compacted.

It was the time we lived in a small 3rd floor apartment about a kilometre from the rail station. We were close to the centre of the city though out along the waterfront near where the harbours were. Sometimes in the night I would wake and hear a train hissing and rattling over the bridge that crossed the canal and in a curious way it reminded me of running water, sounded more like running water than the water that ran under the criss-cross of steel girders, under the bridge that took the tracks southward out of the city. There were times I would think that sound was like water emptying from a sink, the way it swirls and murmurs and runs down into the nothingness of the drain. A drain that looks only like a black hole but about which there is something sad because in lots of other apartments there are the same drains and people not even noticing them. Just pulling the plug and letting the water empty away and maybe shouting at each other as they do.

In the darkness of the morning and because I was sleepy everything was soft and there was only this sound and then the sound of my wife sleeping beside me, her breathing and sometimes the sound of our son turning in the cot from his bedroom.

I remember this time and that it was very cold. The cold starting about the middle of December and going on well into March. Even before it got cold I knew it was going to be cold. One Sunday we were walking along a street and over the dark grey pavement the lights from a cinema shone and glowed against a needle-sharp sky. In that sky, blue like the blue of oceans from space, the clouds were thin and drawn out. I was wearing a purple sweatshirt, a black denim jacket and my wife had on an olive suede jacket. On my shoulders, I carried my son. He was wrapped in a down-coat with the hood pulled down over his face and a yellow scarf around his neck. As we came around the corner onto an open square the darkness was building in the east, the blue turned to indigo. Then it was sharp and cut through us. The wind kicked up dust and bits of paper, kicked up the leaves of autumn, too dry and withered to lie heavy in piles. My wife said she wished she was home with something hot to drink and the light turned down low in the room so that everything would be close and warm. We hurried across the square and along the street under the first part of the bridge that crossed the canal and then onto the canal itself before we were home and climbing the stairs to our apartment. After that it got colder and soon the canal was freezing every night and in the morning there would just be the silence and the ice.

At that time I got up early. I had a morning shift. In fact I did not like getting up so early but neither did my manager so he took advantage of the fact I was a father and sometimes had to pick my son up from school in the afternoons.

I would walk as quietly as I could around the apartment, trying not to make too much noise, only switching on the lights I needed. Generally I spent a couple of minutes in the kitchen, blinking my eyes open, looking down onto the street. The bridge that took the road over the canal would be quiet apart from a solitary motorcyclist or early morning taxi. In the office where the harbour-service worked there would be light escaping from under the blinds and the railings on the steps up to the door would shine and the red and white of the barrier they raised to stop traffic when the bridge was open would also shine and be standing tall and stretched into a sky broken with stars. Sometimes I would think about the men and women sitting there watching out for boats or barges coming in from the harbours. They would be sleepy after working all night and on the table in front of them would be half drunk cups of black coffee and newspapers and they would lean back, their feet on the desk, their shirt sleeves rolled up because the heating was on full. The water in the canal would be white and a little less white through the centre where the patrol boats broke it open every morning so that when it froze again at night it was thinner and did not have that opacity that the thicker ice at the edges had. It would freeze in strange vein-like patterns.

Before I stepped under the shower, I often looked in the mirror over the wash basin into my face and examined it, wondering if it really was my face and realising in fact it was though it was not how people saw it. It was only how I saw it because it was reversed in the mirror. I wondered if it really looked all that different to other people but concluded it must because where one ear always stuck out for me it stuck out the opposite for everyone else. Then I got under the shower, letting the hot water wake me, feeling it run down over my eyes and my face and glad it was hot because it was so early and I knew that outside, that below on the street the temperature was well below zero. I dressed quickly and drank a glass of orange juice. Then I put on a ski jacket I had, fleeced-lined and with a high collar. It was old but I liked it anyhow. My fingers pulled the zip up sharp and I wrapped a scarf around my neck making sure it covered as much of my ears as possible. Then I put on a woolen hat, doubling it over my forehead so that most of my head was covered.

