now

1

Now that it is nearly summer, I am glad. It has been a difficult winter. For weeks everything in sight was frozen. In front of my studio, the canal was covered in ice. When I slept there, I would wake early, would look down onto the opaque surface, over the lines, the cracks and fissures from the previous day, the patterns in which they had refrozen during the night. As the sky cleared, the pavement reappearing in the morning light, pale and frosty, the exposed branches of the trees were often covered in a crystal-like layer of white.

Now that I can see green, that the parks appear thicker, that I can sense the brush of pollen in my nose, hear the stir of leaves in the breeze, I feel different. The evenings have stretched out and the light does not die before I feel the day is finished. And when it rains, there is a softness, a quality to the air I find appealing. It brings a smile to my lips.

Not every winter is so difficult. Some winters it is simply wet and raw. It rains and rains and the city is enclosed in a clinging, cold fog that seeps into everything. There are some when it seems the intense cold threatens, but never arrives. And then there are those when the days are mild, when it is almost warm and I have to tell myself it is the middle of a December or a January, that the summer is as long behind as it is still in front.

This winter has reminded me. It has brought back my first winter here. The night I arrived; when I stepped out onto the square in front of the station, a stranger, the cold cutting straight into my body, the temperature minus fourteen. That night I had a sensation of transition. I had a sensation of crossing a point, arriving at a harbour from which I could examine the map, take provisions, step from one thing to another.

Now, when I think back, I realise how that time is already part of a distant past, a past that is purely personal. Here I have taken root. I have grown, have gradually flowered. I have come to a deeper understanding of myself.

I remember, for example, looking out a cafe window one morning at the yellow and black tug boats, the stripe of fluorescent orange across their top, the crunch of their reinforced bows as they attempted to cut a way through the packed ice of the harbours. Or the strange colour of the sky, a glassy, stinging blue, like a jar of mint sweets that once stood on a wooden shelf in a kitchen when I was a child. It is strange to contemplate the time that has already passed. It is peculiar to grasp the way in which weeks have slipped into months and months into years.

Now I cannot see myself as anywhere else but here. This is the city in which I have accrued an anatomy of experience. It is the city in which a life has grown around me like a second skin, has marked me as part of what I have become, who I am.



2

I look at the colours on the canvas. I wonder. Perhaps in the transition from winter to spring this year, I feel I have crossed something.

I stand back and turn the painting toward the light. I position it under the overhead window so I can better see its colours. I am still not sure about the particular quality of the red. The yellow, its position, the almost saffron tone it imparts is correct. It contrasts with the flecks of white, the fade to the green, sets them off. I am satisfied with the thin line of brown across the bottom. There is a hint of both sienna and ochre in it. It is the brown I sense in the earth after it has rained.

The colours are not strictly positioned, they blend and they bleed, they touch and they have space. Simple representation, is not what I am after. Feeling, vitality is what I want, the energy of the soil living, the sense of spring returning, an invisible intensity, something not only seen but felt.

It came upon the sensation while walking through the park. An April afternoon with the weather cool and showery. The sun shone brightly but then would be swallowed up by quick moving fields of dark, grey cloud, rain abruptly falling. A number of times I was caught and had to find shelter, running for a clump of trees, or one of the scattered cafes along the pathways.

Initially, I thought of conveying the sensation in shape, in form. Then I considered suggesting the drive of its energy by actually working the paint directly and quickly onto the canvas, mixing it straight in. Eventually I decided on a different approach, something simpler. Why not let the colour alone determine where I would start, where I would stop, let it randomly suggest the nature and method of work?

For some months, I have felt this change. All I need to say, all I want to say, lies in the colour itself.

Once I was walking along a street and I stopped to look in a shop window. There was a row of faceless mannequins. The display was incomplete. It was as if it had been stopped halfway through, had been left for some other time, postponed, an idea still waiting to be brought to life. One of the mannequins lay on its side. Part of it had been wrapped in plastic. Examining it, I noticed that an arm was missing, that one leg was twisted sideways. Under it was a roll of velvet material, a strange shade of red, a ruby or maroon. It had a mysterious quality. Something about it reminded me of blood, of a time I had once been in a hospital. There it was in a test tube held to the light. I saw this strange red, liquid, its viscosity, its evidence of the fragility of life.

The scene with the mannequins, despite its apparent innocence, seemed to contain some concealed element of violence. I stared until I realised it was the colour that was holding me, the colour that was working on my feelings, bringing up associations.

I remember autumn when I was young. Walking along a lane, the scattering of fallen leaves, the trees looking wounded in the tops of their branches. This is where I grew up. The streets, the houses, the wooden telegraph poles, their black wires stretched in the evening against the fall of the sun.

I hear the cry of the crows as they fly over the fields on silent afternoons, smell the mixing, the sweetness of the last bloom of flowers, the odour of decay, the summer dying as the autumn comes on. Faces come back to me. In particular one face. Back and back I go until I se her. She has crossed my mind before. My first awkward love.

We face each other in profile. Her ebony hair sweeps back off her face, the straight line of her nose, her dark eyes, a quiet smile on her mouth. All contrast me. The youthful hunger in the way my head leans from my body; the uncombed hair, the unsure, questioning line of my mouth.

Behind us, is a background hazy and diffuse. Around our heads, the colour lightens. There is almost a violet quality to where we meet. It is as though there were an energy between us that mitigated against the association of autumn, against how I remember the streets subdued at night, the provincial facades of the buildings, the resonance of footsteps as the city succumbed to darkness. Some of that energy is contained in the rattle through the city of the train that links us to the capital. The sound of its engine running away out over the still, sleeping land.

I put the canvas down. Perhaps I will choose another red. Lines of soft-drink bottles stand against the wall. Now I have nearly seventy of them. The labels have been steamed off and they have all been numbered. The combination, the mixture, of each colour, I have written on a list. Everywhere I go, I keep a photocopy of it stuffed in the inside pocket of my jacket. This is a form of definition. If ever anything happened to me I would have it with me. Without my colours my canvases would be nothing.

Days have colours. There are blue days or lemon days or mixtures and contrasts. Some days stimulate me, hold one colour as their line, their theme, the whole way through. Then there are the days that are grey, days when I feel alone. These are the days when I struggle, the days when I feel empty, when I find myself fighting just to keep working. On these days it is difficult to stand in front of the canvas, I must push myself to lift the brushes. It is on these days I understand what is meant by choice, what is meant by putting one foot in front of the other.

What is colour, really, but light? Everything around me is the result of this light. How would this change if I were to travel at the speed of light?
On one level, the world would cease to exist. The world my eyes create, would be no more. Because my knowledge of the world is so tied up with perception, seeing, would I not experience this as a form of death? Would it not seem that a part of me had died, that many things, I associated with life had disappeared?
Perhaps colours are more than light. Colours are energy. Energy that transmits feeling and sensation. And feeling is also energy. Is the energy of feeling as strong as the energy of light?
The energy of feeling is as tied up with my experience of the world, as the energy of light. Without the energy of feeling, much of the world around me would also cease to exist. Would I feel myself to be nothing more than a shadow then, an incomplete person in a world of other incomplete people?

One time as I sat in a cafe, I tried to imagine how it must look. This journey I have made.
It was a late winter evening and through the window people moved past. Bicycles rattled along the canal side. The fog that had lain above the city all day, began to lift.
The moon appeared, the moon that earlier was just a vague white disc. Rising slowly over the gables of the buildings, it framed itself in the tangle of branches leaning out over the water. In the sky were stars and it seemed as if suddenly there was a sky behind the sky, as if something had revealed itself after a long absence.
I imagined I could fly. I imagined I was far above in the air and I could see down, not only on the city, but on the land, on the countries, the continent. I imagined how it would appear. A map without frontiers, a map that showed only the topography, only the relief of mountains, of rivers, the flat lowland of deltas. Fronts of cloud, some thick, some thin, their edges, their definition changing, moved, drifted in off the sea. They wove their way in over or up from the heart of the continent.

Each colour is the outcome of its interaction with other colours. Each colour is the result of the weight of its motion with other colours. It is seasoned with other colours, continually in a state of flux. Always there is potentiality, always movement.
The purity of colours, the originality of colours, is an illusion. There is no one red that defines all reds. All reds are a form of light and all light is a form of energy.

I stand by the lines of bottles against the wall. I look around me. It is still early evening. Should I start working now or leave it till later? Experience has taught me that it is often better to wait.
For two years this studio has been my second home. Sunlight falls across its far end, rests in patterns on the walls, lighting the area where I sometimes sleep, where I eat.
The children to which I am father, two, a boy and a girl, cross my mind. I have watched them grow, watched them feel their way out into the world, been amazed at their will, their determination to assimilate, to learn. It is the simple things, the things adults take for granted that have impressed me most.
Learning a language, learning to communicate. When I compare their ease to my own clumsy attempts to master new words, to make sounds strange to my mouth, my own, I am amazed. Now they negotiate the world around them in two vocabularies, switching from one to the other with ease.

When I first came to this city, I was raw, new, felt vulnerable, in a way, like a child again. In my memory is the musty smell of my first apartment. I remember the almost paper-thin walls, the tight, shabby buildings in the south of the city. I remember the narrow street that ran at right angles to the river. Clearly I recall my first weeks, my first months, the struggle to get settled in, the struggle to find my bearings.
There are some things that seem to be forever etched in memory. Small things maybe. The taste of vanilla yoghurt. The view from the kitchen onto the small patio below. The first hesitant days of spring. The afternoon when from a tram, I saw a field of crocuses where the week before there were only tufts of tenacious winter grass.
I remember the blustery March weather, the wind and squalls of rain, that at night swung the streetlamps suspended from pavement to pavement, eerily.

