does know love. - And she has advice for unhappy lovers:
'Relax. The right man for you might be a woman; the right woman, a man.'