The light in the hallway flicked out quietly and often I stood in the doorway and sensed the quite in the apartment, felt the warmth and thought of my wife and my son sleeping there and wished I could go back. Always I closed the door quietly but firmly and went down the stairs, out onto the street holding my gloves in one hand so I could get the lock on my bicycle open. If it looked really icy I would have to think about walking. That added time and meant I would be late and have to work a little faster and maybe not have time for coffee. Only if I thought it was really dangerous did I do this. Mostly I took the bicycle and cycled down the canal and then around the corner before crossing the square and heading for work. As I cycled I would only be thinking of the coffee machine and setting some coffee on when I got in. If I was early I liked to roll the shutters up and look out onto the street, smoking a cigarette and watching the city come alive.
Around was the darkness of the street and sometimes the smell of bread baking from a bakery. If I was late, I would hear the first trams, hear the rattle and the screech of their metal wheels against the rails. The trees on the squares and along the water were black and shadowed. Occasionally I saw an airplane coming in over the city, heading for the airport, its lights all on, its movement seeming slow, looking in a way like a ship about to reach port. Sometimes I thought of it full of people, people who had no idea I was on my way to work, of all the individual days about to begin below them, their thoughts just fixed on their comfort as the cabin crew readied them for landing. All journeys are like sea voyages even if through air and not over water. It is as if the air is in fact an invisible sea. We make our journeys in some part with deference to those who made the first voyages of discovery. Only in reverse and with one part of us fixed on the simple idea of mobility. We make a journey without a goal. We do it because it is what other people do and motion makes the circle of our lives a little less tight.

As my gloves gripped the handle bars and the bicycle rose over a bridge, the cold would whip against me and my body would tense and with some irony I would wish to be at work.

It was the time we were living in that 3rd floor apartment. I can still see it, the odd way it stood on the corner, the area in front of it where there were bushes and where all the bicycles were parked in a bicycle lock. And the café beside it with its plastic tables. Its overweight owner, his hard face relieved with a large nicotine-stained moustache. A man, it was rumoured who had spent time in prison for running girls on a boat somewhere in the north part of the city.
There are times when I still smell it all. The entrance to the building when in autumn the dry scent of linden leaves blown in at the foot of the stairs whispered of change and death. Or in summer when heat brought the smell of yeast up from the containers of beer in the cellar, making me think of short nights and music and the canals silky at dawn. Then spring with the wind a certain way and rain just passed, the sea drifting over with the oily smell of the ships from the harbours, reminding me of the return of life.
It was that winter I came out of work one day and it was snowing. It was snowing so heavy that the city seemed buried and though the trams were moving, they moved silently. I walked all the way to my son’s kindergarten wheeling my bicycle beside me, my feet and ankles crunching into the soft layers of snow and getting wet. When I got there the door to the playroom was open and most of the other children gone. The room was bright as if there was a light shining somewhere within it and I heard the muffled laugh of a teacher from somewhere and could smell freshly made coffee and opened oranges.
Out on the street, my son walked alongside me, looking with wonder around him. When we got to the apartment, it was nearly dark though it was only about three in the afternoon. I did not turn on the light but instead the TV. There were cartoons and then reports about how it was with the railways, or the city, or about the state of the traffic out on the motorways. The sky was steely-grey and the snow just kept coming down. Outside the world seemed to be coming to a standstill. The world was getting smaller and now was just a speck, a flake drifting through a distant universe. I sat on the couch and did not take my coat off, just opened it and unwrapped my scarf then got a glass of water and drank it slowly. In the living room it was quiet with only the sound of the TV and my son running around. He went to the window and looked out, his small body standing against the low sill, his face pale in the white light coming through the glass. And I wondered where my wife was and thought she was probably in a department store buying some clothes, some new woolen stockings or a hat or maybe drinking coffee with a friend. With the snow falling, the quiteness, the long weeks of coldness, the voice of the TV and then the thought of all those cars on the motorways, their lights yellow and in long lines, I suddenly felt lonely. The way I sometimes felt when I was a child and lying in my bed on a winter’s night with the moon coming through the space where the curtains had not been fully pulled. I felt a loneliness it is difficult to describe. As if it had always been like that and snowing and there had always been the station and the apartment and the ski jacket I was wearing. There had always been this snow and those winter nights. Here was a world enveloped in quietness and I could hear my heart beating, hear my breathing, in it. A dreaminess that was tender and like falling into a bed of deep cotton. Before my eyes there were frozen lakes and white plains and coniferous trees and also a spring day when I was running though a forest. Then, between each fall, each flake coming down was my wife and us sleeping in our bed, the duvet pulled around us, the paleness of her skin and her brown eyes. An early morning and our son coming in, waking us up, his blond hair shining in the first light, his face curious. And the snow fell and fell and I wondered why I did it. Why anyone did it. Continued. Why there were these moments when it seemed I touched some deep sense of aloneness. When the only thing was a naked fire, a spark somewhere way within that kept me going. Out there on the motorways were all those people in their cars now slowed down, their normal speed and mobility suddenly compacted into visible lines. Perhaps the radio was on, or they were sleepy and they were alone behind their wheels. Maybe they were thinking of partners, loved ones or the straight edges of their buildings, the parking lot or grassway in front of those buildings and how it looked each morning. Going through their minds was something small and maybe not obviously significant. A picture that needed fixing, a new hairstyle or the fact that a footstep, a voice calling out ‘I’m home’ was all that was needed. In front of them was only the length of motorway, the motorway signs and the cities on the horizon. And here I was in this room thinking of plains and forests, of bedrooms and the moon. Here I was thinking of my wife and of the warmth of those secret places only a couple know, of the look in a child’s face when it woke in the morning. I was here with this loneliness I could not explain.

