from within

1

It occurred as I was walking across the floor of Liverpool Street station. A series of thoughts. All I could hear were the thousands and thousands of feet echoing their way over the tiled surface. A cacophony of small noises.

I took the escalator up towards the café where I would quickly drink a double espresso before starting the day. Then I caught sight of himself while passing a shop display. The handrails of the gallery shone and there I was, my face slightly distorted in the glass, eyes staring back at me questioningly.

I looked different. With the collar of my jacket pulled up against my neck, the heavy woolen turtleneck sweater underneath, it appeared that my face was emerging from a darkness. And that too, was how I felt. Ever since I met her. I was aware there had been a subtle change in my life. It was as if there was something happening somewhere within me, something pushing toward the light.

Really I could not be sure how long I had felt in the dark. Perhaps it was a gradual. The sky slowly growing thicker with cloud until every day was a little darker and then I no longer noticed. I went about my business as if there was nothing else to do but go about business, nothing else to do but follow some common pattern that was never clear but I followed anyway.

Even as the train pulled into the station, I was wondering to myself why I should feel that way. After all now she was gone. She left, just like that. No word of explanation; simply went. She was there the way a bird lights on a branch, the way you are aware of the rustle of wings among leaves and you look and for those few seconds the sun is brilliant, the breeze is warm, is like a hand being placed gently on your shoulder and everything seems clear, everything seems to have found its place, be at ease with itself. Then there is sudden movement and the bird is in the air. A cloud floats across the sun and the breeze gets a little cooler. So you wonder about the transience of things – the sense of being left, of there being some things that just cannot be grasped.

I stood against the door among the other commuters and noticed the way the walls lining the entrance to the station were crumbling, were overgrown with weeds along their tops. They were lined with black, with dust and soot, were standing like a rather sad reminder of passing time. Above them rose a large office building, its steel archway, its marble finish, its rows of windows catching the breaking day. And something inside said me that this was just the way it was and the pale winter sunlight streaming through the train window was part of it, the anxious looking face of the woman in front of him was part of it and the eighteen year old with spots on his face was also part of it. Which made me think of her again. Made me wonder why she went like that till I thought that maybe I misread the signals, maybe I wanted so bad to see those signs that I found them in her eyes, found them in her smile. Then I had an image of her as a lonely woman sitting in the corner of a room somewhere, her lovely long hands holding a magazine, her half-length hair falling over one side of her face, knowing life was outside her and wondering how she could stop it being outside her. And her gaze seeks out the eyes of every stranger in the hope that one of them will light the fire and she will open like a flower. Or perhaps she has already opened like a flower. Opened and been hurt and closed again.

When I thought of her like that, I understood I had wanted to be the one to make her smile, wanted to be the one that took her out of herself, into the stream of life, that broke apart her solitude.

It was the solitude that hurt. The sense of her sitting in the shadows, her life buried, her love a fire that burned only her instead of something that lit those around her. But perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps this was only something I imagined. My own darkness getting the better of me. From within the dark days I wanted so much to see the light that any small glimmer was enough to fire me up, enough to get me dreaming. And perhaps she never would sit alone in some room waiting on a stranger to pick her out. Perhaps her solitude was not solitude but simply her own way of being so I asked myself where dream ended and where reality began.

It was as I climbed, pushed past the other commuters on the escalator it occurred to me. Coming through the ticket gates I attempted to shove it from my mind. The thought that it was only something I was imagining filled with me with a sudden falling feeling. Like my stomach was completely empty and knotted. A surge of irritation seized me and someone pushed in front of me. For an instant I was seized with the impulse to say something, to make some comment but knew from past experience that the anonymity of a crowd offered even the most timid of commuters the chance to bare teeth, the opportunity to vent myriad small frustrations.

Why should what I felt be somehow unreliable? If I was imagining and what I imagined somehow connected with what I felt then maybe imagination was the better guide to reality.

Here she was again, her face in front of me and me looking for it. I am in a novel. Post-war Berlin maybe. East or west. I am moving across the floor of a nightclub. It is dark. The air is thick. The air one always imagines when thinking of that era. All the bitterness of defeat. The sad realisation that dreams of glory have ended where they were always to end. In fire. In destruction. In sorrow. She is sitting back in a booth. Service men dance to black music. In my hand is a glass and I am wearing military fatigues. She is wearing a long dark dress and the skin on her face has tightened somewhat. It only adds to her bone structure, her special beauty. And now she is gazing at me, watching me approach. I am is older and she is older. Yet I still see the woman I have always been able to see. Her eyes still hold that quiet intensity and her face with its elegant shape, its paleness seems to reach out of the shadows to me. I stand in front of her and she looks at me. She invites me to sit. I sit and my hand reaches out and takes hers. “What are you doing her?” she wants to know. I wait. I am not sure how to reply. Then I say, “I was told this was a place for angels with charred wings.”

It was when I caught sight of my reflection, my face staring back at me from the window of a telecoms shop and the feeling it conveyed of something emerging from the darkness that I felt strong again. There was a tactility, a soft edge to the darkness and my face seemed to be mobile, to be shifting even as I watched, as I stepped away and toward the door of the café.

No, perhaps I was wrong. She left because she wanted to. There was no question of her denying me. Why was I so reluctant to let it go? What part of me refused to admit that feelings like this could be one way? Was it possible to pick things like that up and be so wrong? Or maybe I was just blind. Or simply stupid. In a way that was a relief. Yes, I was simply stupid. I was stupid enough to have imagined it or stupid enough to have got it wrong. Yet even as I accepted this, as I assured myself I had got it wrong she came back and I remembered. I remembered one evening standing beside her in this very station and feeling her next to me, sensing her the way the earth can be sensed after rain. Opened, asking. Calling for the sky. Calling for completion. It was a true memory. It reminded me of when young. On the long grey avenue of childhood. There was a house and a neighbour. An old woman, a widow whose daughter rode horses. In their hallway there were always riding hats and crops. Everything had an equine feel or a leather smell. I was an adult before I understood behind the riding boots, the saddles, the pictures of hunts there was a dead father and a daughter who had grown alone and was nearly a spinster and the sorrow of a mother made companionless too young. A daughter who had probably never known the touch of a man. So I understood what happens when life gets blocked. When there is only the evening light getting dark over blue mountains. In those mountains it is winter and the leaves are all fallen into the fields and on the roads, are curled and withered and the trees bare and exposed. The valleys are quiet as if touched by some strange spell. Rivers that in another’s summer flow lightly are heavy, their motion held down, their dash checked.

Standing beside her that evening waiting to take the train to the airport, I wondered if perhaps I was reminded of this, if perhaps I should say to her what I was thinking. But she was too concerned with her ticket while I carried her suitcase and in any case she was still a young woman and I was older and perhaps it was that and I was really seeing it from my perspective.
Perhaps I was trying to recapture time for myself. There was life. There was this emptiness. Nothing more, nothing less.

And if I was imagining it, then what did that say of me? It was still the dark days. I was not in fact clear of any darkness, of the forest. The reflection was an illusion. There was no growing back into light. This fleeting moment was just the turn of a shop window. In that reflection I was seeing something that did not exist. It was only my face. The high-necked sweater was the sweater I had hurriedly put on that morning; the dark jacket pulled over it, its collar up to keep me warm. I was on my way from a to b. Life was just moving along and I was just moving with it.

No she was not here. And I did not know exactly where she was. I had no address. Was she right at that moment waking somewhere, stretching after a night’s sleep, the white of a pillow softened in the transparency of this winter morning? Or crossing a street, the traffic lights flashing over empty tram tracks, falling into the space across her eyes, lightening them, showing the sadness I could not figure out.

I did not know. It was beyond me to know. Why had she not spoken before she left? I would never know. Thinking of this finality, I felt sad. Was it that what went over a certain line, what moved beyond a certain point had to be thrown away if it did not succeed? The door had to be closed tightly after it left. No shadow was allowed to fall across any future street. And yet in the night it was there. When you awoke and it was quiet, when the streets were empty, when the streetlights fell in over the floor, it was there. It whispered lower than you thought possible and there was no detecting it at first. Up through you body it came, working its way under your skin, until even with your hands over your ears, your eyes tightly closed it was there. In the silence of the room, in the beating of your heart in your chest. It never really left. Only that in the light of day, it could be forgotten. You could push it aside like the headline of a newspaper, leave it on an underground train until that train rode back like a ghost through the small hours of the morning, its rattle jarring into your sleep and its incessant words, that no you had not forgotten, could not forget, did not want to forget.

