I wasn’t in love with him, yet. But he gave me that odd little fridge buzz, somewhere inside me – in more than one place inside me, in fact – that made me aware that love was a possibility. That feeling that one’s heart has been replaced with a Victorian mechanical replica; one that still works perfectly well, but now emanates a steady metallic slapping of gears, coarse but warm like beetle wings, sometimes louder, sometimes softer.

I wasn’t in love with him, yet, although my compulsion to invite him to every conceivable non-date activity that I could – anything other than an actual date, naturally – and the icy, terrified delight each meeting brought me suggested that perhaps I was. I couldn’t be, though: we hadn’t even been on a proper date. Maybe I was set on an unalterable course that meant whilst I was not in love with him yet, I absolutely would be, whether I liked it or not, at some point soon. Perhaps that made me Schroedinger’s Fool, simultaneously in love and in denial and bound by physics to move from one state to the other, regardless of where I thought I was right now and regardless of any semblance of will I thought I might possess.

I was aware that Schroedinger’s theory is very rarely appropriated entirely accurately, but here I was, appropriating it inappropriately anyway. Perhaps that made it Schroedinger’s Analogy, being knowingly incorrect and therefore effectively correct at the same time.

I wasn’t in love with him, yet, although like two drunk men in a pub shouting “Yeah?!” at each other and edging forwards, goading each other to be the first to punch their mirrored twin and fight for or against something or other, he and I were drawing together with every over-long glance and every conversational corner we turned, each step quietly registering as unsettling and exhilarating, like a breath of some newly-discovered sort of air.

We were waiting on each other’s cues for permission to give cues, somehow spiraling inwards, an unplanned, perfectly choreographed and totally predictable chaos, a prime number of free will and suckered-in inevitability.

I was not in love with him, yet, but the fact that he was, as always, eating a packet of Marks & Spencer knock-off Chipsticks and the fact that I, as always, apparently found this inexplicably endearing and fascinating suggested that, somewhere, a contract had already been signed. If you’re going to eat shite it may as well be posh shite, he’d said, and I’d snorted and wondered what it would be like to kiss him and whether the taste of acetic acid and potassium hydrochloride and reincarnated potato dander would make me like him less or like Chipsticks more. And I knew it would be neither because if I kissed him no taste would register because I would sense nothing and think nothing and everything would be perfect, perfect near non-existence, just a disembodied Victorian mechanical heart come to life and drifting through the endless wilds of outer space. It would be like breaking every bone on an ice rink and gasping as the ice numbed your entire body better, although I wouldn’t tell him that as it made it sound unpleasant and I meant it in a good way. Of course, I meant it in a good way. And of course, I wouldn’t tell him; I would tell him nothing.

—

For this afternoon’s non-date date we were attending a devoutly peculiar talk from a woman who claimed to be 116 years old and was absolutely, definitely lying about this. Everything about the event was mildly odd. The venue was the upstairs function room of a local pub, whose current function was clearly primarily storage, hence the old arcade machine under an oil-blotched dustcloth, the wholesale boxes of unfamiliar puffed maize snacks stacked floor to ceiling, and the sheepish-looking, undecorated plastic Christmas tree leaning into the far corner like its parents had just discovered it drunk. The subject of the talk, according to the italics on the flyer, was the impenetrably oblique ‘Imagine yourself healthy and double your lifespan.’ The way the event had been promoted had been odd; the woman who definitely wasn’t 116 had hand-delivered the leaflets door-to-door. I’d seen her from the front window, wondered who she was as she walked up the drive, and moments later seen her face again on the photocopied piece of A5 that had appeared in the letterbox. It also seemed strange, perversely, that there were no obviously strange or sinister affiliations mentioned on the flyer, no references to ‘The Church of Future Friends’ or the ‘Forum Into Insight’ or anything else that suggested that robes would be donned and donations would be robbed. There wasn’t even an entry fee; it appeared, under any level of scrutiny and with any amount of cynicism, that the woman was simply trying to share her knowledge with the sole aim of helping others and with no ulterior motive of personal gain whatsoever, like a total psychopath.

Of course, it didn’t really matter what the event was going to be like, or what any event was going to be like. Everything excited me at the moment if it gave me an excuse, no matter how tenuous or arcane, to invite him to come with me.

“How old do you think I am?” asked the woman, who was clearly no older than 60. None of us, the fifteen or so of us in the pub function room, offered a reply, perhaps because of the light-hearted tension in the room, or perhaps because we’d all read her leaflet and so knew what the answer was, or what her answer was, at least; the records at the town hall might disagree. The woman had long and thick but slightly strawed hair, centre-parted, light brown with a well-tended grey-white streak running down the front on one side, and wore a hemp smock.

