The Final Farewell by Elizabeth Obadina

Looking to the future. Looking to the past. A story inspired by Mary Shelley's lines:

“We sat late. We could not tear ourselves away from each other, nor persuade each other to say the word ‘Farewell!’

Mary Shelley Frankenstein Chapter 3, 3^rdpage, 3^rdline

We sat late. We could not tear ourselves away from each other, nor persuade each other to say the word ‘Farewell!’ The just used VR goggles lay in our laps. 

Seconds earlier we had walked back the years, hand in hand, down to the lake in Whiteknights Park to meet with Mike, Henry and friends before strolling back across campus in the deepening evening light to Wantage Hall and supper.

We had drifted apart during that walk back. You and Mike had fallen in step, side by side, in tune with each other but this was years before you had become more than friends, much more.

Mike’s hair blew across his eyes in the stiff breeze. “I don’t know how all you girls cope with this all the time,” he laughed aloud.

“Hair slides!”

“Elastic bands!”

“Plaits!” came back the replies.

“Not for me,” he retorted. 

It was the era of shaggy haired boys with drooping moustaches wearing washed out loons. We girls dressed much the same. I was dressed in my skinny green T-shirt, brown loons and calico jacket with a tartan trim. It had been my ‘go-to’ summer outfit. In winter I kept warm with an old fur coat and 1920s cardigan. We didn’t have many outfits in those days.

We looked at each other again through rheumy eyes.

“Again?” I asked.

She nodded and fumbled for the goggles nestled in the tartan rug tucking her in and keeping her warm against the evening chill. It might still only be October and the weather wouldn’t really get cool for a month or so yet, but occasionally a wayward breeze brought a frisson of how the seasons used to be: chilly in October, rarely a time for sitting outside on warm evenings. So unlike today. The weather was warm and the leaves on the trees were still green. Leaf fall may or may not happen this year.

“One last time,” she said and struggled to adjust the goggles, “and then we must go.” Two ladies in late middle age who had been deep in conversation got up from a garden bench and came over to help each of us adjust the app. and set us down memory lane again.

“Is that OK Gran?” they chimed in unison and we all laughed.

“Fine,” I said and touched the goggles to start the VR again.

I looked across at my pretty young friend of the past ninety decades. She sat across the table from me. The flowery new dress she had bought that morning from Top Shop in Reading was obscured by the big black gown she was wearing. We were all wearing black academic gowns with a wide blue trim to distinguish us undergraduates from the postgraduates on the high table. We were served our supper by waitresses – but they weren’t called that. My memory fails me. I can’t remember what they were called.

I hadn’t noticed at the time but she wasn’t looking at me. She only had eyes for Mike sat next to me and he and I were in deep conversation, probably about the latest episode of ‘Star Trek’ which we never failed to watch on the small flickering black and white television set of the JCR. That’s the Junior Common Room. I know Wantage Hall still exists. It escaped the firestorms of 2038. And I know that these gowned, weekly formal dinners were phased out a year after this supper in 1970, but are there still JCR’s in 2062? I must ask someone. Who would know?

I look across at the rest of our group. Henry, high as a kite who died in 2018 from some sort of cancer. The other Mike who emigrated to Texas and became ‘something big’ in computers. Chris whom we all lost touch with; Robbie who went back to running his family farm and was killed in the Forties Food Riots when starving people from the cities flooded the countryside looking for food. Then there was Jack C. who always wore shorts and flipflops and was the first white man I ever knew to talk with a Jamaican accent. He was Jamaican. White Jamaican. I often wondered what happened to him and his family when all the former colonies of the empire took back control when the old queen died.

Looking up and down the long table. The beautiful Jennifer and her boyfriend Geoff are head to head, eyes locked with each other. They would stay that way for fifty years. Rosemary is chatting up Jack C. And Welsh Megan is making everyone laugh. Later tonight she will hitch a ride in a bread van heading for London so that she can spend the weekend with her boyfriend from home. And then there’s sparkling Lina whose wonderful 60^th birthday party we spent on a pleasure boat floating up and down the Thames past all those landmarks of old London: The Houses of Parliament and St Thomas’ opposite, where my youngest son would be born; we drifted under Tower Bridges strung with giant Olympic Rings and sticking out from the South Bank was the newly opened Shard. All gone in the Energy Wars. And Lina too. We last heard from her from her home in Italy – before the Great Silence.

Teenagers again, we look at each other across the table with the same thought in our mind.

“I wonder what happened to Lina?” she says.

“I wonder?” I echo.

Our eyes wander over the much-loved faces of our friends. Eating. Drinking. Joking. I know she’s looking at Mike joking with me. She looks at me and smiles.

“Turn it off,” she says, “It’s a long time ago.”

I tap the side of my goggles and the laughter stops. The clattering of knives and forks, the chink of glass and the sight of all that food disappear. All gone. Only pitch darkness remains.

I yank the goggles from my eyes and look at her. She has done the same. A tear runs down one cheek. At some point during that last supper we had reached out for each other. We are holding hands.

“It’s time to go Gran.”

Our granddaughters gather up our VR paraphernalia.

“It’s getting dark now,” they tell us – as if we can’t see that for ourselves! Not everything in our centenarian plus bodies has broken down! We have been sitting much later than had been planned.

“I’m not sure if that’s such a good idea,” she says about my great grandson’s latest 3-D avatar creation from our old photographs and university archive materials. “So real. So real. But …” She is silenced by her thoughts and memories.

“We need to go now Gran,” says her granddaughter, Mike’s granddaughter – the one he would never know for he has already been half a century gone.

We are still holding hands, unable to tear ourselves away from each other and our shared memories and our long-ago lives. We can not bring ourselves to say farewell.

Farewell is such a final word.