Then you knew where you were. In that space within where questions had no answers, where all the tricks of daylight, where reason failed. There was no escaping. You knew what you were missing, knew that voice inside that asked why you could not forget, did not want to forget and yet each day tried so hard to forget.

She was gone. It was that simple. And yet the change was there. Why else was I thinking of her? Why, this morning, were these things going through my mind?



2

I stepped through the door of the café. There was the smell of bacon, of eggs of toasted bread. In front of me a coffee machine hissed. A waiter, his skin sallow, his eyes moving quickly about stood joking with a dark haired girl. When she smiled she showed a row of uneven but brilliantly white teeth.

I took my cup and paid the cashier. I found the line of high stools that looked out over the rail tracks and sat. I pulled a newspaper from under my arm, I placed my shoulder bag at my feet and look down onto the platform below. Two porters stood talking and a man ran to catch a train. His briefcase knocked awkwardly against his legs. Somewhere among the rows of trains, the line of platforms was the connection to the airport.

Again there she was, her face tense that night, and me trying to close the gap, wanting to tell her how lovely she was. I could see this other woman in her, a woman who wanted to step out from the shadows, a woman who wanted to live. Yet she would not let this woman out, would not give her, her freedom. I was wanting to say I would be there for her, I would be with her. But then she was gone. Her suitcase was in the baggage rack and I was walking back my hands in my pockets, the sky above the station endless and cold and the stars just hanging there.

I opened the newspaper, then stared absently at the headlines. I lifted my cup. The coffee appeared blacker against the white china.

She was gone and she was not gone. And my heart felt as though it was suddenly going to burst. A smile spread over my face. I was thinking if she were to be beside me, to be standing there right beside me and asking could she still, it would be like the passing of a storm and I would be saying, . . . yes. . . , yes. . ., yes, of course, yes.

Copyright © Peter Millington. London. May 1999

place Carnot

1

I am standing by the window. It opens onto the small balcony of my hotel room. From the pavement below I hear the sound, the bustle and movement of crowds.

I am looking to the room across the street. Every now and then figures move behind the pulled curtain. Their outline is vague and blurred in the peach of the hanging fabric; shapes sketched by the light from the ceiling. As I watch, as I listen, I think of her.

Four mornings ago when I arrived the city was quiet. It was just after seven when I stepped off the train.

I walked thinking it was too early to find a hotel. I had a couple of hours to kill. My first impressions were of the white of the buildings, the soft colours of the paintwork, the strange emptiness of the yet unpeopled streets.

The sun was rising then. It climbed up over the houses on the hills in the distance, finding its way in over the roofs, glinting here and there in the mirrors of cars parked alongside pavements.
In the coolness of the morning I shivered. I felt the change after the warmth and stuffiness of the train carriage in which I had been travelling all night. I opened my bag and pulling out a light jacket, put it on.

I wondered then what the city would bring. I wondered why I had marked it on my map. Why, when the previous day I was planning the last part of my journey, I decided on a detour. Why it prompted my curiosity.

I first saw them standing in front of the 1st class section of the train - a little further up from me. They were carrying two large suitcases that they set down carefully on the cool stone. As they stood looking about them somewhat confusedly, I noticed her shiver, noticed how he stood a little away from her. His hands were in his pockets; his eyes were narrowed and wary.

I walked toward them and heard him say in English, he was thirsty, that he could sure kill a cup of coffee. She looked down and opened a small bag hanging from her shoulder, took out a mirror and began to put on lipstick. As I passed she was applying it to her lips. She looked up, caught my gaze and smiled.

I was a little way beyond them when I heard a voice call out. For a moment I thought it was for someone else. Then I stopped. I looked around and saw him wave, walk quickly up to me and, his eyes flickering a dark grey, say ‘you don’t happen to speak English do you’?

I replied that I did but was not able to help them. I explained it was my first time here. I too was just a traveller and I was also looking for a hotel. I added I thought it should be possible to find something in the vicinity of the station.

Pausing, I watched him stride back to where she was standing and shake his head.



2

The following morning while sitting on the terrace of a cafe they came in. I was putting a roll of film into my camera and heard the seats across from me being moved. As I glanced up she was sitting down, the same small bag held out in front of her, her short blond hair falling over her face. I noticed her eyes seemed a little remote. I felt almost immediately she was annoyed at something.
I watched her, watched her put her light jacket over the back of the seat, watched her smooth out her skirt and then cross one leg over the other. And I remained like that. Observing the breeze ruffle her hair, her pale arm against the cream of her blouse, the concentrated light from the table softening the tones of her skin. It was only when I heard the other voice, heard him ask if a black coffee was alright, I looked away.

He was standing behind her, under his arm a newspaper, in his hands two cups. His hair, still wet from the shower, was brushed back smoothly off his forehead. There was a tiny scar marking the line of his jaw.

She answered without looking at him. Her face remained impassive. She said nothing. Instead she reached into her bag and pulled out a paperback.

He put the cups on the table, sat down quickly, his mouth set in a thin line.
I did not want them to notice me looking. I felt awkward; felt I was staring impolitely. Something inside me said it was better not to interfere. Yet I could not but admit I was curious.

I put the cup in front of me to my lips, I finished off the last of my coffee. I called the waiter over and was just getting my change when I heard his voice. At first I thought it was the waiter he was addressing, but no, as on the previous morning, he was speaking to me.
“Hey, did you get fixed up with a hotel. We found one not far from the station, but the other station. There are two here. Did you know that? How about you?”
I returned my wallet to my pocket. I was already standing up.
“Yes thanks, I managed to find something. It’s a small but comfortable place near the Place Carnot”, I replied.
It was too impolite just to walk away and besides, I was wondering if she would again smile at me the way she smiled the previous morning on the station platform.
He turned to her and said to look; it was the guy they had met yesterday, the guy who had not known where they could find a hotel.

She glanced up, her mind seemingly still on the words she was reading and stared at me. For a brief moment she frowned and then her eyes flashed a vague recognition.

As her lips softened into a smile, as I watched the way her eyes suddenly wrinkled in the corners, the delicate bridge of her nose, I found myself with a strange sense of familiarity.

He motioned to me to sit down and have a drink. I did not really want to. I had already decided how to spend the day. He turned to her. She leaned over and removed her coat from the vacant seat. He saw me hesitate, gave a wide grin, all his teeth showing, his eyes steely and asked would

I like another coffee, maybe a beer

She nodded her head, sat forward in her chair, closed her book carefully and placed it on the table.

I felt embarrassed, felt it would be rude now to refuse but also saw my plans for the day disappearing. He called the waiter back. I sat down.



3

The following morning I met them again. It was she who saw me, called out to me as I was coming from my hotel. I crossed the road to say, hello, and when she asked what I had planned for the day, I had to say, nothing.

He began talking about how he wanted to drive around a bit outside the city, how he hoped maybe to see some of the famous small towns of the region. She suggested I come with them, that it would give me the chance to see a little of the surrounding countryside. He looked at her blankly for a moment and then said, yes, why not. I arranged to meet them in the foyer of their hotel. (We discovered we were staying across the street from one another).

When I arrived he was already there, pacing in the foyer. As we stood waiting on her he complained about their room, saying it was too small, that it was cramped, that it cost more then it was worth. I shrugged and replied it was always the chance you took, it was always a matter of luck if you were not well acquainted with the city you were arriving in.

Eventually she came down the stairs. We turned and began to walk the short distance to the car-rental agency.

It was a sunny afternoon, the clouds sparse and pearly white. She was wearing a light blue blouse, a loose red skirt and a pair of white tennis shoes. As she walked ahead of us on the street, I found myself following the faint tan of her legs, following the fluid way she seemed to move over the pavement. I think he noticed this because he suddenly asked me why I was travelling alone.

I explained I was on a trip. I had recently ended a relationship and felt the need to get away, to spend some time alone, some time travelling. I told him I had taken the opportunity to bring my camera, that I had decided to see it as a chance to build up my stock of images.

He looked at me with a puzzled expression and then answered, his voice suddenly vulnerable, that you never really knew where you were with women.

It was surprising he picked up on the end of the relationship. It was surprising the perplexity that suddenly appeared in his face.

I wanted to reply that sometimes it was something else. Sometimes it had to do with the unsaid expectations people had of each other, the secret images we have of ourselves and others. I wanted to say it is easier to look outside ourselves, to avoid looking at a situation as it is, easier to persist on seeing a situation as we would like it to be. Instead I simply said, ‘perhaps’. He stuck his hands into the pockets of his khaki trousers. We walked in silence.

When we reached the office there was a misunderstanding about the car rental. She stood outside with me and we listened to him argue, heard him raise his voice and watched the older man behind the desk shrug his shoulders, gesticulate with his hands.