The room was quiet. It was white, bleached out and the images from the TV flickered and moved over the wall. Outside the snow fell. It fell on the ice on the canal, on the pavement, on the bridge, on the handlebars of my bicycle. It fell all over the city. I stood and walked to where my son was standing. He looked out, his eyes following the flakes, his face intent and concentrated.

Then I put my hand gently on his head.



Copyright © Peter Millington.

the teacher. (extract The Blue Lotus)

I spoke often with the teacher. When evening came and the light would fall we sat by the hearth in the cabin.
If before I asked thoughtlessly, now I asked with care. The teacher, himself had said the question is more important than the answer.
"Student pay attention to the question," he said. "It is the thought put into the question that solicits the better answer."
I no longer asked him to speak of the Blue Lotus. Instead I asked that he tell of his journeying in the mountains.

Then he would speak of his days when first a wanderer. His eyes would warm and he would tell of the Palace. Of setting off one morning through its great doors. How he sat first before his Master. In a room with walls hung with tapestries of fine worked silk. Where a fountain rose in the courtyard. The sound of its water ever running. His Master sat before him and spoke softly.
"Cherished friend you leave us now. Go wisely. Bring with you all you have learned. Hold fast all you have found in this Palace. The Blue Lotus will always be with you. You carry its mantle. Therefore its words are your words. Live simply, think greatly."
My teacher rose and left. Telling how he walked through the marble hallways. Of the lawns and gardens. The great groves of swaying pine under which he had often sat. That morning he went through the gate, the gate through which all seekers must eventually walk; blue-shining, its glazed tiles sparkling in the sunlight.

Or I would ask him tell of the masters that are said to wander the mountains, that are said to visit the coastal cities or cross the sea. Then he would speak of coming to the Palace, of the prophet that came from the west, of the masters who have lived long, who have bodies that die and yet never die. Masters, it is said, whose bodies are light.
"Those are the Masters, who choose to stay," he would add. "They embody the secret of the Blue Lotus. They are the living breath of the white spring blossom."

In those dark winter nights he asked often of my thinking. Delving into each answer I gave. Some nights I slept, thinking his silence to contain reprimand. For I would feel myself to pour my heart out at his feet. Then he would rise and say he should sleep. I would be left staring into the dying flames of the fire as though an empty vessel.