At first I worked as a baggage handler in the airport. It was numbing work, repetitious. Sitting at a table in the canteen, I would try to understand what those around me were saying. I would examine their faces, looking for signs of interest or friendliness. They did not talk much, just sat silently rolling cigarettes, staring into space, reading newspapers.
Every lunch-break I lost myself in a book or scribbled on the pad of cheap paper I always carried with me. And each day I looked out the window, gazed at the clouds floating above me. I puzzled at the sense of exposure the landscape gave.
Each day I waited for three thirty. Then I would walk hurriedly to the station, wait for the train to take me back to the city, pull relieved on the sharpness of a cigarette.
Once as I came in through the periphery of the city, the track rising above other tracks, skirting a small park and lake, I saw the sun like a huge red ball in the turquoise air. I imagined I could see it move. I could its atoms, its electrons and neutrons, its hydrogen and helium turned energy driving inwards, driving down into the city-line. Then I wondered how long it would take me to become part of the city, how long it would take me to bring my energy down into it like that.

The experience of being outside this city is as much part of it as being in it. This is a city of interchangeable modes, of belonging and not belonging. For me, being a stranger, a person with a different past, a person encountering something new, has been replaced by something else. I am both familiar and strange in two worlds. In this world I am still marked by my difference. In the world I left behind I am marked by the sense of an acquired otherness.

What is left of the world I came from is only the constellation of private memory; the faces, the events, the personal experiences that formed me as I grew up.
Occasionally I see that world as a spot in the spread of the world, a spot over which I hold a magnifying glass.

I am standing on the platform of a rail station holding my mother’s hand one winter afternoon. The lights of the train in the tight air stand out. The old man we are waiting for, steps off. His thin, grey hair is combed across his forehead. In his old, wrinkled hand is a worn but polished suitcase. It exudes a presence of some past time. And I watch him greet my mother, wonder if he has done as I once did when going to the city with my father.

Did he go into the toilet and lock the door behind him. Then push his foot sharply down on the pedal that worked the flush, look through the open space, watch the tracks rushing past below him, see the swaying, silver lines of rail, the blur of the stones between the sleepers?

Did he feel the acceleration of the train through space. Did he feel its movement in the roll, in the sudden lurches from side to side? If he looked through the window, did he see the landscape move by, see the grey, cloudy sky press down over the fields, over the rise of hills, of forest, the scattering of towns, and wonder where this country ended and where it started?

I listen as my mother greets her father in German. I watch them as they embrace, as they look at each other for a moment, sadness swimming up into their eyes.

Later that night before I sleep I carefully place the crumpled stumps of the tickets my grandfather has given me under the pillow. In the pale, yellow light of the lamp splashing across the room, I read again and again the words. Leipzig - Praha.

Suddenly I understand the look of resignation in eyes, the sense of something withering at the roots, the sense of an energy pressed too far down on itself, an energy eating away at itself from within.

I place the canvas against the wall and stand back. Putting my hand to my unshaven chin, my fingers running over the stubble, I squint a little, lean to one side. I want to see the contrast of the colours in another light.

There is the accumulation of work, the roughs, the false starts, the unforeseen successes. Each picture is a mark on the long list of marks I have kept to record the passing of time here. There have been times when I have felt like a man crossing a wilderness. With every step, the need to continue has strengthened. Every canvas has brought me deeper to myself.

Slowly, I have learnt to recover the ground beneath my feet, to detect the life sustaining streams, the rivers, the places where there is shelter. I have determined the way the land lies. I have understood that destination, the other side, the yet to be attained side, is nothing but a variation of where I started from. As if departing and arriving were really one and the same thing.

What I experience as my first point of reference, is only so because of my lack of other points of reference. As my reference points increase, so what appears complex becomes simple. Choosing threads or strands of experience is not about choosing one thing over another. It is about various ways of looking at the same journey. Familiar and unfamiliar are contingent.

If the canvas defines me between these two points, then am I defined by the energy of my experience? Are my paintings, my memories, my loves, my losses, everything that falls between these two points, all that I am? And if so, what happens to this energy, this experience, after I am no longer living? Why do I feel compelled to explore. Why do I feel my experience of the world is something other than the arbitrary experience of me as a random part of this life, this universe?

In summer I like to open all the windows of my studio while I work. Often I paint late into the night.

It is good to listen to the city around me. Hearing the sound of the trams, the way they rattle over the streets, the way they sometimes grate against the rails as they round a corner I feel at home. I like to listen to footsteps on the pavement, voices, raised and laughing. Or music drifting in from other buildings. The sound of a radio. The sound of someone singing to themselves perhaps as they stand in a kitchen preparing to go out.

If it rains the drops patter on the leaves of the lines of linden trees. They fall and run across the roof above me.

There are times when the night around me mixes with the smell of my studio, or the smells of the street. Times when the smell of the acrylic, of the medium is the smell of the city. When it mingles with the perfume of plants and trees, or the beer from a cafe, its doors open because of the warmth.

Sometimes I bring the children around and let them run in the space, let them simply play, sit and watch.

The sticky feel of the paint beneath my fingers, the spring of the brush off the canvas, gives me pleasure. Mixing the colours I watch, enjoy. I see the slow blending, the one starting point becoming multiple.

It is in summer in front of the canvas I come closest to the echo, the energy that drove me out of where I was born, drove me like the train along the silver lines of the rails, drove me to let the blurred hard stones between the sleepers sink into memory.

On my map of colour and relief there are no borders. The lines of rail connections, the tangle of motorways, the winding course of rivers, are only channels of ever changing and ever moving variations of colour. The geography through which I travel is my canvas. This delta in which I find myself is the slow converging of land and sea. And the city in which I live, is the last outpost before land is consumed by sea. City and canvas are the points where the solidity of land subsumes the fluidity of sea.



3

I walk across the floor to the window and open it. I lean over the ledge and feel the breeze around my head. The sun is suspended, compressed into the evening sky. On the small gravel plein below me, the trees are obscured by movement; they bend and sway. The air is full of the blown remnants of blossom, blossom fragile and filament-like, its small petals falling in favour of the stronger leaves of summer. They drift and flutter, their oval, transparent shapes eddying through the air, forming and reforming in myriad patterns where they land in the flow of the canal.

Over the harbours, the water quivers and sparkles. A small ship cuts its way through the shining surface, the white surge of its bow moving ahead, catching the burn of the evening light. Down streets, shadows, still short, still sharp, run, or lie against the warm colour of the brickwork.

Now that it is nearly summer, I look back on the winter, think of transition, of the way in which I move on, move out. I re-encounter the energy contained in each spring. And now that it is nearly summer, I stain the canvas again and map my way, cross this delta, this confluence of expectation. I watch each painting emerge from the darkness, watch it become another mark on the journey I have started here.

Copyright (C) Peter Millington. June 1996.

beaufort street

The following are excerpts from a diary I found while walking down near the river embankment.

When I say it was a diary, I mean, it was a sort of journal. It was as if someone had been keeping notes for something, a novel, a paper, something they were planning to write.

It was a Sunday in late January. I had nothing much to do, and thinking I needed some exercise, decided to take a walk. On seeing it lying in the grass I first thought it nothing special. It looked to be nothing other than a bundle of three A4 writing pads held together with some elastic bands and covered in a piece of clear plastic. I was almost about to pass it by when something caught my attention.

Beside it lay one of those photocards. You know the type, rail or public transport, or some other such amenity. It was a picture of a young man, probably in his late twenties or early thirties. He had a somewhat familiar to his face. I immediately felt I had seen those eyes before. I felt, for a moment, that it was someone I knew.

The card was partially damaged, presumably by rain and sun, as it was bleached and faded. I lifted up the bundle of writing pads. They were relatively unscathed. Perhaps the plastic saved them. Apart from some mud and dirt on the cover, a little yellowing along the edges of pages, their contents appeared generally well preserved.

I assumed the card had some relation to the diary. Both were lying on the same patch of ground, one on top of the other. I searched around for any other items I could find. There were none. Only some rubbish. The kind one always finds in these places; papers, cigarette boxes, discarded tickets, plastic wrappings, dented soft-drink cans.

It would be a strange irony if the photocard had in fact nothing to do with the diary; a coincidence that they lay there together. What for instance would I have thought had the face been surly, heavy-set, the rough face of a labourer, or a beer drinking thug? Or what would I have thought had I seen a sallow face, dark hair slicked back with just a little too much oil, smooth skin, a pencil thin moustache, the look of a dubious intellectual?

Would I have been as interested?. Would I then have read the same meaning into the lines I later read so carefully? I cannot be sure.

Enough speculation. I began to leaf curiously through the pages. I glanced quickly over their contents. I was about to throw them back on the ground when something grasped my attention.

It was a description of an event, a happening, something that seemed to carry with it an uncanny resonance, an uneasy sense of knowing. I read it there and then, somewhat shaken, going back again and again over the words.

I confess then to taking everything, card and writing pads, home, and guiltily, compulsively, reading into the small hours of the morning. Yet who wrote them and where the author came from was never made clear. It is still not clear.

When I reluctantly reported my find to the local police, they had no record of such a missing object. Indeed they seemed rather annoyed I would attempt to take up their time with what they evidently considered a question of little importance. I did manage to convince them to try and trace back the numbers on the card, still just about readable, but they too turned up a blank file.

The effort of trying to make sense of the text, of trying to impose some sort of coherency on it, has not been too difficult. Yet though dated for day and month, the year of all entries has been omitted.

I have worked from extensive photo-copies that the police were kind enough to permit me to make before taking the documents into their custody.