I squatted down on the pavement, opened my camera bag and looked to see what lenses I had. He came out, swearing under his breath and turned and said to her that they would not charge it to his credit card, wanted him to pay cash.
“Goddamed foreigners,” he suddenly exclaimed, asking her if she could lend him some money.
I felt embarrassed and I think she did too but she said nothing.

As we drove out of the city he began to sing to himself. He wound down the window and stuck his arm out it. She sat next to him, her legs stretched out in front of her. Opening her bag, she took out a pair of sunglasses and the paperback she had been reading the morning before.

I sat in the back. The air from the open window blew in against my face. The city slipped away behind us.

After a while he leaned over and turned on the radio. He asked if either of us knew if they had any decent music in this country. He fiddled around for a couple of minutes, switching rapidly from station to station, until finding nothing to his liking, he turned it off again with a grunt.

I watched as we drove. It was impossible not to notice he was a rather careless driver. On more then one occasion we had to break hastily as he attempted to overtake into oncoming traffic. She sat reading, her eyes moving patiently across the page, now and then wetting her upper lip with the tip of her tongue.

He looked back and asked me what I thought of the city, Lyon, the countryside around it. I saw him fix me in the rear view mirror as I answered it looked good to me. Without waiting for any further reply, he launched into an account of where he had grown up. He told me it was still the most beautiful place he had ever been. He described the mountains, the forests, the sheer scale, the sense of nature untamed. He added you could build a couple of highways through it, but it would still only be a dent in its wildness. His eyes lit up eagerly as he told me how when you left the city you could drive along the highway and come to a town and there would be the neon of the seven-eleven, the shopping mall, the diner, the fast-food chain, and yet you felt its isolation. You felt in someway that underneath it was something lonely, something blue and doggedly determined. When he was forty-five he was going to pack everything up and go and live in one of those places.
“Build myself a house, buy one of them off-road vehicles and go fishing when I want”.
At this she lifted her eyes from her book and looked at him. Then she turned to me.
“Dreams,” she said. “He’s just dreaming. He couldn’t live for forty-eight hours without the excitement of his work, his TV, his fax, his luxury apartment, all the things that go with life in a city”.
He glanced at her and then lifting his hand in the air, brought it quickly down as if sweeping her words aside.
“No way, just you watch me, I’ll do it. And what’s more you’re coming with me”.

I already knew what he was doing in Europe. He worked in Paris as a shares-trader. He had a one-year contract with the overseas section of his company. It was there he met her. She worked for an English company that had just started trying to make inroads into the French market.

To me, she seemed the more settled of the two. I was not surprised to learn she was older. He laughed at this, winked at me and said, “yea, but what’s age when you’ve got experience”. She did not reply.

Watching them, I could not figure out where the centre of their relationship lay. There were times when she appeared displeased at things he said, hurt by his straightforward manner.

The previous morning in the cafe I felt she was upset. She was subdued, quiet. I felt her to be almost trying to shut him out. When I sat down she was at first somewhat distant. As we talked she eventually became lighter, showed herself to be curious, to be interested.

I observed her sometimes look at him with tenderness, as if looking at a boy, someone who needed special care. To my eyes it was this he liked best; he needed the attention.
As we drove these thoughts went through my mind. I put my head back against the seat and relaxed. She remained immersed in her book. He hummed to himself, now and then cursing other drivers as we sped through the countryside. From the corner of my eye I saw the fresh green of fields, rising hills, and above us, a sky soft and blue.



4

Yesterday evening I met them at a point along the river. There are actually two rivers running through the city; two that meet here, that join and flow together, enriching the land around, rolling gently southwards through wine country before entering the Mediterranean.

It is strange to think of the sea so far inland yet somehow, even at this distance, there can be a sense of its presence.

He complained of having a headache. He was feeling nauseous. He stood leaning out over the languidly flowing water. They had been driving all day, had gone as far as Grenoble.

We were supposed to eat together. They had booked a table in a nearby restaurant. Suddenly it seemed unlikely.

At first he was uncertain about it, appeared puzzled when she suggested there was no reason for me to eat alone, that she could still go on with me. Then he grinned and said, ok, of course, what the hell, he probably only needed some sleep. Maybe he could arrange to join us later. We agreed on a café.

We found the restaurant and sat down. I was hungry. All day I had been taking photographs. I had walked around much of the city, the camera tight in my hand, the lens ready, the shutter on standby looking for anything that caught my eye, anything that remotely piqued my curiosity. The mixture of old and new, the contrast and contradiction, the peculiar sense of two cities, one underneath the other, was intriguing.

I watched her as we waited to make our orders. She seemed strangely dreamy, to be there and yet somewhere else. Her hands rested on the table, curled and apprehensive, her fingers thin and delicate. There was something about her, coiled and aloof, as if withdrawn yet consciously so and capable of sudden intensity.

I asked about her day, how she had found Grenoble. She replied it was interesting but they did not really have time to see much. Before I could say she could always visit again sometime, she looked at me, stared straight into my eyes and asked me about my photography.

In truth I felt slightly taken aback by this sudden interest. I wondered if she had been hiding it, wondered if it had been there all the time, if it had been in the background but that when he was around she refrained from showing it.

I told her a bit about where I had gone during the day, about some of the things I had seen while wandering around, about how the city had revealed itself as somehow binary, as existing in different layers, as somehow paradoxical.

She was interested. She put her hand to the side of her face and listened attentively.

When I finished, she smiled, saying she would like to see some of the photographs sometime if that were possible. For a moment, I thought of saying more, of telling her not what I had seen but of the strange manner in which I had seen.

I wanted to explain to her that in some ways it is the uncovering of how I normally see I enjoy most. Often the camera seems to indicate to me to another dimension of where I am. In the simplicity, the details, in the act of looking at what I look at normally without being aware I am looking, but then being aware of my looking, it seems I come close to another understanding of the world. When I was a child it was also like this.

Often I took my father's camera and placed it to my eye. Then I would walk around the apartment we lived in, or along the street, or through a park, or by the seafront. It was like being a different person. I would feel I was looking from outside in, that the world had become contained in the images appearing within the viewfinder. Even then I sensed these images were only ways of narrowing down the picture. They had been plucked out of the whole picture. The whole picture was too big, too complete for the eye, for any camera.

Sometimes I wonder if this is not a reasonable representation of how life is. I realise I never see the whole picture, that all I ever see are the glimpses, the shots, the images that suggest its completeness, its complexity. I realise that if I were to see it all at once, I would be swept away. It would destroy me. It would be more than my mind could contain.

Those moments when I experience myself as part of the whole picture are the moments when I am concentrating on only very specific parts of the picture. By isolating parts of the complete picture its existence is amplified, its tangibility increases. Contracting it to the nature of a series of simple connections, the totality of all other connections is implied.

It is similar to noticing the footsteps I make in the sand when walking along a beach. I stop and examine the pattern I have made and gaze back and see its form, where it begins, where it ends, where I stand making it even as I turn, and see where it will be washed away by a change of tide, or blown over by wind. I realise that what I call loss is simply a working of the interweaving of life’s complexity, its macro effect on a micro level. There is no loss. Only non-knowing of my participation in living, my continuing involvement in existence. The sand is still there. It has only altered its configuration and is waiting for other steps, other patterns. It is the forming and re-forming that defines me, not the pathway I temporarily make.

The waiter's voice interrupted these thoughts. The run of the conversation was somehow broken. I felt it inappropriate to continue, to add anything. I remained silent.

For the rest of the meal we exchanged small talk. Occasionally we discussed our impressions of the country, her work, or the merits of travelling by road or rail.

When we had finished we argued about who would pay. We compromised, each paying a half. Calling the waiter over, we settled the bill and stood up to go.

I waited a moment as she put her jacket on, fixed her bag over her shoulder and then stepped ahead of me onto the street. Watching the lightness of her movement, I remembered the previous afternoon when she walked along the sunny pavement and he asked me why I was travelling alone, when I felt he was marking out his territory, claiming what he considered his.
The air was warm and humid. I came up beside her and said I thought it might rain.

We passed under trees, thick and fragrant, all in full May bloom. We came to a square with a line of benches, open. It was surrounded by stately, grey buildings. As we crossed it I felt my resistance weaken.

I asked her about the book she was reading. She glanced at me, her face breaking into a teasing smile. Looking at me carefully, she told me it was the story of a woman who had travelled alone through India.

I watched her as she talked, watched the way her eyes became animated, the way she threw her head back, the manner in which her voice suddenly started to linger over words. I wanted to ask her if she had any special interest in India, had she always wanted to go there. I was curious to know why she had chosen the book. Did she always choose books about journeys, or about women, or did she just read what came before her.