One night as the flames leaped high and the snow fell thickly he spoke of my reason in searching. Holding me in his gaze, he asked when first I heard of the Blue Lotus, how first I found in me the longing to know its wisdom.
I recounted my meeting with him by the well, my hearing of stories and reports from strangers. Yet he persisted. I recalled my dreams, my love of poetry, the discussions and knowledge of the Vizier's court. He was not satisfied. Then, leaning forward, he struck me gently on the heart. Speaking low, yet with the force of a thousand drums, he said, 'look within'. In my mind I saw myself as though in a dream. I stood in a grove; a boy. The pines of Amrihiza swayed about me. The sun burned in an evening sky. The clouds were violet and gold-lined. Before me stood a messenger. A fiery being of light. I saw that I listened. I heard what I heard. 'You have come to find your wisdom. It is time to journey home. For you have been long without the fold. You must travel east. You have come to understand a great mystery.'
The teacher lifted his hand and I knew I had always been travelling. For in the dream I saw I was both boy and man. The man was of light as was the messenger. I looked into my teacher's eyes and understood that before the boy came the man. The man was the light-body, the soul body of the boy. It was into this body I would grow. Into this body I would flower. The man was the fruit of the tree of the soul.
Indeed I had come to travel. I had come to find my mystery. This messenger had appeared to remind me. He had implanted the seed of my longing within.

That night the teacher explained a secret to me. Such longings are often planted deep in memory. The pointers along a pathway are not of coincidence. It is not a happening that somehow turns the seeker from one pathway to another. In the soul is the seed that looks for its flowering. It is a r woman's or man's own soul that brings them to their pathway. Parading their pathway before them in the form of events that speak to their inner longing. Yet such is the world that many have forgotten their soul. Some confuse it. They mistake the mask for the actor. The actor for the role. And yet others already deny its existence.
My teacher spoke often of the need for strength.
"The way of many is appeasement," he would say. "Yet can one appease darkness? If a man or woman knows a thing to be incorrect should they remain in its presence. If you should see the goal ahead, should you turn from the path upon which you walk. One step away is one step back. A thousand steps away is a thousand steps back. A seeker must learn strength and perseverance. A seeker must learn to consider. Careful consideration is the root of wisdom. A seeker cannot be wise until he or she has learned to consider all before them. To drift is to miss the opportunity for learning. The seeker who does not also consider the wrong path, the way of darkness has not learned to discriminate. This seeker does not recognise and know how to interrogate wrong-doing. For if a false messenger is to come, will it come and claim to be a messenger of dark. No! It will claim to be a messenger of light. It will attempt to weave about it an aura of greatness. Wisdom and careful consideration are needed to separate the true from the false."

Often the teacher set me a test. He would try my will or ask of me some difficult task. He would not answer a question and then observe me plunged into doubt. He would negate all I knew and say to me that learning was of no value.
"Words,"' he would say, "are useless, let us do away with them. Thoughts are of no meaning, let us cease to think." If I protested he would walk from me.

Soon I learned I was expected to refute these sayings. I was expected to search within me for an answer. That I was to use my learning, all he had taught me against him. This he considered correct.
When I would ask him to explain, he would say to me.
"I will not always be here. If you should need to have me as support then you will be tied to me as a child is to its mother. What should you do if challenged and unable to answer. You cannot demand my counsel always. Your pathway is to find your mystery. I will make you ready to be its servant. In this I am your teacher. Yet no teacher is greater than the teaching. The teacher who ferments unnecessary dependence in his students is not a true teacher. The true teacher is but a mouth for the teaching. When you feel the power of your own wisdom within you, then my work is done. When the teaching is as a sun within your body then you will be the instrument of your own shining."

In those winter days I learned endurance. Evenings in the cabin were warm. We sat often by the fire. Yet days we walked in the mountains. There was work to be done.
The teacher tended his goats and sheep. When the snows fell life was harsh for them. If the snows were deep they were unable to find food. Then some died.
Though we had stock-piled wood for the winter, still we gathered brushwood from the forest floor. We walked on the slopes nearby. Looking down upon the lake, its pale sheen, its ice coated edges. I would be wrapped about in the sheepskin coat or one of those worn by the shepherds of the foothills and steppe. On those walks I learned to breath deep and keep my body heat, to endure as the teacher endured.

The teacher showed me the things of the winter. Showed me the beauty of the frosted pattern by the lake's edge. Woke me and bade me rise early to see the mist frozen about the bare branches of the larch and birches on the slopes. I saw too the great power of winter sunset in the mountains. When the thin and frozen air turned the golden disc into crimson fire. Falling through the turquoise as though being swallowed by the mountains themselves. As though the earth upon which we stood was a cave, a womb into which the light sank in order to be reborn. A method through which the sun's great energy fused itself with retreated life.