I have presented it in its apparent order, that is how I have come to read it. I have preserved, where possible, the original names or place names.

The period most reproducible spans forty-one days, all of which take place from mid November to late December. Where necessary I have drawn upon my powers of interpretation. I hope it shall be read, bearing these factors in mind.


november 12. I awoke early this morning to the sound of lightly falling rain. It seemed before I was even conscious, I could feel it in every cell of my body. It was soft and fine, and penetrated the morning.
As I lay in the dark, I was aware of my aloneness. I could imagine how it looked outside. The paving stones dark-grey, the leaves piled up against the edge of the building, their colours of yellow, gold and brown enriched by the damp. Already there must have been people about. Yet the silence of the building was overpowering.

I got up and walked to the window. I pulled back the curtains and saw the black shape of the fire exit. I could see no-one, and hear no-one. Only the sound of the rain dripping from the metal steps. It was as if I had woken in another world. There was nothing except my memories from the previous day. There was nothing except my memories of other times looking out this window to reassure me it was in fact a living world. I pulled up a chair and sat.

The trees were nearly bare and the narrow path that wound its way around the back of the building was deserted. The shapes of other buildings, curtained windows, furniture no longer used left to age in back gardens, all stood silently in the morning's greyness.

I thought then of the size of the city. How it spread like a great tentacled organism, gradually acquiring all that stood in its path. Buildings upon buildings. Roads upon roads. Everywhere its accidental shapes and circles, all awaiting the animating touch of its inhabitants.

november 13. It has been bright and sunny all day. The sort of sun you get in November. It is as if the sun was somehow frailer, and this in turn contrasted with the pale blue of the sky.

I walked in the park at lunch time. The grass was very green and still damp after the light morning frost. The richness and the quantity of fallen leaves were almost unbelievable. I walked under the trees and felt as if I became somehow weightless by just being there.

Coming home this evening, along the street, I was intrigued by the pattern of lights, the density of bodies. Everywhere people were walking, hurrying, stepping in or out of buses. Yet nowhere could I distinctly hear the sound of footsteps. It was like a vast army of insects with only the traffic as a backdrop against which they all moved. I went to a phone-box to call Anna. There was no reply. She must still be away.

november 14. I do not like returning to the emptiness of my building. Sometimes after a difficult day, the aloneness that greets me when I open the door seems to laugh mockingly in my face.

I went to the station and bought a newspaper, thinking, I would sit in a bar and have something to drink while reading.

november 15. I took a half day from work. I felt I had enough. I came home early and made something to eat. Afterwards I sat listening to music. I feel asleep on the sofa and woke about two in the morning, stiff and cold.

november 18. Going down the stairs to the Underground this morning, stepping over papers, discarded tickets, following the crowd, all seemingly with the same edgy faces, I suddenly felt sick to the stomach. The station seemed so grimy and dirty. The tiles on the wall were old.

As I waited for the train to rush out of the tunnel I was aware of a heaviness in the air. The sound of so many commuters echoed eerily through the tunnels and up and down the escalators. I was still sleepy and wanted to smoke a cigarette. When the train appeared, the rush of its motor diminished everything else. Watching it I was aware of the sweat on my forehead. I was aware of my own discomfort.

november 19. No work today. Called in sick. It is cold and frosty this morning. I am writing over breakfast. In front of me is a half-drunk cup of coffee, two pieces of toast with marmalade, some fruit and a hard-boiled egg. I have not shaved, neither have I showered.

I am sitting with my feet against the table. The heating is on full so I am comfortable in just my shorts and a t-shirt.

Earlier I listened to the radio, to the morning news. There was nothing much to report. The usual things. Public-spending cutbacks, minor incidents, local occurrences, and a civil war that threatens the stability of the eastern part of Europe.

I wish I was more interested. I wish I could take it more seriously. Instead I follow it rather offhandedly from the comfort of my kitchen. Here I am sitting half-dressed listening to what for someone, somewhere, must be nothing short of disaster. What am I really thinking about?

I am wondering if Anna is back from the north. I want to see her. I need to see her. I have missed her.

november 20. About six this evening a friend phoned and asked me if I wanted to go for a drink. I had nothing planned so we arranged to meet at eight in a café in the city’s west-end. He was already there when I arrived. We decided to go a bar he knew behind the opera. It was much quieter there. We ordered two beers and sat down in a corner to talk. He seemed agitated.

november 21. Anna is back. She left a message on my answering machine.
This morning I walked along by the river. In a city this vast, one would expect to see more shipping traffic. It is not so. Now this long and famous river is a stage for the ever expanding tourist industry. Now it appears there are only tour companies, each one offering their unique own special view. I cannot say I am impressed.

To know this city one must live here. One must experience its myriad frustrations. One must walk its streets day in, day out. No visit, no guided tour can ever come close to revealing its core.

This is a city with two hearts. It is mean and generous, garrulous and withdrawn. It offers much and denies a lot. Its history is one of commercial expansion and political drive. Alongside its grandeur, its elegance, exists squalor and poverty. Its largeness belies its smallness. To walk its streets, to ride its Underground, one cannot but be aware of its past. No short visit can reveal that.

Only on the fringes, in the hidden areas, does one begin to approach the contradictory energy that has made it what it is today. To live here, to come home each evening in its rush hour, the collar of your shirt already grimy, your hands sweating, staring into the eyes of a stranger, is to understand it. It is neither splendid nor squalid. It exists and it breathes in its own crowded way.

It unexpectedly inspires and frustratingly disappoints.

This morning it was quiet. The river seemed timeless. It stretched out to either side of me, wide and lined with buildings old and new. Its achievements, the successes were there to see. Then the sun coming up, silhouetted the buildings, created an impression of great complexity. There was no running from it. It surrounded one on all sides.

Crossing a bridge, a train rattled noisily. It headed out to the suburbs. The city was already beginning to come alive. Under my feet leaves crunched. Here and there papers and bits of rubbish lay on the pavement. The benches on the embankment were empty. The cold was touchable.

I walked, thinking of the river flowing every day to sea. I thought of how many billions of lives have taken place along this river’s banks. I imagined my footsteps tracing a path, that though itself unique, was lost and obscured by the billions of other paths that could be traced along this embankment. If I could pick one of those lives out of time, what would I find?. What similarities would there be?. Would I find a life that paralleled mine in any way?.

Lives swallowed by history. Each city, each documentation of its past carried out at the expense of the individuality of its inhabitants. Would the telling of one life reveal anything other than that I already know?. Is it that when we get down to the details of individual lives, we find their particularity goes beyond that of cities? Is a city only what we make of it in our minds?

november 22. Talked to Anna on the phone this evening. I wanted to call her all day. Each time I went to the phone I was distracted by something at work.

When I left this evening I went straight to the nearest call-box. I kept bumping against a bag of books I had left on the floor. Our conversation was marked by long silences. There was no tension, just a frequency of spaces. I knew what I wanted to say. And she knew what I wanted to say. We both knew I should not say it. We skirted around this issue with a number of vague comments and questions.

I could imagine her mouth against the receiver, the unusual way she had of putting her tongue up against her corner teeth. I wondered if she was sitting the way she sometimes did, her hand playing with the lobe of her ear. What were her eyes doing?. What things were they also longing to say?.

We took our time. We let our phone conversation meander slowly through forty units. We arranged to meet in a café tomorrow. We did not know how to say goodbye. It somehow seemed so formal. In the end we agreed just to put the phone down and wait till three pm tomorrow.

november 23. At first it was raining. Cloudy and misty. It seemed to hang about the city. Looking out the window, I did not feel it was a day for going out. About eleven thirty it began to clear a bit.

I had a couple of things to do. I went to the supermarket and bought some groceries. I cleaned up the flat and generally got things into some kind of order. Living alone one tends to get lazy, thinking no-one else will see the mess. I did not know whether I would spend the night here or at Anna's.

I walked slowly to where I was to meet her. I was thinking about us, of how long we had known each other, of the days we had spent in this city.

There are many places we consider ours, that for us have a personal meaning. Yet we probably share them with many others.

She was sitting looking a little lost. Her hair was falling across her face and she was wearing that funny raincoat she sometimes wears.

She did not see me coming in, so I stood for a minute or two watching her. The fairness of her face, the sort of nervous way she has of moving, graceful and yet a little awkward, seemed so familiar then, so normal as if she had always been standing beside me.

There is always this space, this slight distance when we have not seen each other for some time. It seems she grows apart, or she becomes vague, something that threatens the ease with which I feel I can be myself with her. Perhaps this is one of the things I love most about her. This feeling of not having to assume an attitude or role.

Then she saw me. She smiled suddenly and spontaneously, but with a trace of shyness. I kissed her cheek. I smelt her perfume. I felt the reassuring softness of her skin and the warmth of her body.

She asked how I was, and I asked her how her work had been. She answered it had been alright, a little tiring, and that the language had been a problem, but she had done what she went to do.

We held hands across the table. I told her I had not been doing much, just reading the newspapers, going to work, sleeping and waiting and that everything was about the same. She laughed and said she had only been away for a week.

We talked a bit longer and decided to take the bus to the north of the city where there is a large heath, where one can almost pretend one is in the country. Getting up, I watched her walk on ahead of me. I thought of how her movement, how when she had smiled at me, it destroyed any of the doubts I had begun to feel. I felt reassured and suddenly happy.