Again I felt I should say more, attempt to explain myself. Stopping, I turned to her in the evening light. Her calm, blue eyes looked into mine. I leaned forward, was on the brink of kissing her when I felt her tighten. She moved as if to step back a little. The look in her eyes, the expression of her mouth, told me she was still seeing me through the window of their relationship. I knew it better to let it pass. Reaching out my hand, I simply touched her on the arm. I reminded her we had arranged to meet him, that we needed to start getting back.

We walked then in silence. We found the river and headed along it, following its slow wind, its lazy, stretched-out movement. I heard the sound of bird song, the occasional burst of activity in the spring-scented trees above us. Her steps were light and I wondered if I just imagined she walked with a little less certainty.

Before we reached the spot where we were to meet him, she stopped and put her hand in her bag. She took out a pen. Discovering that she had no spare paper, she pulled out the paperback and tearing the blank back page out, wrote an address on it. She handed it to me, saying she thought he was planning on leaving the next morning, that he still wanted to go to Geneva before they returned to Paris. It would be nice if maybe I could send her a copy or two of some of the photographs I had taken while here.

I agreed and we started crossing the street. He was sitting by the window of the cafe, his head half-hidden by a financial newspaper. There was a tall beer in front of him.

We paused to let a trolley-bus pass. Its green and white shape came between us and obscured our view of him. Suddenly she leaned up and kissed me briefly on the cheek.
Then we were on the other side of the street, stepping onto the pavement and pushing the door in front of us in onto his questioning gaze.



5

The storm held off all night. I left them after half-an-hour and came back to get some sleep.
About six this morning, I woke to feel the humidity ease, hear the rumble of thunder and then the hammer of the rain against the roofs. It fell hard against the side of the building. I got up and went to close the window.

Pulling on a t-shirt I stood and watched the drops beat against the railings of the balcony, watched them sweep and pour down the empty street. I stood until they died down, until there was just the occasional flicker of lightning, until I could hear only the run of water along the edge of the pavement.

Most of the day I have spent just walking around. This morning I took some more photographs, went back to some places I figured I still needed a couple more shots of.

Around midday he came over to tell me they were going to Geneva. He stuck out his hand and said if I was in Paris within the next couple of months to look them up. I said, ok, and then with a cheerful goodbye, he abruptly walked away.

This evening I ate alone. I drank a coffee on the terrace where I first met them. When I had finished I wandered back to the square where I listened to her yesterday evening, where I stopped and almost kissed her. I sat and watched the birds dart among the trees.

Perhaps it is right I should be standing here. Perhaps when I leave tomorrow morning, I will look back on these couple of days, will see a line running from my arrival to my departure. I will sit in the carriage as the train makes its way out through the suburbs. I will feel the footsteps fade, feel the glimpse of the picture slip back into its disconnected patterns. The images I have will settle back into moments, into memories.

Somewhere she will be reading her book on India, reading about the poverty and heat, the vast subcontinent with its great variety of landscape, of life. He will be beside her talking loudly as always, eager to be somewhere, tapping his foot impatiently.

Copyright (C) Peter Millington. May 1996.

affair

1

His eyes fall on the telephone. For a moment it seems to assume an extra power, it holds him. He glances again at the piece of paper in his hand. The name is written clearly on it. He repeats the numbers out loud to himself. Can it be nearly two years already he asks, two years since I last saw her.

He looks around at the toys lying on the living room floor. The wooden train tracing a line across the rug, painted in shiny red, yellow, and green. Blocks, soft toys, books, the scattered concentration of a four year old boy. He hesitates. Should he put the paper back into the book from which it fell? Or should he tear it up and throw it in the bin?

He knows what he wants to do. He wants to lift the telephone receiver and carefully, deliberately, push the buttons underneath the relevant numbers. It is her voice he wants to hear. He would like it to be warm and friendly, glad to hear him at the other end. It will not be. Probably it will be cool and polite, a little distant, something like his. He stands for a moment.
A voice calls from the bedroom. He goes in. His son is sitting up in the bed, tears in his eyes.
“I hadda bad dream Papa, I hadda bad dream,” he is saying.
“Hey," says François,” it’s okay, don’t be crying. Papa is here now. You’re awake. It’s all over. Don’t worry.”
The child looks at him doubtfully. His eyes are still sleepy. François goes over to him and lifts him out of the bed. He carries him slowly into the living room, points to the toy train.
“Look, what’s that?”
“Train, Papa, that’s my train.”
“Yes, that’s your train. Why don’t you go and play with it? Mama will be home soon.”
He puts his son down on the carpet.
“I am just going to get some coffee. okay?”
Straightening up, he walks to the kitchen. He reaches for the coffee machine. The piece of paper is still in his hand. No more than a metre away is a small bin. Taking a step, he places his foot firmly on the pedal. The top springs open. He crumples the paper up into a tight ball, raises his arm as if about to throw it, then stops.
It’s just a number he thinks. Why shouldn’t I throw it away? Am I being sentimental?
He raises his arm once again then stops once again.
No, maybe I'll keep it. I can still remember her writing it out that evening as we sat in the cafe.
Somehow he cannot quite see himself throwing it in with the rubbish. Somehow it does not seem right. His foot lifts off the pedal. The top comes down with a bump. He smoothes out the ball of paper and walks back into the living room. His son is now playing happily with the train.
“Papa my train is coming into the station. Look! Peep, peep!”
“Yes, yes, I see.”
“Papa is not looking.”
“Yes I am. Okay I’m not. Just a moment Mattias.”

He walks across the room, stepping over Mattias and the train. Picking up the book where he left it on the armchair, he opens it and carefully places the wrinkled piece of paper between the pages.

Remember, François, do not forget, he says quietly to himself. Between pages twenty-nine and thirty.

He closes the book and pushes it in between the others on the shelf.



2

It was a Thursday evening. He was working late. It was quiet in the office, and she, bored, came to ask him if there was anything she could do to help. He was trying to fix a sleeving machine. Oil on his fingers, a screwdriver in his hand, he was frustrated and tired. He was searching in the back of the machine for the problem. Suddenly he was aware of her standing beside him. He felt a little awkward and half-smiled.
“There is some client’s work ready, over there, by the light-box,” he said.
“No, it's okay. There’s no hurry,” she replied. “I was only wondering if I could help.”
“Do you know anything about this machine?” he asked.
She smiled.
“No. Not really.”
“Then I am not alone.”
The blue of her eyes, the soft line of her mouth caught his attention. He wondered why he had not noticed it before. She laughed lightly. He gave the screwdriver a sharp turn, then flicked the man switch to `on’.
“Let us see if this is any better,” he said.

He took a film from the rack and inserted it between the grooves, beneath the spools of film-protector, pushed it forward over the sensor. There was a low click, a pause, and then the machine suddenly whirred into action.

The spools turned and the transport pulled the film forward, sandwiching it between the matt and shiny plastic, sealing it with two fine lines of acetone, and then ejecting it safely the other end. He cut it free and holding it up to the light, examined it both back and front.
“It’s okay,” he said, “it's good now. It seems to be working again.”
He turned towards her. Her head was cocked slightly to one side, and she was looking at him curiously. There was an awkward moment of silence.
“You must have a magic presence,” he said.
She suddenly blushed. Her hand went up to her hair, pushing it back to one side, behind her ear.
“I doubt it,” she answered.
Turning back to the machine, he concentrated on setting up the receiving spool. He threaded the plastic through and stuck it down with a piece of clear tape.
“Don’t you need to put the back on again?” she asked, pointing to the back of the machine.
“No,” he answered, glad to be able to say something, feeling that he had embarrassed her. “I'll leave it off just in case it stops working again. That way I shall save time.”
“Okay,” she said. “If you need me to do anything, I’ll be out in reception.”

He watched her walk away. She was wearing a brown jacket, loose khaki pants and black leather shoes. His eyes remained on her until she turned a corner and out of sight. Even as she went, as she disappeared, he wanted to call her back.

He ran his hand across the front of his t-shirt, cursed under his breath as he realised he had put two long oil stains on it.

It was not quite eight o'clock. There was another two hours work in front of him. Two large orders of film were still waiting to be done, black and white, colour, transparency, some of it straightforward, some with special instructions. The noise and the harsh white light of the laboratory seemed stifling.

Outside it would be getting dark. The trees would be swaying lightly in the park, creaking, contracting, as if letting go after the close heat of the day.

The sky would be falling into turquoise, the trams rattling around the red-bricked facade of the museum. Their lighted windows would be moving though the dusty air.