“Sorry, sir?” said the woman, opening a palm at a man sitting in the front row as if he’d offered an answer, which he had not.

“Erm,” said the man, finding himself unable to repeat something he hadn’t said. “Er – 55?” His voice had an undertone of squeak; he was, presumably struggling to recalibrate his politeness setting, having got used to tactfully underestimating women’s ages but unsure how low-ball an offer this woman wanted, given that she was about to claim that she was 116.

“I’m 116,” said the woman, playfully pushing her hair back on both sides and breaking into a long, slow smile. This gesture seemed altogether too flirtatious for a 116-year-old; if I reached the age of 116 I was fully planning on doing nothing more vivacious than drinking whiskey, eating ancient biscuits of unidentifiable heritage, and standing in people’s gardens at 2 am and shrieking like an owl, so they thought I was a ghost.

The man in the front row tensed his entire body politely, and the room held one stale communal breath as we felt the fourth wall disintegrate, and with it our defence against the awkwardness of the situation and the compound awkwardness of knowing that everyone was aware that things were awkward. I glanced at my companion; he glanced back, his gleeful, mortified rictus mirroring mine, with eyes wide and lips pulled inwards to teeth, sending static ripples across our cheeks.

I squeezed his thigh to convey my delighted excruciation; this was far, far too forward and I was certain that I’d planned to aim for his arm, but the tension of the situation, like an outbreak of war, had shifted the Overton Window of acceptable behaviour. Maybe it hadn’t. I recalled how he’d not long ago signed off a text with three kisses, I’d steadfastly ended my response with our undiscussed default of one kiss, and he’d replied with Definitely autocorrect’s fault, that and a photo of the orcs from Lord of the Rings. Orcs, awks, awkard. It’s never given me any pogroms, I’d replied, and image searched a mixing desk, circled the audio output sockets, and sent it to him. He added a ‘D’ on the left of the photo and sent it back. Orcs, aux, awks, dorks. And dorks we were. But I wasn’t in love with him, yet.

—

The key to her supernatural youth, the woman said, was to never imagine any stressful situations. She didn’t actually use the phrase ‘supernatural youth’; she told us that she could tell we were all surprised by her age, with a coquettish giggle.

“None of you think I look 116,” she said, “and I can tell you – I don’t feel 116 either.” She talked like a butler breathing lovingly onto precious silverware in readiness for buffing. “Nothing stressful; use your imagination for good. You feel everything you imagine as if it’s really happening, so be kind to yourself. Don’t worry about things that haven’t happened. “Anger is okay,” the woman said, her smile remaining fixed in place while her eyes just for a moment took on the dark marmoreal reflection of a dusk-lit lake, and a grittiness came from her throat like echoes of gizzard stones. “Anger can be healthy if you enjoy it.” Her voice returned to its original soporific velvet and continued peacefully, leaving us even more alarmed than before.

This was not just learning to identify when we were ‘catastrophising’ and nipping that in the bud; her philosophy went deeper and beyond. We should always assume everything will work out fine until proven otherwise. We should avoid all sad films and books unless we were certain they had a happy ending, and even then they should be treated with caution and preferably rationed.

“There is no advantage to be gained by experiencing negative emotions outside our real lives,” she said. “You are not practising the piano; these things will not become easier. You will just lose hair and skin tone and vital energy.”

And so she continued, with floaty voice and floaty hand gestures and a flinty certainty beneath it. We were gently bracing ourselves throughout the presentation for the moment when we would be asked to contribute something of ourselves, either to sign up for regular paid sessions to imbue ourselves fully with her wisdom, or to join a cult masquerading as a church masquerading as a science. But no literature was distributed, no glossy pamphlets, no photocopied forms with rows of wireframe boxes at the bottom for collecting direct debit details. There wasn’t even a long-haired, beheaded white male founder for the 116-year-old to eulogise about; these talks were usually organised by institutions founded by a Californian who claimed to have assimilated their life-changing philosophy while living in a Mongolian cave for almost all of the 1980s with nothing but jade carvings for company and food, and who’d attracted a legion of devotees who could be exploited financially or physically. But no; it was just a lady who was either lying about her age – or the equivalent of lying when the liar truly believes they’re telling the truth, but isn’t – and the wholesale boxes of unfamiliar puffed maize snacks.