As we walked out onto the pavement I took her arm and pulled her close to me.

november 24. We woke late this morning. The sun was streaming in the window. I lay for a while and then got up and went out to pick up the Sunday papers. Anna made some breakfast, and we stayed in bed till noon reading.


november 26. The radio is on. I am listening carefully. It is an old song I remember from when I was younger. I am catapulted out of the present and into the past. I am standing and listening to how I once was. I am standing again in the living room of my parent's house. I can see the leaves of the willow tree in the garden in the morning sun. I can see the shadow of the buddleia on the grass, its orange blossoms bright against the green, its branches swaying beside the pebble-dashed wall. I can hear the chatter of birds from the bushes that line the garden wall. There is a feeling of nostalgia. The song finishes. I wait a couple of seconds. I instinctively expect to hear the next song that was on the recording I owned. I am back there, back in the living room of my parent’s house.

Then I realise there is no other song coming. The voice of the radio announcer brings me back to where I am; in the kitchen of Anna's flat in some non-descript section of this large city.

The juice squeezer is squeezing the oranges. The toast has popped from the toaster. The frost is thawing on the windows; and I am standing grappling with a sudden feeling of loss.

november 27. Quite day at work. Itching all day to get home.

november 28. Week nearly at an end.

november 30. Yesterday evening, Friday, we went to the cinema and later to eat. We drank a lot of wine and took a taxi home.

Driving through the city at two in the morning it looked like a great half-empty ship. Its roads, ring-roads, were the decks, and the centre with its complex of old streets and squares, the bridge.

Everywhere people stood cold and pale, huddled into their winter clothing under the night sky. Old newspapers mingled with the bodies and blew in scurries down the streets. One could understand, looking at this, the electronic scream which permeates the airwaves.

At night this city floats on a great sea; the collective sea of a planet. Its energy, its drives are tangible. The merest change of weather, the merest change of posture, is enough to communicate a shift, a sensitivity to a new direction in its unending voyage.

This sea chatters endlessly in bleeps and scratches, in pulses and non-pulses. It babbles into the black vacuum of space. Air waves that once carried only birds, prevailing winds, the pollination of pastures, cackle with voice and counter voice, with snatches of music, advertisements, rumour, gossip. They build like a great electro-magnetic wall over which it is sometimes difficult to hear.
Strange to sit in a taxi and watch this slip by like a clip out of someone else's movie. Two in the morning, and a little drunk. Anna lying asleep against me on the back seat.

december 1. We went walking in the park this morning. A windy and raw day.

december 2. Sat on the Underground this morning, squashed in against the window. It was a typical Monday morning, neutral and grey, with that air of sullen acceptance. In front of me the headlines of a newspaper. Continuing violence on streets that as a child I knew. Streets where I spent happy carefree summers, now stained with blood and hatred. Patrolled by Armoured Personal Vehicles; scanned by radar and high-tech listening devices. Electronic ears in place of human ears. The voices drowned by sound bite. By politicking. Words wrenched from their context.

It was about five hundred to six hundred kilometres from where I sat hurtling underground at that moment, but, it felt a lot closer. Distance somehow diminished by personal memory.


december 3. A busy day. Christmas approaching. The lights are now going up on the streets. I do not like it. There is always something lacking. I feel it is somehow out of touch with reality.

We would like to go away for a couple of days in the new year. It depends on Anna's papers. She does not know how she stands with her visa.

december 4. I came south and she came west. We met here on an April evening when we both got into a lift taking us from the Underground to the street. She dropped her passport and I ran after her. When she turned around she looked so beautiful, so sad. I stood looking at her and rather stupidly said, I had never met anyone from there before.

december 5. If I talk to her about home and how she feels about it, she becomes rather wistful. She does not say much, but I sense there is still a deep attachment.

She describes it in terms of heavy, foggy days in winter, made heavier by industrial pollution, and yet the beauty and freshness of arriving spring. If I try to imagine her there, I see her as if still in a dream.

She paces the cobblestone square in front of the famous clock-tower. Or she sits in her cramped office looking longingly through an ochre tinted window. She is already wearing that funny raincoat that sits so oddly against her lightly sun-burned neck. She is moving in the dream as if the dream itself was moving somewhere. I feel I am looking at her through a glass sphere or a stretch in the fabric of space. I can see the blue-green ovals of her eyes set so delicately in her face.

december 6. If she talks to me about where I was born, I can only describe it as a presence. I do not think of it much yet it is there. On days when I feel the impersonality of the city wear me down,

I find myself walking in places I knew when I was young. It seems I have become a stranger again, right within the centre of all that has become familiar, all that has become home.

I tell her about the mountains and the sudden shifts of light. I tell her about the tiny back streets and the rain sweeping in off the sea. I tell her about the cranes and the shipyards. I tell her about a city torn apart on its own bitterness; a city that is no longer my city yet refuses to lie down and go away.

december 7. If she asks why I left, what can I say?. As a boy I watched the boats leaving port to cross the short, difficult sea. Somehow I always felt the necessity. Felt I was born to leave. It seemed the only step. I would walk along the coast and gaze expectantly into the horizon. What did I imagine, what did I expect to see?. What voice told me I would not find myself till I left?

december 8. If I ask her why she left she answers with passion. All her life there was a frontier across her mind. She felt she lived in a lost city. She always dreamed one day the barriers would fall. With her camera, she crossed three countries on a night train.

december 9. Anna sitting by the window in the morning sun. Her face is not made up. Her eyes are bright and soft in the cold winter light. Her hair is uncombed and she is curled up, her feet underneath her, reading a magazine. She looks at me and says she is glad to be here.

december 10. Anna sitting in the park on a winter’s day. The bright green of the grass and the bare trees are the only backdrop; there is the red of her lips, her light, brown hair.

Her hands are gloved and hold the book she has nearly finished reading. A leather shoulder bag, a bag that looks as though it has grown here with her is on her knee. I see her leather shoes, now wrinkled, and a loose floppy hat is pulled down over her eyes.

On her coat is a piece of jewellery inset with an amethyst; subtle and elusive, clear and direct. Her legs are crossed. She is sitting at the far end of a park bench lost in the words she is reading.

She does not hear my footsteps on the smooth stone path. She is not aware of the ducks in the nearby pond.

When I sit beside her on the bench, she looks up a little surprised. She smiles and kisses me on the mouth.

december 11. Anna close up. The elasticity of her lips. The spray of light freckles across her nose. Her teeth, white and close together. The slightly round end of her nose.

december 12. Anna at three in the morning sleeping quietly, her breathing deep, her hair loose, the sheets only half covering her. Lying beside me with her arms around me, her mouth slightly open. On the streets nothing but quietness.


december 13. I went to the train station this morning to check on tickets. It was raining heavily. Anna called me at work. We met later and had lunch.

december 16. It is raining again today. I sit and look out the window of my office to the street below. There is the usual stream of traffic. An old woman is looking through a rubbish bin on the side of the pavement. The taxi drivers blow their horns at the slightest provocation. The old red buses trundle by more or less regularly. Umbrellas scurry here and there. People disappear in and out of doors. The rain falls continually. It runs down the windows, across the pavement and into the gutters at the side of the street.

december 17. Staying in my own flat. Anna will come over tomorrow evening.
Slept badly during the night. Strange dreams. At one point I seemed to be drifting down a river on a small boat.

I awoke about four and could not get back to sleep. I lay there, trying to get a hold of how I felt about things, trying to get a hold on that sense I sometimes have of the ground moving from beneath my feet. Something about my life here is a point of reference for that, is the core of where I am actually going. I stayed in bed for about another hour and then got up and had an early breakfast.

Snatches of the dream remained with me for the rest of the day. A strange echo of relevance, meaning.

december 18. It snowed yesterday evening. The city is sombre and bitterly cold this morning.

december 19. I am home early from work today. It is now late afternoon. Already the streets are changing into shadow, into pin-points of light, made and unmade. The sky to the east has cleared.

It is dark blue and flecked with violet clouds. Yesterday’s snow is still on the streets.

Sometimes I am struck by a strange sense of living backwards. I feel I am somehow stepping outside the world and yet immersing myself in it all the more intensely. It is as if I have experienced this scene, somewhere else, at some other time, in some other way. My footsteps echo like they were echoing across another time.

If I open the window and look into the street below, the murmur of the distant traffic assumes an expression of its own. It seems to be talking with a sadness, as if each car were a voice, and each voice were saying something, speaking to me. Yet when I listen I cannot catch what is being said. Instead I am aware of a sense of aloneness, of estrangement.

In the kitchen the darkness descends. The light bulb burns harshly from its place in the wall. I stand in the middle of the room, my arms stretched out, my hands reaching into the air.

All around I am surrounded by people and yet the spaces between us seem as vast as lifetimes. Now and then I hear a radio, a step on the stairs, an opening or shutting door, the voice of a child. Yet everything seems to come from afar. I feel I am wrapped in a cocoon of silence.

On the floor is a pair of Anna’s shoes. Her book and perfume are on the table. In the bedroom the bed is unmade, and a suitcase lies half open beside the wardrobe. Newspapers lie here and there, after-shave, a magazine, socks, a couple of scribbled lines on some foreign notepaper, little things that in a way define me, but are also the common currency of many others. The feeling of threads of life interweaving and intertwining across many lives is one I cannot easily shake off.

Each life is a history and each history is the accumulation of the events, illusions, fallacies, and facts of all lives. I carry within me my own history. Am I at each moment of the day, at each turn of the corner, creating new possibilities for myself? Each time I kiss Anna, each time I pull her close to me, am I returning to a thread, a vein to which I have returned many times before?