He imagined he could hear the clink of glasses in a café. He could hear the murmur of voices underneath spinning ceiling fans. He could taste ice-cold beer, creamy coffee. The couples in corners, their gestures, their movements, the turns and dips of their secret conversations would suggest intimacy. Suddenly he was thinking of her. He was seeing them there together. Would she smile the way she had just smiled?

He put the screwdriver down then walked to the washroom. Whistling, he cleaned the remains of the oil from his hands. For a moment he stood in the corridor that led to the office. He wondered if perhaps he should go out to the reception and see what she was doing. He decided it was better to get on with his work. He went to the computer and entered figures, took a sip of Cola from a cardboard cup he had left sitting to the side. It was too sweet and already flat.



3

François sits down in the armchair. He looks at his son playing on the floor. Trains move in various lines, stopping every now and then at stations made from an improbable collection of objects. Here some blocks, there a book, imagination serving to finish and decorate what the eye cannot see.

François wonders if it is better to have a child's faith in imagination. Perhaps it is more than just illusion, a weaving of something around what is not really there. He hears Mattias.
“Papa, this train is going to that station there, and this one is a metro that is going to go across the sea to a very big island.”

His son is pointing to a line of wooden carriages.

François smiles.
“Metros cannot go across the sea. Only boats or airplanes. A metro is only for the city. How would it cross the water? Maybe you could make it go somewhere else.”
The child looks puzzled for a moment.
“Why not papa?”
“Well they need tracks to run on, don’t they?. You can’t build tracks on water because they would sink.”
François pauses. He waits for the reply. The eyes move, the head tilts a bit to one side.
“Yes, but this is a special train.”
“Why?” asks François.
“Because the station-master built a very, very, big bridge all the way over.”
His son’s hands move in the air as he indicates the length of the bridge. François smiles. He wants to laugh happily at the way in which his son’s mind works. The way at this age, space, distance, the attributes of the physical world, of reality, are not yet insurmountable, unchallengeable.
“Yes,” he says, “I guess the station-master could do that if he wanted to, couldn't he?”
François realises how big his son has become. He knows the miracle of growth and development in a child is something repeated countless times the world over. Nevertheless, it is true in your child it always seems special.
Two years have seen such a change. Gone are the diapers, the baby talk, the stroller, and the high chair. Mattias has grown under his nose. He has already been one-and-a-half years in a playgroup and is just about to start school.



4

There were the early days of the marriage. There was the June day they moved to this apartment, a couple of months after Mattias were born. There were those first nights when all he remembers is the feel of his wife, Sophie, and the warmth of her body as he got into the bed beside her each time.

The long cycle along the Plantage-Middenlaan on the way from work. Clear days. Wet days. Afternoons when the canal outside the living room window could not be seen for fog.

There were the Saturday evenings sitting around the old wooden table, eating. A large dish of cannelloni or lasagna, cheese sauce, thick and creamy, the tomatoes, the meat, rich and hot. The lingering smell of the basil. The sweetness of the garlic.

Often they ate late, well after Mattias was asleep. Sometimes the student from the next flat joined them. They sat and talked, sharing a bottle of wine, breaking off pieces of the fresh baguette, laughing, teasing each other, until it seemed the street outside went quiet, and they noticed the lights in the buildings on the other side of the canal going out one by one.

Occasionally he stood by the window and watched a boat, a barge, cut its way through the dark water. It glided under the spindly branches of trees, its engines churning up the surface behind it.

There were the times they were both tired, both exhausted. Yet there were also the times when each cycle of tiredness seemed to bring with it a flowering, a freshness, a sense of some shared achievement.

It was a year or so before the first problems, difficulties, began to appear. At first it was an irritation, a sharpness. Then a sarcastic edge began to creep into some of their conversations.

The arguments, the silences, became more frequent. They lasted longer. It was not that they constantly fought. It was more that the avenues of communication became strained.

They tried talking but it only seemed more confusing than clarifying. Then it felt like he was hardly ever there. He was up early watching the sun break the day over the water, hearing the cascade of birdsong that late spring and early summer brought.

Regularly he was not home till late, till after ten. Then Sophie was in bed, or sitting sleepily in front of the T.V.

Was it then he noticed he had begun to find escape in work? Was it then he realised that he felt a stranger at home. He felt himself to be somehow drifting away from it?


“Papa, the train has crashed.”
François turns his head and looks to where his son is playing. Mattias is pointing to a line of overturned carriages.
“What is it? What has happened?”
“Papa, the train crashed. It was going very, very fast, and the signalman didn’t change the signals, and then it went crash and fell off the tracks.”
Mattias is kneeling down, looking intently at the overturned carriages. Then he sits back up. There is a mixture of curiosity and concern on his face.
“And what about the passengers,” François asks, “are they all right? Are any of them hurt?”
There is a moment of silence, and suddenly with a big smile the child declares...
“No! All the people jumped out before the crash, ‘cause they didn’t want to be hurt. And the first carriage was a goods carriage and it had lots of water in it, and it spilt everywhere and made the driver wet.”
He kneels up, obviously pleased at his explanation, his handling of events. François smiles and looks at him.
“Well I’m glad no-one was hurt. The signalman should really be more careful. You will have to speak to the stationmaster about him, won’t you?”
Mattias nods his head in agreement then takes up his other train. He pulls it around towards a book, making that familiar approximation of the noise of an engine. Stopping it as straight as he can, he rolls over lying on his back. His eyes stare up at the ceiling, his hand going up to his mouth. His hair falls back off his forehead, and in the fairness of his face, the whiteness of light reflected from the walls, his eyes look all the bluer, all the brighter.
François gets up and goes over to him. He bends down and tickles his stomach. Mattias wriggles and laughs.
“Hey little fellow,” François says, “what about something to eat, what about a nice salami sandwich?”
“Cookie, Papa. I want a cookie.”



5

She was already in a relationship. He knew her partner was older than her and that they had lived together for some time. She referred to him now and then in conversation, but never directly.

More and more he found himself thinking of her. Somehow she combined with his need to work, his need to escape the tensions building at home. He was always glad to see her.

At first they only talked about their work. Despite the difficulties in his marriage François still felt committed to it. He felt responsible to his son. He knew he was somewhat cautious and was relieved to have an excuse to avoid any definite or impulsive action.

Their friendship moved forward gradually and carefully. In many ways she puzzled him. At times she appeared insecure and over eager to please. He knew she worked well. The comments, the gossip, the petty jealousies of small company life, went past him.

She was friendly. She seemed intent on involving herself in things around her. Yet somehow different, somehow apart.

On more than one occasion she demonstrated to him that she considered him special. Once after having being away for a week and delayed in returning, she hugged him, kissing him on both cheeks affectionately when he returned. It was more than friendship should have required.

At other times she was cool and distant. He realised she had guessed he was having problems in his marriage. He never openly mentioned it, was not the type to discuss his personal life quickly.

Now and then she made a reference to it, a comment, but he knew he was the one guilty of avoiding any discussion of the subject.

It continued like this for four or five months. In fact it grew slowly, as summer passed into autumn, as the nights became deeper and longer, as the year fell into winter. It was that February he realised it was becoming something other than friendship.

At weekends he found himself wondering what she was doing. He imagined she was thinking of him, and that if out in the city alone, he would maybe run into her by accident. Occasionally they had to work Sundays together.

Then he would get up early taking the tram so he could walk through the park. As it rattled its way through the quiet streets, he would think of her. His eyes would take in the rows of four storey apartments, the windows empty and still, curtains open, curtains closed. Dreamily he would stare at the long lines of the tram rails, sometimes vivid and mercurial under a sparkling winter sun.

There would be the crunch of his feet on the gravel as he entered the park. He would walk underneath the trees, their long leafless branches stretching up into a frosty blue, or ash grey sky. By the frozen lake he would cross a wooden footbridge and breathe in the sharp smell of a line of evergreens.

Sometimes he sat on one of the benches in front of an unused bandstand. A wide circular opening, surrounded by tall, bare chestnut trees. It was set in a layer of loose grey and white stones.

Then she would be somewhere in the back of his mind. Her face, the way her eyes lit up when she smiled, the crinkle of her nose, the shy turn of her mouth, the fall of her hair against the curve of her back as she walked past him. She would somehow mix with the morning to come, mix with the smell of the freshly made coffee, the penetrating peep of the telephone and the radio that was always playing somewhere in the background.
February became March. The clearness and coldness of midwinter gave way to the colours of early spring. By April the trees lining the canal in front of the window, were dusted down with a coating of green. The squalls, the sudden showers, the leaden skies that it seemed with deceptive speed replaced the blue, the banks of drifting cumulus, brought with them change. Evenings became brighter.