Copyright (C) Peter Millington 2007

rue de Malte. (extract)

They left her friend at the junction of the Place St Michel and the Rue Danton. Turning from the river they sauntered through the numerous small alleys of the Marais. She felt they were being caught up in the press of bodies. They were like two people set adrift, two people who had lost everything, had only what they stood in. Two people temporarily released from the demarcation of time.

It was like an old movie. The grainy black and white, a war, and the friendship that springs up between a couple, a couple who under different circumstances might never give each other a second glance. Now for these few hours, the artifice of day to day living seemed swept aside.

She was strolling through living theatre. In the strange gestures of a street performer or the movement of a couple, she felt a curtain was being lifted on a scene. A face passed her straight from the deserts of North Africa. Or a body moved by with the grace, the simplicity of the east. She sensed layers of time, of ages packed one on top of the other yet living in front of her. Her footsteps seemed lost in this tide, this stream of animation and energy. With every ebb, every flow of the crowd she was touched by both its ease and its melancholy.

Again she imagined them both moving through it as through the scenes of a movie. War following closely on their heels. Stolen moments of togetherness, of freedom. Yet why war? Why conflict?
Was it that war drove people to simple choices, life or death? Stripped away the accumulation of living, all that is superfluous.
War is the price paid for disregarding the reality of death, of taking love for granted. And there are wars everywhere. If not over politics, religion or land, there are the small wars. The wars in homes, in families, the war between men and women.
As they reached a corner, he stopped. He asked her to come back with him. 'Where he lived was not far,' he explained. She hesitated.
She felt darkness. Not darkness as in the opposite of light, but the darkness sensed in the corners of a Cathedral; the darkness suggested by the flicker of a candle.
He stood looking at her, the features of his face drawn in the street light. Turning her head she caught sight of her reflection in a window.
She saw a woman who for a moment she did not recognise. It was a woman who in her profile, in the longing of her eyes, the turn of her mouth was asking if she had forgotten what life was. A woman always there. The young woman, fresh and eager to taste life. Then the woman she now was - nearing the end of her thirties, matured somewhat, perhaps better able to balance the differing energies that held her.
And there was the old woman. The woman who would one day be a flower that had blossomed beautifully. A woman fading with grace, shedding the trappings of her life the way the petals of the last flowers eventually fall on a lawn as winter approaches.


Now by the window of the hotel room, she thinks of him. She remembers the words he wrote for her, words from a poem. He knew Neruda, but it was Milosz he quoted.

She goes to the bed. The page he tore from the book for her is folded in her bag. It is somewhere between her other papers, her passport, her bank and credit cards.
Her hand slides silently into the bag's blackness. It grasps the piece of paper, pulls it out.

Sitting herself carefully on the edge of the bed she reaches for a small bottle of mineral water on the floor. She slowly unscrews the cap and carefully takes a drink. Then she begins to read. She moves her eyes across the page intently, stopping every now and then to remain on a word or a phrase.
The breeze blows against the curtains, ruffles the room. It is as if the line between inner and outer is weakening. As if, as she finishes, everything seems to fill with a luminosity. The walls begin to dissolve as if there were fire running through them. From beneath her feet, the floor rises to her in waves. A swaying, endless sea. She is grasped by an elusively fierce sensation. As if she were being shook, were being split apart by some force. A force that with a subtle but powerful touch reached right into her very existence. There is a rushing sensation and then quietness. Something opens out within her. Every second, every instant of her life is there. She feels she is surrounded by a light.
It comes to her that people do not fear death as much as they fear living. People do not fear loss as they fear loving. It is the small simple fears that hold you back. Losing yourself in myriad empty dreams.
She thinks of her life. Have there not been times when she has felt completely laid bare? When she has felt exposed the way she would feel if she were made to stand naked in a public place.
Beneath her composure, her coolness, she is often at the mercy of feelings, feelings that just rise up out of some hidden part of her. Feelings of intense sorrow or joy. When she would like to be able to touch the whole world, everything in it from the faces that pass her on a busy street to the tiniest blade of grass in a garden or park.
Even as this desire sweeps over her she is aware that were she able to do so it would not be enough. It would still leave her with a sense of an un-reached world; somewhere she has yet to touch. This world, (and she is never quite sure if she believes it to be outside her or inside her), is a world she feels she once knew. A world she is always trying to get to. A world where her most secret feelings, her deepest longings are met.