Are those decisive moments in my life, the dropping of a passport on the street, the running after a complete stranger, only infused with the sense of meaning I choose to give them? Do I write my own history from some deep inner sense of what I feel it should be. Or do I construct it in retrospect, demanding it fit the pattern that most vindicates my present position?.

december 20. I have been living in this flat for two years now and still I live out of a suitcase. To see me walk on the street, my shirt, my tie, my raincoat, my leather shoes, one would probably place me in another world. I live a double life.

Each morning I walk past the porter of my office building to the fourth floor. Each morning as I enter the lift, I alter a part of my personality. I mask myself and assume the face of my colleagues.


december 21. This city that I can almost taste, this city in which I have spent years, is it only a part of a journey? I envy the permanence of others. Their lives are solid, their blindness something to be rewarded. I live in a continual state of flux and influx.

If I grasp too hard, that which I want slips away. If I chase, that which I pursue becomes invisible.

When I look at Anna I ask myself what it is we have in common. What is it, other then those personal things, that holds us together? We both belong to a time when the roots of much have been pulled clean from the ground.

When she tells of her journey here, she tells me how she looked out of the window as the train raced through the night. Then she saw the lights of towns and cities, towns and cities that for her were once only dreams. All the time she was struck by the sense of unreality. The dream was coming true, yet, somehow it had always been true.

When she stepped off the train that April morning she was suddenly struck by a feeling of intense hunger. The space she had once been sensed was now real, was about to fill itself up with a life that previously could only have been guessed at.

She tells me how she sat on a bench, her baggage at her feet, and looked about her. She saw the light filtering through the glass ceiling of the station, the pigeons, flying, trapped, nesting in the great steel girders above her. She saw the dirt on the ground, the electric trolleys picking up the mail. She heard the whistle of porters as they went to and fro between the platforms. She saw commuters, oblivious to the presence of tourists or travellers. She slowly began to feel she really was somewhere else.

Then, she says, she felt sad as she realised that a step once taken is always taken; even if gone back on, it has been taken.

Coming out of the station she saw a city busy and moving. She tells how she found a hotel room. She describes the smell of coffee and toast in the reception as she set her bags down; the desk a little worn, the furniture having seen better times.

In her room she opened the window and lay on the bed. She listened to the sounds coming from the street. For a moment she wondered if it was all true, the unfamiliarity, the strangeness.

She realised she was on the crest of a wave. This city she had chosen was a vortex of influence. She tried to imagine herself living in it day to day, tried to see herself finding a way through its linguistic and social maze.
Her life, she says, suddenly seemed short. She was suddenly aware, that like many of the city’s other inhabitants she would become a mutation, a product of her interaction with it. What she would find, was not a new life, but a new aspect of her particular life. The barrier had fallen, the frontier was crossed.

december 22. A friend of Anna’s called and asked if we would like go and eat with her and her partner next weekend. Sometimes I enjoy this, sometimes not. It is outside the city, an hour's journey. I like the travel, the train swinging out through the spreading suburbs. I am always refreshed by the smell and touch of the countryside, its contrast with the streets of the city. I always look for the flight, for the poised movement of birds over the fields.

december 23. It was raining again this morning but cleared up later. This evening as I walked up the path behind the flats, I noticed how completely bare all the trees had become. They were hard and jagged in the ghostly glow of the street-lamps. Their tips disappeared into the clear night air. Overhead an airplane was crossing. Its lights appeared like a short line of white beads moving though the sky.

I looked toward the window and saw a light on in the flat. It was the only one burning on our floor. I figured Anna must be already there. It seemed all the warmer for the coldness outside.
I stood for a moment listening. The city was turning over. It was still busy. It was still involved in its endless permutations.
Then I saw Anna come to the window. I stopped for a moment and watched her. She put her hand up to drop the blinds. I could just make out the details of her face in the light from the room. Then she shook her hair back from her face. Then I wanted nothing more than to be upstairs and with her.


The entry for December 24 is unclear. It starts with a statement about a poem the author appears to be attempting to write. However the text here is quite damaged and just how it pieces together is uncertain. There are some sparse entries for December, but, it is not till January the author again appears to have much interest in writing. The entry concerns the beginning of a journey. He appears to be alone. There is no reference to any of the previous entries. I have not included it above.
As already stated the identity of the author is still a mystery and will probably remain so. I have resigned myself to this fact, though it must be said I still entertain the occasional hope of further discoveries.
Anyone with information concerning the above or with anything they feel may help in this strange matter, should contact me at the address given below. Or, if they prefer, refer the matter to the police at Battersea Bridge station.

Andrew Dubrovsky.
Beaufort Street,
London.
June 1992.

Copyright ( C ) Peter Millington. Amsterdam. May 1993.

Hradcanska

1

I remember walking down the Chotkova that morning. How it wound, descended, the leaves in splendid piles over the footpath, the sun gently lighting the colours of the buildings, the soft reds and creams.

The previous evening, we arrived late. We did not eat much on the train. When I showed the address to the taxi driver outside the station, his face looked puzzled for a moment, its wrinkled and melancholy features moving over the written words. Then in broken German he asked if we were paying in Marks.

The following morning, I went to the window and pulled back the heavy curtains. I saw for the first time the street that the night before had been hidden in darkness. Steam was rising and in front of the building, stood a small square full of bare trees. Parked outside the window, was a battered, light blue Skoda. After getting up and showering, she applied a thin covering of lipstick to her lips, quickly brushed her hair. Then I put on a heavy overcoat and pulled a woollen hat down around my ears.

On the street, she took the map from her pocket and handed it to me. First we crossed a small railway with the rails disappearing into early morning mist. We heard a bell and saw the front of something that looked like a tram appear, saw it tilt as it rounded a bend and slowly headed for the crossing. Then we went along a wide street, passing a football stadium before turning to our right and beginning to feel the pavement under our feet slipping downwards, realised we were descending.

We left the Chotkova and found themselves on a series of narrow, side streets. We came to a green area with a metro station and thought the river should be nearby. She stopped and asked to see the map, but I assured her I knew where we were going. Checking street names every now and then, we arrived at a small bridge set in an intersection of streets. On the bridge there were two girls looking down into the water, down at the surface sprinkled with leaves and on which two white swans swam. A little way in front of us, running to the left was the northern end of the Karlûv Most. We did not go along it. Instead, we turned right, walked up a short hill until we arrived at a square with an old, gold-brown building, and a church. It was a square formed by buildings with shadowy pavements under archways, and a square cut in two by a tram line. On the corner was a cafe and I remember its name because it was in English not Czech and was called the White Eagle.

We ordered bread with ham and eggs, toast and jam, two glasses of orange juice and four cups of coffee.

Finishing before her, I smoked a cigarette, watched and looked about me. Tapping my fingers on the table, I turned the map over, saw the pictures, the tours offered, what there was to do, and for a moment felt a sense of familiarity, felt a recognition, as if it were really no different from home. This surprised me and I wondered what else I had expected and then wondered what she would like to do. Next to us a couple spoke rapidly in German but no-one took much notice. Standing, I paid. Then we returned from where we had come, this time crossing the bridge.

The sun had disappeared behind the cloud and the river stretched away to both sides. In places it rushed over what looked like weirs. It was only there I could see the speed with which it moved, see the power it held, not in any way apparent from the slow surface beneath the bridge. I stood and looked and felt cold and then heard music coming from my left. She had already moved a little way away from me and I looked and saw a group of middle-aged men playing dixie jazz, and a crowd gathered in front of them, and among the street sellers, near where she stood, a French woman turned to her companion declaring it was, `vraiment amusante.’.

We walked on and the sun reappeared. I did not want to stop so we crossed streets and alleys, coasted along the river until coming to a bridge that was cordoned off, that we gathered was being repaired. Then we paused while she consulted our guide book, while she looked at the building we were in front of, its ornamented pillars, its baroque elegance. She explained it was a famous concert hall and that in August 1968 a philosophy student set himself on fire in front of it in protest at the Soviet occupation. In the reflection of its doors I could see the letters from a neon sign the other side of the street, see the Czech words that I did not understand and were in any case reversed. Beside me someone was bending down and taking a photograph, and I imagined how it should look, thought the glass should be black and the letters should swim in it with a whiteness and the stone should come out grey and grainy.

She said she wanted to rest and could sit for a bit so we found somewhere to have a coffee and I loosened my coat and watched her drink. I watched the reassuring sight of her head bend over the cup, the ring on the fingers that grasped the white porcelain handle and I smiled at her and she smiled back, looking a little puzzled.

She finished and we crossed the river again, climbed until we came to the palace. On the stepped street upwards I looked back over the city and marvelled at the weave of roofs, at the sloping park, the trees planted in lines on rolling grass. The river twisted and turned below, curled between the rise of spires, the air seemingly thicker in places. A young woman sat on a corner with an open case in front of her and a cap, manipulating some brightly painted puppets, making them dance and move in quick jerky actions. We stood and watched and she dropped some money in the cap, turned to me, her face flushed with the cold and climbing, and I thought again how good she looked.

Further up we passed a small stone house covered in burgundy ivy, its walls almost completely hidden. We looked over into its garden, saw a patio area tangled in apple trees, their branches no longer full. Here and there some pulpy looking fruit remained lying on the ground.

On the road back we swung to the right, finding ourselves on the Malá Strana. Its pathways wound up and down, its trees with their shed leaves caught the light of the afternoon, obscured the city below us. Finding a bench, we sat, enjoying the colours, the sense of the city, its sounds carrying on the cold air. I liked the way it lay nestled between the hills around, felt I was discovering it, yet it had always been there, and I had always known it was there, and that it conformed to some sense of a city I carried within me. I put my arm around her and she moved close to me, began to talk about home, about the new apartment we were going to buy, but I put my finger over her mouth and said to her it could wait. We walked a little more, hand in hand, the air getting colder, then took the metro back to the rooms we had rented for the couple of days and slept for a while.