Once he stood in a downpour with her, the umbrella too small, and the rain bouncing off the pavement around the tram-halt. They waited a couple of moments, their shoulders pressing against each other and then ran to a cafe to get in from the wet. They sat at a black table, on steel chairs, and each ordered a coffee. He smoked a cigarette, fingering the crumpled red and white pack, the rain still running down their foreheads, dripping off their hair, down the back of their necks.

As spring advanced he felt himself lighten. The longer evenings and the fine weather lifted his spirits. He watched his son grow, watched him grapple with a world that was still all new. Somehow he was encouraged by the evidence of life's determination. He saw its instinctive move forward, its continual willingness to learn and adapt.

The park that in February had formed a vein-like pattern of bare branches over the glassy surface of ice and frost, became a vibrant weave of green. Older Turkish men sat around in groups talking, their wrinkled hands fingering prayer beads, their lined faces serenely observing the world pass by. Kids playing ball shouted out to each other. Mothers fussed over newborn babies. Bicycles maneuvered their way around casual strollers. Africans with drums, squatted on the grass, their elastic, insistent rhythms, bouncing off the continuous background of traffic.

As the summer reached its peak, the July nights full of the murmur of voices from the busy terraces of cafes, he felt himself more involved. It was not an affair. Not in the way he would normally have thought of an affair. Still it skirted the edge of any deeper intimacy.

He kissed her only once. An evening when a couple of glasses of wine at a noisy bar found them on the turn of the street, a line of trees forming an covering, a canopy between them and the first show of stars. Her face, soft under the street lights, her cheeks flushed from the drinks were more than he could resist. Leaning over he put his mouth to her mouth. He tasted the wine, smelt her skin, felt the softness of her lips. She did not hesitate, in fact she responded, moved towards him but then pulled back.

Immediately he felt foolish. He apologised but she only smiled, brushed her hair back off her face and said it was late and she should get home.

Wheeling his bicycle over the street, he looked back, thinking to see her go. She was standing there, waving, her arm raised against the night, the orange spheres of the pedestrian-crossing, lighting then un-lighting her shape, somehow reflecting the contradiction of what had just happened.

As August slipped into September the questions seemed to grow. He felt caught between two equally distant points. Was he being fair? Was he being hasty? Was he throwing away something which he would later regret?

He reasoned with himself that if he found himself looking outside home then there was something missing within home. He knew he had begun to feel something for her which he no longer felt for his wife. There was no denying the growing emptiness. His marriage had moved from affection to arrangement. It still had some sense of purpose but that was something that had supplanted the earlier tenderness, the earlier attachment. And then there was his son. If he broke the marriage, would he not in some way be letting Mattias down? The willingness, the innocence with which a child trusted, was there to be seen. He felt responsible for reciprocating that trust. He felt if he stepped outside the marriage, if he broke or destabilised the home, he would be guilty of betraying that trust.

As autumn crept in he realised the issue was betrayal. When September finally let go of the summer and October arrived the only question to which he really needed to answer, was, who would betray whom.



6

There is a picture of him at that time. He is standing on a bridge, one arm leaning on the railings, wearing faded blue jeans, a black turtleneck sweater and brown suede shoes. The photograph is a little blurred. There seems to be a question mark over it, something transient, and something not quite clear. It gives the impression of movement, of liquidity. As if the act of catching him on film was accidental.

He cannot remember exactly when it was taken, though he remembers her with the camera. The black and silver body, her hand twisting the focusing ring, the click of the shutter, the rasp of the film-advance.

They did it in turns. Photographs of each other. They joked about where they would have it developed. He laughed when she said she thought she had a contact in the business. There are times when he wonders if she still has the close-up he made of her.



7

He has not forgotten that October evening. She sat at the table. There was the slight creak of the wooden chairs, the footsteps on the bare floor.

She fingered her cup nervously. He drank quickly from the cold beer in front of him. Between them was a tension that had not been there before. It was he who had asked if they could meet. He had decided he needed to say how he felt, needed to know where he stood with her. He had made up his mind what he should do. He should at least, take the risk.

His heart leaped that bit more while walking there. The moon seemed to travel with him, appearing and reappearing between the gables of the houses. Wrapping his scarf tight around his neck to keep out the gusts of chill air, the damp, he was too busy thinking, hoping, to hear the quiet fall of leaves.

He looked at her, then started to say what he wanted to say but she forestalled him. She did not let him get any further.

She explained that she valued the relationship she already had, that she and her partner had been together for nearly five years, they had decided to have a child together. Her eyes looked straight into his and then down at the table. He did not know how to reply.

At that moment he wanted her, wanted her more than at any time since he had known her.

He sat there, the cuff of his jacket in the ashtray, the head of his beer sliding slowly down the half-empty glass. When he spoke he said little. He realised that she was still sitting in front of him, that while she was there he could not be angry with her. He did not know if he should tell her he was disappointed, if he should say that he was hurt. He looked once again into her eyes.

The line of her mouth was not as soft as it usually was. It was set, stiff, and he knew her mind was made up. He felt her decision had perhaps been made with difficulty. He said he was glad for her and sorry, and she replied, she was too.

They talked for a couple of minutes and then he said, he should go. She called a taxi and he waited at the door. As she stepped into the car, she turned to him and for a moment put her hand on his arm. Her hair fell over her face and she pushed it up behind her ear, the way she had done that night when he had been fixing the machine, the way she had done that first time he had noticed her.

The shiny door closed with a thud. The tires bit into the roadside and he saw the yellow, neon sign of the taxi moving away through the evening traffic.



8

He has phoned her once before. A year ago. They talked politely with each other. She was well, had become a mother. He suggested they get together, but she said, she was busy, tied up between home and work. 'Call again sometime,' she suggested, 'maybe you could arrange to come by some evening for a drink'. He answered, `yes', but never did.

It is not that he thinks about her much. Every now and then when he finds himself somewhere where they once were together, or when he walks through the park, the gravel crunching under his feet, he remembers.



9

François stands before the old bandstand with Sophie and Mattias. His son climbs the steps, curiosity pushing him on, stepping into the great circular space. The early November air carries the excited cries of, ‘Papa, Papa, come and look’.

He finds himself on empty, greying boards. Moss and weed grow between them. His hands are deep in the pockets of his winter coat. He stops.

Mattias runs around him, his arms outstretched, making the sound of an airplane. His child’s face is flushed, his eyes joyfully free. Zooming and zooming, ducking and darting, his four year old body is lost in its own movement.

Francois turns back toward the layer of grey and white stones. There is a woman standing there, her back turned to him, her hair blowing loosely in the breeze. It is not her. It is Sophie.

At that moment they both appear to form a line, a polarity, like the opposite points of a compass. There is the creak in the empty trees, the rustle of curled brown leaves being blown across the bandstand floor. A bell from a bicycle somewhere, rings.

He remembers the mornings when he waited there, when he looked forward to seeing someone else.

Then calling out to Mattias that they are going, he moves down the steps. He comes up beside Sophie. He startles her. She turns quickly around, surprise showing in her face. The distance that has grown between them, the disappointment, the dreams which have not come to fulfillment are also to be seen in her face. They say nothing. He takes her arm and they wait for Mattias to catch them up before walking on through the park.

Copyright (C) Peter Millington. October 1994.

thunderstorm

1

It appears that every blade of grass could be counted if he wanted. They lie in a green rectangle. The boy feels the heat, the closeness press on him. The sun of the morning is giving way to stretches of grey. He puts his hand to his forehead and feels it sticky and wet.

His ears pick out sounds. Doves coo longingly into the gathering afternoon. Their song carries his eyes to the tall trees beyond the end of the garden. The still and dense shapes whisper to him of the coolness of shadows, of losing himself in a secret world.

He thinks of the stream in the tangle beyond the wall. He is running into the afternoon’s length, carelessly, feeling the scrape of dry earth on his knees. Until he is lying there his heart beating in his chest, his face pressed to the dry grass. Above him the sun is breaking the enveloping trees. The broken spaces, the endless blue are circumscribed only by the movement of clouds.

In the garden, half way down the lawn, his mother sits with the next-door neighbour. The light clink of china cups reaches him. On a low table is a plate with small cakes on it.

In the afternoon heat his mother’s flower-print dress stands out. The northern lilt of her accent drifts through the air. The next-door neighbour tilts her head to the side, her red hair falling from her freckled face. The flow of their laughter meanders up through the garden.