Now, sitting on the edge of the bed, the page with the words still in her hand, she would like to run down the narrow stairs of the hotel, to run into the street.
She wants to be sure the pavement is real, the sounds, the smells, the noises of the city are still there.
Not that she doubts their existence, only she feels she has been missing them. For so long they have been there in all their complexity, all their intricacy, all their depth and she has grown complacent. She has forgotten their wonder.

~

She lay there, her eyes open, the silence of the room whispering to her. They did not make love. They simply talked, held each other. Sometimes it is better not to taste every pleasure at once.
Love, she imagines, is a perpetually unwinding thread. It cannot be subjected to will, made obey whims. It cannot be explained in numbers. Uncoiling, stretching out, it finds itself a path, goes where it needs to be. In each of its turns and twists she finds herself and in some additional aspect. For her love is a fire that once lit burns silently and long.
In the darkness, his words came back to her, his kisses, and how she felt the years between them, the difference in their ages, obliterated.
In intimacy, the quietness between them, it was as if they had left their bodies. There was a space around them in which time, gravity played no part. A feeling that she no longer needed to lose herself in activity, that now she could be still, could let herself fall into the emptiness and yet it was not empty. It was full of something that sustained, some energy that had always been there, like coming to a river and realising the river was a river she had always known.


Copyright (C) Peter Millington

a night. (extract)

I bend over my bicycle, struggle to focus on the lock, struggles to get the key to turn.
The water below the bridge, is slow, dark. It washes indolently against the stone canal side. The warm air moves against my skin, over my neck. Pulling my light raincoat over my shoulders, I get up onto the seat. I grip the handlebars and begin to cycle, begin to cross the deserted main street.

The buildings around me are impassive, the shop fronts darkened. Slowly pushing the pedals, I move along the bicycle lane.
A police car drives lazily past, its white and blue keeping to the raised centre of street where the tram-tracks are.

My eyes gaze up into the sky. It is a clear night. I do not yet feel like going home. In a way I do not want the night to end, the morning to come.
To my left, where the old palace stands, is a three-quarter moon.
Sometimes the moon seems cold, to be made of chalk, to be just a still, white disc hanging. In the winter, it can make the city seem colder and closer, its pale rays catching faces as if suggesting some time past, some memory not quite forgotten.
Now it is the middle of June. It is florid and creamy. In the warm Spring night, it blends with the city air, with perfume, the remaining aromas from now closed restaurants, the faint smell of car fumes, pollen.
I turn left and pass the Nieuwekerk. The yellow traffic lights flash on and off. Cutting to my right, I cross onto one of the main canals. Following it, I take in its rise and fall, whistling to myself.
The trees are heavy, their leaves full under the arc of the streetlamps. The vibration of the bicycle as it moves over the surface of the canal side passes up into my arms through the handlebars.
I am about to cross the bridge near the station, to go to my left when I realise this will bring me home quicker. For a moment I stop, putting my foot down on the hard ground, steadying myself and thinking. My head still feels a little light.
I decide to go straight on, to cross behind the station, to cycle along the old unused harbour area.
Coasting under the rail bridge, there is a hiss as a solitary post-train rattles above.
The open space with its water appears in front of me. The wooden piers, the rise of the pass behind the station and the moon shining on the silky surface hold my vision.
This way I can still get home, this way I can get around to where I live by another route.

~

Their footsteps echo in the empty street. He carries her guitar. Leaning against him, she links her arm tightly through his and yawns.
"Sleepy, eh?" he says.
"Yes," she replies.
They come to the door. It seems small, old. Putting the guitar down, he searches in his pocket for the key. She folds her arms across her chest, yawns again. There is the sound of the metal turning in the lock, the rasp of the hinges as the wooden door swings open.
"Come on," he whispers, "we're home."
They climb the stairs. There is that familiar smell, that dry, musty odour in the air. She hears the creak, hears him knock her guitar off the wall.
"Who would have thought you could build something so narrow," she says.
He opens the door of their flat. His arm stretches into the darkness, his hand fumbles for the switch, and suddenly there is a glow and light like an orange sphere hangs over the centre of the living room. Something brushes against her ear, buzzes past her.
"Dammed mosquitoes," she murmurs.
"What,"
"Nothing, it was just a mosquito I think."
He walks to the window. The curtains are blowing gently against the back of the sofa. Pulling them over, he turns as she falls into a chair.
"I'm going to get a glass of water. Do you want one?" he asks.
"Yes please. I'm feeling a little dried out."
The bright fluorescent floods the tiny kitchen. The tap opens, echoes in the steel sink and the water gushes around and into the cylindrical glass.

