The Fountain of Youth Part II

Mary huffed a small, nostalgic sigh as she watched the young couple giggle, squeal and swirl through the jets of the walk-through water fountain, trying to avoid the more vicious and vigorous spurts. They looked at each other like there was no one else there in the world. It was like something out of a Jack Vettriano painting, like the one they got for one of their other anniversaries from the kids.

Mary gently squeezed Alex’s knee once more and wistfully stated, “We used to be like that, you know.”

“Like what?” Alex harrumphed between licks of ice cream, like it was her duty to ensure that not a single bead of ice-cream dared to breach the walls of its cone. It was a fight she was almost losing.

“You didn’t even – l-like them! Look! Look at them! Young-”

Alex continued her battle but glanced upwards towards the spectacle before them, making furtive glances at the ice-cream cone to monitor her success at keeping the flood at bay. She hadn’t even registered the yelps and screams, nor the crowd that surrounded the fountain and the dancing couple. It took her a moment to pick them up out of the crowd, but when she did, she clucked in disapproval, “You mean ‘stupid’?”

“-spontaneous-”

“They’ll die of hypothermia, if they don’t get arrested first.”

“-full of love – hypothermia? Alex, it’s 14 degrees! That’s Summer in Newcastle.”

“Look at what they’re wearing! If they don’t have hypothermia by the end of the night, I’ll be surprised. That, or sun stroke. You know, once the sun’s gone, they’ll freeze to death. We might well be in a desert, but it still gets cold in a desert, you know. I read an article a while ago about snow in the desert. I can’t remember where it was… Anyway, it said that it snowed there for the first time in a long time, but the point is, it gets dead cold. I reckon it must’ve been the Sahara – or was it the Serengeti? I always…”

Mary turned back to face the couple, her shoulders sagging in defeat. She heard this one before. After 25 years and two children, was there anything that she hadn’t heard? Alex read so many articles, but it felt like Mary heard the same 10 over and over again. Every once in a while, a new one would slip into the rotation and old one would disappear. At least until one of the kids called to see how they were doing and then it was all about the life cycles of the African elephants all over again.