The boy walks toward his mother. He asks for a cake. Then reaches out to take one without waiting for a reply. He goes over to a football lying nearby. Swinging his foot, he kicks it against a bare patch of wall, moves to anticipate its return. He likes to watch its trajectory, the black and white diamonds spinning away from him, the thump as it strikes the pebble-dash. Its every movement, its every bounce, focuses his attention. And each shot is a dare, a challenge to his reflexes. With each shot he stretches possibilities, pushes himself, until a miss, something broken in his father’s flowerbed, a badly directed shot too close to a window, pulls his him back, pulls him back to his foot, to the relationship between eye and foot.

He aims a shot, strikes the ball and drives it with frustration. The heat delays his reaction. Diving, his fingers reach out, stretch, but miss. They grasp at empty air. With deceptive speed, the ball skids off the grass, spins away and rolls into the goal striking the picnic table and rattling the china cups. The roar of the crowd, the groan of disappointment, the commentator’s observations are all echoed in the sharpness of his mother’s voice. Asking him to be more careful.
The presence of the neighbour restrains her reprimand. ‘Has he nothing to do, nowhere else to play, no-one to play with?’ she asks.

Leaving the ball nestled in the corner of the goal, seeing himself as the goalkeeper, head hung after defeat in a close match, he walks toward the dressing room.



2

The kitchen is cool. He pours himself a glass of water. Drinking it quickly it runs over his chin and onto his green cotton t-shirt. His hands move across his mouth and he wipes it dry. Then he strolls into the living room.

The garden no longer has any interest for him. He feels restless and lethargic. Resting his head on the table he sighs. He gazes up at the rows of potted plants. They line the window-sill. Their shapes suggest to him giant trees in a make-believe world. His eyes wander over the various contours until they come to a large geranium. It has those delicate furry leaves and its flowers, a luminous red, are all the richer in the close afternoon.

He reaches his hand out and touches it. The movement releases its smell. That smell always evokes a conflict of sensations. It is neither sweet nor unpleasant. But it is a little too strong. It falls a little too heavy against the back of the throat.

Like all distinctive smells it evokes memory. Winter mornings on his way to school. The sun falling on the pavement as if weakened by its effort to penetrate the cold. He feels a hollowness in his stomach because he would rather remain at home. His father, coat buttoned, shoes polished, is waiting. calling out the car is started. They drive along the avenue, the exhaust hanging in the frosty air. And the boy is already anticipating the morning to come. He leans his leather school-bag against the back of the seat. In his head he tries to work out how many more days till the next holiday. His father talks brightly. But he, he is counting, watching each corner turned, each house passed.

Summer holidays are supposed to be fun. Today he does not know. The day is coming to him from a different level. There is a clarity, a sudden way in which objects strike him, as though he were seeing them for the first time. There is a sense of stepping over some line, a sense of time suddenly slowing into recognisable, graspable, units. The long summer holiday does not seem so long and perhaps the unendingly boring days of school in between also seem shorter. His fingers tap against the table. He moves them around in loose circles. Later a friend of his mother’s is coming to tea. He is curious. Who is it? Why is this man coming? His father will not be home till later. He is away on business.

He looks again to the sky. The clouds are growing in weight. They appear to be made from oily, torn pieces of paper. If only he could reach a little higher, he would touch them. He would dip his fingers into them, grab their heavy emptiness, drag them down to earth or push them back out into the unending sky.

The trees are motionless. He stares at the willow at the top of the garden. In the stillness, the occasional falling leaf, spins gently to the ground.

In the autumn these leaves turn bright yellow and litter the top of the garden. Like confetti at the sad marriage of summer and winter. He recalls with a shudder of excitement and fear that at the base of that tree each year, where the branches are bundled closely together, there is a concentration of wasps. He thinks of the jars that metamorphose into home made traps. Jam on the bottom, water on the top, a little more jam around the edges to lure the hovering bodies in and all hung conveniently with a piece of string from a nearby branch. Those small insects that fascinate and frighten. Their warning markings of yellow and black. The tail with a sting, the sudden way they fly at you, causing you, a creature so much more their size, to weave and run. Stories told in the playground at school. The friend on holiday who saw one three inches long. Another friend who in the mountains had to run from a swarm as big as a flock of birds. Wood-wasps that attack you in pairs. Killer wasps that live in the heart of the African jungle. Queen wasps that nest in the corner of your bedroom. Each storyteller topping the previous, secretly frightening each other, secretly knowing they only really felt easy with the layer of dead ones floating on the top of their jam-jars.

This afternoon there are no wasps. There is only the occasional bee in the buddleia tree. From a neighbour’s house comes the murmur of a radio. A door opens. Steps shuffle across a backyard.

A voice says something only half understandable. Then the afternoon is fleetingly full of the smell of baking bread.

The boy is back in his own world. The feeling returns. The feeling of something about to be uncovered. He sighs out loud, asks himself what it can be. Then he turns his head to the empty living room. The door to the hallway is open. He walks toward the open space.



3

Over the house the air becomes thicker. The avenue reaches back. It winds its way through rows of residential homes. There is a cluster of small shops and a railway station. Then there is the sea.

The house is situated on the outskirts of the city. It is linked by a two-laned tarmacadamed road. Wheels bite into this surface. The white lines, broken and unbroken, merge like the stroke of a brush in the corner of the eye.

The driver looks intently ahead. The curved road is reflected in the lens of his glasses. He grasps the steering wheel and wonders whether he should loosen his collar and tie. His jacket lies neatly on the back seat. There is a box of chocolates in paper wrapping.

Somewhere in an office someone is drawing lines across a map. Tightly bound circles, highs and lows, warm and cold fronts. The weather system is moving in off the ocean. It crosses the western seaboard, heading east. It moves over the relief of land, mountains and valleys, roads running like twisting, black lines into sudden endings, towns, cities. Two fronts about to collide. Cooler air meeting warm, static air. Friction; the release of energy; rain beating into the warm dry ground.

The driver presses on. He is nearly there. Soon he will see the sign indicating the turn left. He will find himself among the faces of tastefully painted brickwork and manicured lawns.

He glances at his watch. It is four-thirty. Leaning over to the wood panelled dashboard, he switches the radio on. A voice, almost sleepily, introduces another country-western song.



4

The light is diffused in the hallway. It comes through the six pebbled panes of glass. The boy sees the hall table. He leans against it. The fronds of a hanging plant tickle his ear. His gaze travels to the light at the door. There is the click of a car door closing. Footsteps sound on the driveway. A shadow looms, dark, undefined. A hand reaches for the bell.

Then it rings, cracking the silence open, splitting the afternoon. The boy takes off as if a starting gun had fired. He moves quickly past the glass of the door and onto the stairway. Taking the stairs lightly, two at a time, he reaches the top. Then he stops to catch his breath and listen.

He does not ask himself why he is doing this. Like a hare ready to spring he waits. The bell rings again, this time a little more insistently. His ears strain to hear the footsteps cross the living room and enter the hall. Then his name is being called out.

There is the swish of his mother’s dress as it passes the small table, the click of the catch being turned, the sound of the door opening and then a crescendo of greetings.

He peers carefully over the banister. His mother is being lightly kissed on the cheek by a man wearing tortoiseshell glasses. His hair is combed cleanly back off his forehead and his voice also has a northern lilt to it. He hands over the chocolates and mentions something about the children.

The boy waits until the steps recede down the hallway. Briefly he hears his mother mention his name but then the voices are swallowed by the living room. Again he moves. This time he springs onto the upstairs landing. He pushes the door of the guest room open. He steps toward the window and gently parts the slats of the Venetian blinds. Below is the front garden. His eyes run over the trimmed hedge to the front of the driveway.

It is grand. A family saloon, the same size as his father’s car. The wing design is flashier. It has more chrome along the side. In two shades of cream. There are wing mirrors near the front headlamps and a car radio aerial. Quickly running through all the names he knows, he settles on the appropriate one, turning it over and over in his mind.

The car stands silently, commandingly; and the Cypress trees form a guard of honour from the far side of the avenue.

Deftly the boy grabs the cord and pulls the blinds up a couple of centimetres. He stares for a long time, his nose pressed to the window, his arms underneath his chin.

The avenue is quite. The distant mountains appear also to be pressed down in the closeness. Their curving, blue shapes, their dark and light patches quiver, caress the eye, compact the space and suggest that their texture, their shapes are just within reach.

His attention is caught by the creaking of a bicycle. A postman cycles past. In the lined face with its large nose, its sour mouth, the eyes are fixed resignedly ahead. The foot instinctively moves as a dog begins to bark in a neighbouring driveway.

Again he feels restless, unquiet, as if expecting something to happen. His stomach muscles tighten, his mouth falls open, and yet, nothing happens. The afternoon continues. The postman passes by, the mountains remain where they are.