2

When I woke, she was already up, sitting in front of the small mirror, her hands resting across her knees. Through the window the mist had gathered again. I went over and stood behind her and for a moment saw her face and my face, and saw her find me in the reflection, her eyes meet my eyes, saw her lift her hand and lightly touch my fingers on her shoulder, as if in the mirror we were in another world and looking at ourselves in this world, as if we were only real in that world and that was the way it had always been.

We left the room and I paused in the hallway before locking the door. I was aware of the old, high roof, the wide, wooden stairway rising to my left. I felt for a moment I was waiting for something, that it was as though I expected something I knew was going to happen to happen. But nothing happened.

In front of a shaky looking table, a young man was peering at a pile of post. The key suspended in my hand, I watched him put his bag to the floor, carefully go through all the letters and suddenly there was the smell of boiled vegetables on the clinging, dusty air, the smell of simple cooking and I felt an almost crushing sense of melancholy.

On the street we retraced our steps. We crossed the Karlûv Most, the river now lost in fog, the lights along its banks strangely diffused in irregular patches. We came to the Staromestské Námestí, crossed the old town square again, took a right until we were on the Národni.

Finding a restaurant, we were shown to a table beside a high, curtained window. Despite the dim lights I noticed the decor was faded, how the atmosphere was almost of another world, another time. My eyes fell to her hands, I heard the rattle of her bracelet, heard her say she was feeling cold, that maybe we had walked too much on our first day. And at the same time was aware of a curious sensation of it being spring, thought of lilac trees blooming, of hedges wild along pathways, of the light lingering longer each evening over country roads, over mountains. Though through the window, it was autumn, late autumn and the shapes on the street were shadows, emerging only in detail beneath street lamps; a face under a hat, a woman on the arm of a man, a stranger in a long coat with an umbrella stepping by quickly.

Then suddenly I felt disoriented. I answered her sharply as she again brought up the subject of the new apartment. I turned to her to see her looking at me, her forehead creased in frustration. I apologised, attempted a smile but felt I did not manage it convincingly. For a moment I wondered if I myself was convinced and the thought of the apartment annoyed me even more and I said to her I was getting up to find the bathroom.

When I came back she was quietly staring out the window. The waiter came and we ordered soup and bread. She chose chicken, but I asked for fish, because it was shark from the Baltic and I felt curious and wanted to try something I had never had before. As the waiter walked away, I called him back and asked if I could have a glass of a beer.

We waited and I was unsure what to say. I asked her what she wanted to do when we were finished eating but she did not know. At the table next to us two men were eating. From their language, their accent, from the neatly ironed work shirts, the freshly laundered jeans, I guessed they were North Americans. They were talking business loudly, were talking about the city as if it were in some state of stasis, talking about the city as if it were something awaiting their magical touch. I imagined these men on the metro, imagined them sitting among the silent faces, the stoical faces and the small metal sign above the door through to the each carriage carrying the letters CCCP, the symbols of what once had been to them an enemy state. I wondered if they would have seen that, wondered if they would have noticed that small detail as I had. Small details, I thought, are sometimes all the more important because they are small details, because one does not always notice them at first. Sometimes small details reveal the hidden world behind the world one thought one knew. Then I wanted to turn to her and tell her what I was thinking, tell her there is no magic touch, the magic is always there, change was in how you look at things and that we do not always look hard enough. She was lifting a glass of water to her mouth, her eyes somewhere else so I said nothing.


When the day is over I will take the lift, return to our new apartment. I will open the door onto its quietness and will think of the evening to come and how my father is coming over. She has asked me to do something about that. She does not like when we sit and watch the football together. And beneath my father's grey, thinning brows his eyes will get angry and he will complain that the footballers of today get paid too much and are more interested in the advertising on their shirts, are more interested in creating an impression than playing. Then he will take a drink from one of the cans of beer he always brings with him and want to talk politics.

There will be the lights of the city burning through the window and the night falling and below beneath the glow of the street lamps, rows of neatly parked cars alongside the footpath that leads to the park. My stomach will tighten, will tense as I think how later I will walk my father to the door, will watch from the balcony as he strolls stiffly the short distance to the tram halt, something he always insists on doing himself; the same tram he always takes home alone.

Turning back in the doorway, there will be a moment when I think of my work, my life, my relationship. I will think of myself in the city as though swimming through it below sea, underwater, as if sometimes looking for ways of surfacing for air.

Then it will be the morning again and maybe the sun will shine over the buildings, the sky will be blue and in the winter a white blue and I will feel for an instant there is a fire within me and step onto the pavement and hear the traffic in the morning stillness, already the cars in lines along the junction. I will put the key into the door and throw my briefcase onto the backseat and then turn on the radio. I will push on the accelerator, will edge out onto the motorway, will pull the phone from my pocket, hear it peep as I punch in numbers, wait for the voice and leave a message wondering if my colleague will get it.

Over the edge of the motorway the city will come into view and the flatness and the trains crisscrossing the flatness and the offices rising with their clean, sharp edges will seem to cut right into the sky.

I will do this every day and each day, will pass every week until it is weekend and we go to the supermarket and stock up with groceries. I will spend some time picking out a good wine and will eventually agree to do something about my father's visits. Then we will drive home and I will be seized by a sudden impulse to go into the bathroom and look at my face in the mirror, will look at the hair beginning to grey on my temples, at the wrinkles beginning to spread from the corners of my eyes. I will wonder if she was right when once she said I lacked direction, decisiveness. Until I reach up and pull the cord extinguishing the thin fluorescent strip of light. Until I hesitantly close the door behind me. Wondering what it is I am closing a door on.

Copyright © Peter Millington 1997

fears

1

She is old now, her chair by the window. Much of the day she spends there. Looking out from behind the lace curtain, a shadow to those on the street. It is the people she likes to watch passing on the pavement. More often than not they are people she does not know. She finds this hard. There was a time when she knew just about everyone. Even the younger couples, the children. Now they have moved on, they have gone.

The most difficult days are the rainy days in winter. The combination of wet and cold, the unyielding grey sky, the damp face of the red-bricked houses.

It is not as it used to be. Before people stayed where they were, people knew who you were. That has changed. Now everyone leaves as quick as they can. They all want a new house, a house away from the city, one of those funny estates with affected sounding names. She has lived in this part of the city over all her life, has seen it change first hand, seen the neighbourhood empty, seen it lose its character. She is one of the last left. It was only the next street up where she was born. Some days she remembers it just as it was then.

Yesterday's newspaper is lying on her knee. She takes her glasses from around her neck, her hands unsteady as she brings them to her face. Her hair is grey and wound tightly into a bun on top of her head. Her face is wrinkled and sad. Her eyes, once bright blue, eyes that once sparkled, are now milky, faded.

As she reads, her brow furrows, her concentration wavers. She mouths the words to herself, holds one finger above the inky page, her hand grasping tightly onto the side of the newsprint. She stops, looking puzzled. She calls out to him.
“Jack, have you seen this in the newspaper?”.
There is no reply.
“Jack,” she repeats, this time trying harder to make her voice carry, “Jack, Jack, are you there love?”
There is still no reply. Where he can be? Has he gone to do the morning’s shopping and not told her? No, that would not be like him. Maybe he told her but she has forgotten.
The clock ticks steadily from the mantlepiece. She cannot make out correctly what it says. Trying to remember if she has recently heard it chime, she calls out again.
“Jack, Jack, are you there love?”
She moves in her chair, putting the newspaper to the side, preparing to get up. Where can he be? Her arms shake as she lifts herself forward, as she attempts to stand. For a moment she thinks she is not going to make it, is going to fall and then she feels her legs frail but on the floor. She reaches for her walking stick, leaning against the table. Her thin, bony hand grasps its edge, attempts to move it out in front of her. She is just about to start for the door when she hears footsteps from the hallway.
“Jack, is that you? Jack pet, is that you?”
A voice answers.
“Are you calling me dear? I’ll be there right now. Just a wee moment.”
Again she tries to move but feels unable to. He comes into the room, his steps slow and measured. He is carefully rolling up his sleeves. His eyes fix on her standing by the chair, the newspaper now fallen to the ground, her stick in front of her. She looks at him.
“Yes I was. I didn’t know where you were...you didn’t answer...I was coming to look for you.”
“Ah here, sit down, would you. What is it you want?”
He quickly moves over to her, taking her firmly by the arm, gently manoeuvring her back to her seat by the window.
“I was just out back for a moment. I was talking to old George. He’s lost that cat of his again. Doesn’t know where it’s got to this time.”
She trembles as he sits her down.
“Are you alright now? Take it easy. Here, get yourself comfortable. Do you want your newspaper?”
Bending down slowly, he picks up the paper and hands it to her. She looks up at him.
“That cat of his is gone down to them other people. You know the ones. There at the end on the corner. Sure he forgets to feed the thing all the time. It’s no wonder it's off.”
“Aye, maybe. What was it you wanted me for anyway?”
She turns to the window.
“I can't remember now.”

He does the buttons on his coat. His fingers are stiff and awkward. There is a rattle as post comes through the letter box. The shadow behind the glass, broken in the dimpled pane, moves away again. Its steps recede down the pavement. Slowly he gets his cap out of his pocket and picks up the shopping basket from under the stairs. Putting his head around the door of the front room, he says, “I’m just going out to do some shopping. I’ll be back in about an hour.” She looks at him sleepily and replies, “alright,”
“Why don't you have a little snooze?”
She does not answer. He steps back into the hallway and closes the front door gently behind him.