—

The woman finished after just over an hour, presumably having calculated that by that point we would all have been converted to her way of thinking. I felt fairly sure she was wrong, but her idea nevertheless remained in my thoughts, slowly moving and rotating like text in an early 2000s screensaver, so I could consider it from different angles. He was ever so slightly quieter than usual too, as we walked by the riverside, presumably doing the same as I was – mulling over the woman’s claims while being aware, really, that it was bollocks and therefore being too embarrassed to suggest discussing its possible value out loud.

We turned in towards the town when the river rolled under the train tracks and the path fizzled out into a grass verge slumped against the bridge and held in place by a spiked metal fence. We climbed the pavement to the high street; the cobbles were each worn to a smooth shine, looking wet and impassably slippery, though neither in reality. Then there were the concrete steps up to the raised pavement, with the single rusted pole of a handrail daring devil-may-care pedestrians to actually try using it. And when you were up those steps and level with the flat above the fish and chip shop opposite, there was one more crested gennell, rising a little then flattening out as it reached my road. And that was where we were, me and him, outside my house just as I’d imagined happening approximately eight thousand times before, and just as had happened exactly zero times before.

I felt the awful, horrible pressure of dreams come true, the awareness of opportunity falling towards my grasp like a baby lobbed from a burning building, and my arms pinned to my sides by isolated waves of nausea around my shoulders and chest. I felt like I was being held in place by a water cannon propelling hundreds of gallons of my own vomit at me. He looked shy, and gentle, and lip-chewingly useless; all the things that made me almost love him, in fact, and the same things that had led to this stalemate. If only I fancied brash clots then whichever brash clot I’d taken a fancy to would’ve tried to kiss me by now. Most guys would’ve tried to kiss me months ago, as soon as I’d invited them to the first arbitrary event and they’d realised they were ‘in’. He had not, yet, but in our current motionless diorama, our mid-swallow held breath, there was the possibility that he might. Or I might kiss him. Although, either we’d kiss or we wouldn’t – there was no ‘might’, really. It was already decided, somewhere in the chemical calculations of our bodies – we just didn’t know what the result was yet. Schroedinger’s Kiss, to use another presumably incorrect analogy.

Well – that was fun, he said, smiling a soft smile. We should do something weird again soon.

Yeah, we should, I said. I’ll keep an eye out for crazy people handing out flyers.

Cool, he said, doing the same smile again, and lapping a bit of air into his mouth to gulp down. He did a double-tuck, pushing his knotty black hair behind his ears. That’s what I’m supposed to do, you thundering great dimwit!, I thought. He, utterly infuriatingly, took three steps backward, between the parked vans, looking at me all the way, clearly aware that he was supposed to have kissed me and that what he was doing was entirely the wrong thing.

And then, as he passed the vans and emerged into the road, a car doing maybe slightly more than the legal 30 struck him flush in the legs and skittled him into the air. His body followed the aluminum streamlining of the vehicle all the way to the boot then, with a noise like a rooftop snowdrift thumping the patio, smacked the concrete with so much more force than anyone needs to reach the ground. A moment later the car had pulled up into a sudden halt and the life had left his broken, beautiful and broken body, rumpled like a crane fly in a plughole and dead as water.

Or, maybe that shouldn’t happen. Maybe, the still-frame of pure awkwardness by my doorway finally gave way under the combined pressure of the very-nearly-love we were exerting on everything around us all the bloody time, our hyperventilating hearts finally broke out of our stupid ribs, and we kissed, we kissed, with lips then tongues, and hands clambering about and pauses to share breaths and to feel the cold air passing over our eyes as we looked at each other from a distance of centimetres, so all we could see was each other and only a fragment of that. Maybe we paused for a moment and embraced, and I pressed a cool cheek against his, and then he kissed my neck, since it was just in front of him, and it all continued over again, with lips and tongues and hands again. And maybe an elderly lady shuffled towards us, walking a Yorkshire Terrier that had an expression like a gobsmacked, outraged motorist, and she tutted and loudly said EXCUSE ME, please, because we were blocking the pavement and, honestly, so far out of reality any more that she could’ve stood there until she died and we still wouldn’t have noticed her.

And then we laughed, privately but obviously partly at the old lady, our gazes not leaving one another’s for an instant, let alone looking at the woman or her indignant Yorkshire Terrier, and we disappeared and then were somehow in my front room, kissing forever and forever and pulling at clothes like we were running out of oxygen and the only way to survive was to get naked, as scientifically improbable as that sounds. Maybe that should happen instead.

– Daniel Searle

Author’s Note: “116” is a metaphysical romance that poses the question of whether all art does us good.