He pulls back. He feels irritated, empty, lost in the entire afternoon. The shooting fall of sounds, the compressing of distance, the emptiness of the house all mount upon his ten year old frame. He looks down at his scuffed knees, sees the tear in the side of his gym shoes, the grass stain along the side of his khaki shorts and he feels constricted, feels constricted by all his clothes, held in by them, as if they were nothing to do with him any longer. Suddenly he wants to take them off, to throw them up into the coming storm, into the rain he knows must fall.

He does not. For a moment he looks about him as if arrested on the brink of jumping. Does he just imagine he feels the floor spinning away from under him? Is it just a trick of the heavy July heat that causes the afternoon to slip from him?

He sways and grabs the wooden end of the bed. The scuffed knee is still there, the torn gym shoe, the grass-stained shorts. Taking a deep breath, he straightens up, waits, coming back in on the blend of heat and light that makes up the afternoon.



5

The finishing touches have just been put to the table. He sits down. Across from him the visitor looks on politely. His mother asks if he has washed his hands. Answering no, he is told to do so. His brother is talking to the visitor. He is telling a story about what he has being doing all afternoon. About a dog belonging to a friend. About how big it was and about how he and his friend took it for a walk on the avenue and it tried to run away. The visitor listens, commenting affably now and then. Over his shirt sleeves are metallic arm-bands. Across his tie is a shiny, gold pin. The blue of his eyes is all the more noticeable behind the frame of his glasses. The boy listens. Then his mind begins to wander, to wander back upstairs.

Now it has become another world; a secret. After leaving the guest room, he crept into his parent’s bedroom. There was a moment of hesitation. He knew he was stepping into private space. Finally he pushed the door.

Through the window he could see the garden. He saw his mother and the visitor, the next-door neighbour making excuses to leave. From above the green was sprinkled in white; small flowers. Beyond were the grounds of an estate, a convent. There was a field of ripening corn, a small chapel. To his right was a line of heavy horse-chestnut trees.

Again that feeling came over him. A burst of fire, a current moving through him. There was constraint and energy. It struck him, unsettling, and yet exciting. It dizzied him as if he were somehow about to fly, about to step into a new world.

Turning from the window, he heard his mother laugh lightly from the garden and was aware of her holding a china-cup, of her crossing one leg over the other. Finding himself reflected in the full length mirror of his father’s wardrobe, he halted. His own face stared back. Its eyes blue, the nose freckled, the body lean, the ears sticking-out, the hair loose and fair. He reached out and turned the key and slowly. Then he stopped. For a moment his heart clasped. His reflection was transformed. It was replaced by his father’s dark, blue suit. It hung there; mute. He could see his father in it. He could see the tall, angular body, the balding head, the shadow around the mouth.

Across his vision swam the blue-grey eyes that seemed always to stare into some unmarked distance. The boy stared at the suit just as he had stared at the car earlier. Yet this was different. There was no chrome, no red upholstery and no flashy wing mirrors. Just a dark, blue woollen suit.

It was the suit his father wore on Sundays; the suit of the church pew with the frail sunlight and long hymns. This was the suit of deference and ambition; the suit that marked a man from the disappointment of his childhood. It was the suit that bore a man’s aspirations and achievements. It was the suit in which a father was seen by his son at Sunday lunch. Sunday lunch with the family dressed in their best. The aunts and the cousins. The smell of the pot-roast. The mother of the father sitting silently. An older world. And the son of the son watching her watching him.

The boy felt a sudden sadness sweep over him. It rose and mixed with the fire, the current, became part of the constraint and energy. It pushed against the constraint as if sadness were now the only energy; though it was also the sadness that tightened, constrained. He closed the wardrobe door. He stopped. Through the room drifted the murmur of the voices below. The air had become heavier. It clung now. It was permeated with the heavy scent of flowers and grass. And he felt alone. He could not put it in words. It was an aloneness that spoke to him of mystery. It spoke of a riddle he could not quite solve.

His eyes moved around the room. There was his mother’s dressing table with her make-up and jewellery box. Suddenly he let himself drop into the aloneness.

He faced the mirror again. He became taller. Imagining a similar suit, but lighter, he saw himself the proud owner of a family-car. He envisaged the woman beside him. She was slender. She wore a loose dress and her hair was long. He could see the laughter in her eyes.

It felt strange, unknown, as if trying on something new. He was stepping into another part of himself. Then it was familiar. He had always known it but forgotten. He had mislaid it or simply never quite noticed it before. Not only was it something he felt in his body but it was like an exhalation of breath within his mind. The closeness, the heaviness emptied out of him. The constraint and sadness mixed again but then loosened their hold on him.

Impulsively he wanted to run. He wanted to jump, to move with the fire, to follow the energy that now penetrated the stillness of the summer afternoon.

He descended the stairs, crossed the living room and garden without so much as a word. He heard his mother call out to him as he scaled the wall and plunged beyond. He ran underneath the labyrinth of leaves. He tore through the long grass. He brushed the bramble bushes and the hedges. Then crossed the stony stream in a single leap. It was the field he needed to reach. The field of the estate in which he had never yet set foot. It was out of bounds. Today that did not deter him. The fire, the opening out within him, the image of himself as having crossed something, drove him all the more, made him feel all the more pulled by the space.

He dived then, let himself fall into the strands of ripening corn. He looked up. His head span and he laughed out under the quenching sky.



6

The boy comes back to the table to hear his sister speaking. His mother asks the visitor if he would like some fruit juice. The boy is looking at his plate. He is hungry. The visitor speaks to him, asks him something. He goes to answer but then stops.
`There will probably be a thunderstorm tonight', he announces.



7

The storm comes. When it breaks he is already in bed with only a sheet covering him because of the heat. He is woken by the first rolls of thunder, the first breaks of lightning. Stepping sleepily over scattered toys he crosses the floor and pulls back the curtain. The trees are motionless, merged in shadow. On the grass, an amber glow spills from the room below. Waiting and watching his eyes are rewarded with a sting and the sky splits in two with a searing, white light.

Then the rain begins to fall. It comes down abruptly with an intensity as if the sky were trying to drown the earth and the earth in turn was reaching up to receive it. The garden rises in a rich, earthy aroma.

Hearing voices from below he creeps to the top of the stairs. In the doorway, his father and mother are standing. His father’s white shirt is soaking wet. The visitor is waiting and they talk together. He sees his father reach out and shake the visitor’s hand. The visitor is now wearing a light sports jacket.

The boy overhears snatches of the conversation. He listens and watches, concentrating as his father takes off his glasses to dry them. For a moment he sees the face of a younger man; for a moment the middle-aged eyes are lit by a brighter hue.

Lightly, the boys mother stretches forward and kisses the visitor on the cheek. He hears her say to drive carefully. The door is open and the rain is coming in. Across the porch the lightening flickers and the thunder rumbles. Stepping onto the foot-wipe, the visitor turns and waves. Then there is the sound of footsteps as he quickly runs to his car.



8

The storm begins to ease. The lightning becomes less frequent and the thunder is quieter. The rain taps gently against the window. Outside the air is clearer.

The boy squats on the top stair. He puts his arms around his legs, his chin on his knees. Again he is thinking about the trees and the field behind the house. He tip-toes back to the bedroom and climbs into bed.

He is thinking only of tomorrow. Running again. Remembering his secret, his new found sense of self. And the white clouds sailing across the endless blue sky. Running his hand over his scuffed knee, he feels sleep begin to overtake him. It run along his back, up through his neck, reaches quietly over into his eyes. He pulls up a blanket and settles the pillow to his face.



9

The slip road left, the main road north is now in view. As the rain eases and the car steers its way deftly out of the city the man in the sports jacket leans over and turns on the radio. Now and then a halfhearted flash of lightning illuminates the inside of the car. On the back seat are a bunch of red roses and the evening newspaper, July 21, 1968.

On the map, the lines have changed, the fronts have altered. The weather system spiralling its way across the country is moving east. Tomorrow’s forecast is light showers with periods of sun, temperatures, no more than fifteen to sixteen celsius, winds light, west to northwest.

The man loosens his tie and fixes his gaze on the road in front of him. He has passed the city speed restriction and already the headlights are picking up the road rushing forward. The two shades of cream, the red upholstery, the lines of chrome, move sleekly through the wet, hidden countryside.

It will be after midnight before he is home. He yawns lightly, sits back in the seat. The arm stretches out, instinctively, to turn up the radio. To the steady beat of a drum, the slide of steel guitar, and the announcer's reassuring voice, the visitor settles in for the long drive home.

Copyright (C) Peter Millington. Amsterdam. August 1994.