Years ago he wondered which of them would come to this first. Now that they are both in their mid-seventies, he no longer needs worry about it.

Taking the cautious, measured steps his age permits, he closes the front garden gate. He too feels the creaking limbs, the shortness of breath, the trying way in which objects seem to elude his power. Some days it takes just about all his energy to get around the house.

When she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, he had already guessed. He had heard about it from others, the slow decline, the difficulty in even walking a couple of steps. That was over a year ago. In reality he was living with it longer than that. He had already seen the gradual deterioration, the fall from the grace of mobility, the shakiness, the lack of control, the forgetfulness. He had seen it all set in, all long before any doctor pronounced it official.

She more or less gave up. It was like something inside her decided there was nothing else to do but sit and wait until the end. Social Services offered him someone to help. He found that difficult. Admitting that he was unable to cope. All his life he has prided himself on his sense of independence. Now, a young man with a funny haircut comes in two mornings a week and does some cleaning. The messy stuff is always left for him.

There are times when he wonders how long more he will be able to care for her. Her doctor has talked about a home for the elderly. He feels guilty about it. It goes against the grain. How would he cope if he were left living on his own? How would he cope with visiting her, the travelling to and fro? Yet that is not the real issue. The real issue is...is, well if she were, ...if she were to pass away, then he would feel somehow he had not been there for her. A home for the elderly, it seems to him, robs her of what little dignity she now has left. Still he is a practical man.

They have been married forty nine years. Their children have long since gone, one to England, the other to Canada. There are always the letters, the occasional visits, at least from their daughter in Bristol. He knows they have their own families, their own lives. Sometimes it makes him sad, sometimes he would like to see more of his grandchildren. Yet he understands this is the way things have to be.

She finds it much harder. She always looked forward to being a grandmother. He realises there is a part of her that does not want to face the reality of things, does not want to accept that life has changed since they were young. There is a part of her that is angry at the altered world around her. He understands that too.

He remembers the day he first saw her. Then he was a young apprentice in the shipyards. He has never forgotten how she looked. Slight, with clear, blue eyes. She always appeared fresh, fashionable. Sometimes he can still see a resonance of that look in her. It is no memory, but something that has kept him there, that has kept him going all through the years.

Before they were married, she worked behind the counter in a small shop off Donegal Square. He would often go to pick her up at closing time on a Saturday evening. Sometimes a crowd of them would go dancing.

It makes him sad when he thinks of that, it all seems so long ago. Now you would not recognise parts of the city centre. Now all those places have gone.

2

She is standing on the pavement in front of him, smiling. A young girl about ten years old. Her freckled face and inquisitive eyes stare.
“Do you live down there in number six with the old woman?” she asks.
“Indeed I do,” he answers.
“What's wrong with her legs mister? My brother says she’s a cripple. Is that true?”
“Your brother doesn’t know everything.”
She falls into step alongside him, giving a little skip.
“He does mister. He knows just about everythin’. He's goin’ to go to Uni next year. Says he’ll get a grant. Says he wants to be an engineer, you know, inventin’ things and that.”
“Does he now? Maybe he knows everything about inventing but nothing about old ladies.”
“No mister. He says she’s a cripple. He read about it in a book.”
“Is that so?”
“It is so mister.”
Something about her movement, her manner catches him. For an instant he feels he is not looking at any young girl, but at her, that she is skipping lightly on the pavement in front of him, her legs firm and strong again, her voice sure, her eyes full of hope and optimism. He feels confused, troubled.
“Run on with you now you cheeky wee thing. Should you not be in school?”
She darts ahead of him.
“Aye, I should, but my daddy’s on holiday for a week. My Ma says I can stay off school to see him,” she calls back.
Waving goodbye, she disappears around a corner.
Must be one of them from number fourteen, he thinks. He has heard about them from George. The father is a security officer somewhere up off Ravenhill, works nights. “You know,” George said, “used to be in the police force but couldn’t take the stress. A bit fond of a drink I hear. A good man when he’s sober, but...ah, well you know how it is.” Jack agreed. It’s a bad situation he thought, it must be hard on the children. Still, she seems a sprightly young thing.

He comes out onto the main road. The sky is overcast. It will probably rain later, he thinks. His hip aches. Passing along the wall, he slows and coughs hoarsely into his clenched fist. He stops a moment to catch his breath. A mother and a young child pass, the child looking about eagerly. He notices the mother's hands clenched tightly, almost white on the handles of the buggy. Where is she going in such a hurry? Did people look like that when he was young? Now they always seem tense, always to be on their way somewhere. Sure where could you be on your way to here, he wonders. What could require so much urgency?

Crossing the street he turns and goes into the local newsagent. A teenage girl comes out from a small room behind the counter.
“Yes?” she says.
He has never seen her before.
“I’ll just have today’s paper, if you don’t mind.”
“The Telegraph?”
“Yes, please”.
She lifts a newspaper from a pile in front of her and hands it to him. He turns to walk away. She coughs lightly.
“Ah! That’ll be eighty pence, please.”
“Put it down for the end of the week, if you will. Tell Mrs McAlpine I’ll settle up on Friday morning.”
“Oh, she knows you then, does she?”
He is taken aback.
“Oh yes, oh yes, that she does.”
He smiles. She eyes him suspiciously.
“You know, it’s just that I’m new here. I’ve got to be sure. You’ve already arranged this with her have you?”
“I have. The name is Parker. Mr Parker from around on the Gardens.”
The girl writes something on a slip of paper and opens the plastic cash register.
“Ok Mr Parker. I’m sure that’s alright now.”
She looks blankly at him. He hesitates.
“Yes, well...ah...goodbye now,” he says.
He again turns to go but stops.
“Will Mrs McAlpine be here herself tomorrow morning do you know?”
“What’s tomorrow, Thursday? She will an’ all.”
“Ok. Thank you.”
There is the sound of a telephone being dialled as he closes the door behind him.



3

She sighs to herself. He looks up from his newspaper. The room is quiet. The only other sound is the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece. His glasses fall to the end of his nose.
“Are you alright dear?” he asks.
She does not answer.
“I said are you alright dear?”
She turns from the window, her head moving slowly.
“Aye, I am. I’m fine just now.”
“Would you like a cup of tea?”
“No. I'm fine.”
“I bought some of them Mr Kipling cakes you like.”
“No thanks. Not now.”
She seems a bit grumpy. He folds his newspaper over, the pages rustling as he smoothes them out.
“I met Mildred when I was out. She was with her daughter in the car. She was asking for you.”
He pauses.
“She says that Jim had a bit of a fall last week. They had to take him up to Dundonald for some X-rays. He’s ok. There’s nothing broken.”
“Oh!”
He puts his hand in the pocket of his waistcoat. She moves a little in her chair.
“Were they out doing the shopping together?”
“Aye, they were. He’s a tough old one, is Jim, always was. Sure you know yourself.”
She lifts her hand to her mouth.
“He must be getting on now.”
“He's still got a couple of years on us dear so he has.”
She can see him fiddling with his hand, trying to get his pipe out. She pulls at the cardigan around her shoulders.
“He used to have an eye for Margaret White.”
“What’s that you say love?”
“I said, he used to have an eye for that Margaret White.”
He looks mildly surprised.
“Did he now? How can you remember that?”
“He did. She was a pretty, young thing then. I think she had a bit of a thing for you Jack too.”
“No, I don’t remember at all.”
“Aye, she did and all.”
From the corner of her eye she watches him hold the pipe between his hands, run his fingers around its rim, and tap it firmly against the side of the ashtray.
“I don't remember any of that. I only remember Jim and how stubborn he could be. Once during the war we went over to play rugby in England, some club in the Midlands, he was nearly the only one left standing after the match. All the English lads wanted to buy him a drink, but he refused. You know how it went, ‘I’m a teetotaller myself. Thank you very much now, there won’t be a drop going over my lips.’ Someone suggested he mustn't be Irish at all, at which point he stood up and started to sing. And mind you he wasn’t a bad singer either.”
“It was different then.”
He crosses his legs, leans back in the chair. Reaching over to the small table, he picks up his pouch of tobacco.
“Aye, it was different then. You’re right there.”
Pressing the dark, thick strands down into the pipe, his fingers knead it firmly, years of repeating the action giving it a reassuring familiarity. He looks thoughtful.
“You know I was just thinking the other day about the time we went down to Donaghadee. Do you remember that? We stayed in that hotel along the seafront there.”
She stares at him.
“No.”
He pauses.
“You must. I think it was shortly after we got engaged.”
His eyes look at her expectantly.
“Was that the time after Anne was born?”
He sighs.
“No dear. I just said it was shortly after we got engaged. You must remember.”
Turning around quickly, she looks indignantly at him.
“There’s no need to be sharp with me.”
“It was when my brother was the curate in that wee church,” he adds, raising his voice slightly.
“It’s alright, you don’t need to shout either. I can still hear. I may not be able to walk, but I’m not deaf.”
She turns back to the window.
“Yes, yes, dear, of course. I remember us sitting up on the hill above the harbour. It was a fine September day. I remember watching the boat that used to sail out to the island there. What was its name now? Copeland, I think. Copeland island. Aye. I was thinking of that the other day. The war was just over. I remember how you looked. The way your hair was done in that new style. I remember how you were wearing lipstick. It was something you had picked up that time you were in London. I remember how some of the woman in the hotel gave you funny looks. I remember one making some reference to you being `a shameless young thing’. That all changed when they discovered Will was my brother.”
He stops, holding the unlit pipe out in front of him. His eyes cloud over. His face looks hesitant. She remains silent, gazing out the window.
“Aye, indeed. Poor Will. He eventually went out to Australia. Didn’t want to go on with the church. I remember he once confided in me he found it trying. That it was no life for a young man.”
He pauses, fiddles again in his pocket, looking for his matches.
“He did alright out in Australia. Not that we heard much from him really. The one time he came back he had changed so much. I remember I was struck by the way his skin had changed. It had become mottled from the heat, had a sun-beaten look. I was surprised by his voice. There was no trace left of his accent. He seemed to have come from a different world. He had I suppose. It’s so far away. Maybe that’s why he wanted to go there. Maybe the distance. Maybe it was the only thing he could do.”
Striking a match he lets it slowly burn. The clock suddenly chimes. He checks his watch. It is three thirty. Lifting his pipe to his mouth, he begins to light it. She remains still, her sad eyes fixed on the window. A cloud of smoke floats across the room.
“Whenever I smell your pipe,” she says, “it reminds me of my father.”
His eyes stare down into the fireplace. He stretches his hand out towards the electric heater. The room is beginning to darken.
“Are you cold dear?” he asks.
She pulls her cardigan tighter around her shoulders, shakes her head.
“I always remember my father sitting in the corner of our small living room. That was when I was older, thirteen or fourteen, I think. He would sit there, his shirt sleeves rolled up, holding his pipe in one hand, the other propping up his head. Sometimes he would ask you a question and then seem not to listen to the answer. I was always puzzled by that.”
He puffs on his pipe.
“That was when you still lived on Lombard Street.”
“Yes. That was before John died.”
There is a rasp, a catch in her voice.
“When John went, well, he never really got over it. Not that he got bitter, just that...well it sort of took the wind out of his sails.”
This is something to which he has become accustomed. The way she sometimes seems to remember things down to the last detail, the way her mind suddenly becomes clear, strong. Often it is events from her early childhood. Sometimes he is surprised by the strength of her recall.
“It was a tough blow.”
She tightens her lips.
“It was.”
Moving her arm, she tries to sit upright in the chair.
“In those days consumption was a serious illness.”
Her voice wavers.
“I’m not saying it isn’t still mind you, only then they didn’t have the medicines to treat it the way they do now. In a way John was his favourite. That’s why he took to you Jack. He thought he’d got a son back. But he was already dying himself then. I have often wondered if he knew that, but just never said.”
He nods his head.
“Who knows? He wasn’t the type of man to talk easily about things like that. He was too proud.”
“You know I remember the exact way that room looked. I remember everything about it, the way the kitchen ran off it, the picture above the fireplace, the way the door would sometimes stick, the way the small back yard looked through the window on a sunny afternoon.”
“Aye,” he says, “can't say I do. I remember that time we took him to Dublin though.”
He moves forward, smiles to himself, waving his pipe in front of him.
“Do you remember him standing on College Green, asking that policeman, if there was a post office on Sackville street? Aye, and this tall, fine looking country fellow, with a heavy accent, his face turning red, saying, ‘I think you mean O'Connell Street sir.’ And your father saying, ‘no I do not. I mean Sackville Street.’ We had to almost drag him away. I was afraid he would get us into trouble. Oh aye. I remember how he could get going on that alright. His sister still lived there. I remember she was like some poor creature stuck between two worlds. She always seemed to be a little too eager to tell you that, yes, she was quite happy.
For a moment he looks lost in thought, remains motionless, his pipe smoking up into the small room. Then he shifts forward in his chair.
“Are you sure you don’t want some more heat on dear?”
“No. No, it’s alright this way.”
“Fine, whatever you say.”

He returns to his paper. She hears him breathing in and out, the tapping of his pipe every now and then against the edge of the ashtray. She stares out the window, stares through the lace curtains onto the street. The street lights have just come on. They cast a glow on the pavement, their light falling in on the room. Her eyes catch the contour of a figure, a head moving slowly through the pale triangle, a cap pulled down tightly to its face. She looks again, trying to recognise the features, trying to find a name. She cannot explain why she suddenly thinks her father is out there, cannot explain why she thinks that it is her father walking along the pavement. Yet she clearly sees the features, the distinct, grey eyes, the round nose, the straight eyebrows, the solid head pressed firmly forward, the slow, methodical walk. She tries to get up, to move nearer the window, but cannot. She wants to call out, wants to say, “daddy, it’s me. Norma. Can you not see me? I’m here, here at the window. Just turn your head. I’m waving to you...daddy, daddy,...please, please answer me. Don’t just walk away like that. Daddy...”
“What is it love? Who are you trying to call? I’ve been here all the time.”
“J...Jack. Oh, Jack. I, I...where am I?”
“You’re ok dear. You’re here. Calm yourself now.”
He stands over her. The light is on. There is a look of anxiety in his face. He waits a moment.
“Jack,... I must have been dreaming. I...must have, I...”
“You just dozed off love. I’ll pull the curtains there if you move for a minute. It's getting dark now.”


He opens the back door and shivering, steps out onto the small patio. The night is cold. There are no stars to be seen. The sky is a deep brown. He looks across the fence into the neighbouring kitchen. There is a dim glow from behind the curtained window. The muffled sound of a television drifts over. George must be watching the snooker, he thinks, has the sound up too loud again. Probably fallen asleep in front of the thing.

He breathes in sharply. The air is cold and raw. Vague clouds form when he expels, their various shapes hanging in the damp around him. There is a rustle from the end of the short garden. His body tenses. He has read in the local paper how there has been a spate of robberies in the area recently. The broom handle is right next to him. It leans against the wall. Quietly, he lifts it. Its surface is cold, is covered in dew. He waits, strains his eyes to see. Peering down into the garden. He has just about made out the vague shape of the hedge, the apple tree, when suddenly two shining spheres appear out of the darkness. Flashing, they move quickly forward, darting first to one side then to the other. They keep low to the ground. He follows them until they come into the arc of light falling from the door. It is George’s cat. Stopping, it holds one paw in the air and meows. He chuckles to himself, calls to it, but it remains standing. He puts the broom back against the wall. “You daft thing,” he calls out quietly, “you had me going there for a moment.”
Just as he is about to turn, go back into the house, a loud crack, a sharp, black noise rings out across the roofs and gardens. He stops for a moment and listens, looks up into the sky. There is nothing, just the wintry silence. Then a siren. Again he calls to the cat but it scurries off towards the other house. He closes the door behind him.
“Sure you'll never get in,” he mutters to himself, “either way if George is asleep or with the noise from that television, he’ll never hear you scratching the door?”

His back aches as he steps into the living room. She is already in bed. He looks at the clock. It is just before eleven, time for him to call it a day. Yawning, he switches off the lights and walks stiffly down the hallway. Remembering he has not checked to see if the front door is locked, he turns irately back. The catch is on the door and the chain is across it. I must have done it earlier, he thinks.

There is the sound of shouting and scuffling from the street. He bends with difficulty, his legs creaking, his back stretching awkwardly and peeps through the letterbox. There are a couple of young lads standing there. He watches them. The draught from the moist air stings his eyes. He hears their talk, their excited, loud voices. They all have scarves wrapped tightly around the lower part of their faces, their hair cut short and close. He is shocked by their language. Adjusting his hands, he tightly grasps the slat of the letterbox. We would never have used words like that in our day, he thinks, would never have even thought of things like that. His watery blue eyes stare at them. They are pushing, jostling each other on the pavement. From somewhere in the distance comes the drone of an army helicopter. With a sense of disbelief he recognises one of them.
“That’s that wee fellow, what’s his name now, the one who used to work up there behind the meat counter in the supermarket. Right enough, I haven’t seen him now for some time,” he mutters.
He stands up, trying to straighten out his back. It cricks, a pain running the length of it. “Oh dear,” he says to himself, “I think I’ll have to go the doctor one of these days.” He pauses, takes a deep breath, winces, grabs onto the bannister. “But that young fellow now, used to be ever so friendly to you. Always had a smile for you. Aye, who would have thought he’d be hanging around with that sort of crowd. You never know these days I suppose. It’s just in the times. Probably just the world they grow up in. Wouldn’t have happened in my day, no. Still, now it’s different. Now nothing is for sure.”



4

She looks up at the ceiling. The dim shape of the lampshade hangs there. Her eyes focus on it. Beside her, she can feel the weight of his body. His snoring echoes around the room. He has been asleep for some time now.

She heard him come up the stairs muttering to himself. As he slowly undressed, she listened to him, wanted to say something but hesitated. Then she drifted off to sleep.

When she awoke again she had no idea how long he had been there. It was later but she did not know how much later. She wanted to get up to look at his watch lying beside him on the tall, square table, but could not. In the darkness and the cold it was really beyond her capability.

She thinks of it again. It comes back into her mind. Suddenly her thoughts seem to become more lucid. He is asleep. What if she could not wake him? What if she were just to go now, if she were just to slip away and he would sleep on beside her? There he would be in the morning, getting up, discovering that she was no more. He would be in the house on his own, smoking his pipe, the rooms empty, talking to his memories. And her children. Would they come and see if he was alright? Would her son make it home from Canada?

For a moment she would like to see them now more than anything, to hear their voices. She tries to wake him, tries to shake him. He only turns slightly, rolls a little more to his side and goes on snoring. She calls his name. There is no answer.

She feels herself panic, tries to lift herself up, tries to turn herself over to get to the bedside-light. What’s the use, she thinks. I cannot. I cannot get up properly, I have not the energy to even reach out and find the switch.
She lies there, looking up into the ceiling. The silence presses down.
“Jack, Jack, Jack dear,” she whispers, “Jack I’m afraid. I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m so afraid of dying.”

Copyright (C) Peter Millington. December 1996.