~

I have left my bicycle lying somewhere behind me. Carefully stepping over the rough ground, I go down to where the grass falls away into a broken wall, to where it disappears into the water.
Muttering that my coat will probably get dirty, that tomorrow I will probably look at it and wonder how it got like that, but that now I do not care, I come to a stop.
The water breaks against the old pier. My eyes fall on the dim wooden shapes, the rotting supports that once must have been a docking area.
To my right, in the distance, are lights, the lights of buildings, the lights of the harbours, the lights of ships.
It seems I can hear a hum, hear the low, almost soothing murmur of distant activity.
I imagine being inside one of those ships, the oily smell, the narrow passageways, the metal railings, the thin steel steps, the excitement of a journey about to be made.

It fills my mind. The sea and how it is, how it knows no boundaries, how it has fed this city, how it is what this city is built around. The tides coming in, swelling, rising and then ebbing, falling away.
For a moment I am there, I am standing on a deck, watching the ropes being cast off, the rusty scrape of a side as it leaves the quay, the surge of an engine, the water churning at stern.
I imagine the next port of call, some faraway place, somewhere where I have never been. The journey, the roll and the sway, the change in appearance, the skin weathering as the ship navigates the ocean's curve.
I gaze up at the sky, at the moon.
It is higher and paler. To my right, to the east, the sky is a lightening, as if the night is beginning to melt away. Dawn is creeping up over the city.
Suddenly I feel tired, realises it must be nearly five or after.
Letting go, dropping to the ground, I lie back on the coarse grass. It is damp. It is cool against the back of my head.
I pull a near empty pack of cigarettes from my pocket. I take out the matches she gave me and light one. The smoke rises in grey and blue clouds.
I do not want to think about it, do not want to think tomorrow is nearly here, soon it will be the day after, then she will be back, then the tension will increase, and there will still have to be an answer.
`Choices', I murmur to myself, `and if I were coming back from a voyage, if I were sailing up past these harbours, into this city, would I see my own life as if it did not belong to me, but to someone else? Would I see the choices I have made, and see that there were choices I should have made, choices I should not have made? Would I see my life any clearer, or would I be caught in another life, held by its current, driven by its needs?'
I put the cigarette to my mouth and watch the end glow.
Tomorrow I will remember this, will wonder what made me do it, will feel tired, my head will ache, and I will be irritated for being foolish, for acting out of character.
Yet as I lie there, I hear the pull of her songs, see her in front of the crowd, her fingers finding the chords, the supple switch from one to the other. The bass strings counterpoint the melody, the soft tap of her foot keeps rhythm on the simple, wooden stage, and her voice gently caresses the ears of those who are listening.

Maybe it was not such a strange thing to do. Perhaps she will be playing there again sometime, and I will be passing, and then I will stop and listen to her sing, listen to her songs as she pitches them to that spot somewhere just above the centre of the audience, listen to her find the blues run, the sweet, jazzy sound like the pull of the sea, the sound that kept me standing there.


Copyright (C) Peter Millington 2007

fire above wood, wind.

I press on. The thickness of the forest encloses me. I feel insulated. Now and then I stop to pluck a blackberry from a bramble. Burrs cling to my clothes. Branches spring across my body and face.
Here one is never far from the sea. Even in this forest, behind these mountains, on the shores of this lake, it can be sensed.
Weather changing over oceans. Storms that batter the land in winter. The rocky headlands and sandy dunes; the clumps of stiff sharp grass.

So much time has passed. When I was last in the city it had changed. It had grown. It had been rebuilt and repaired. The damage of the war was covered over in a veneer of modernity. In places it was unrecognisable.

My old life has passed away. My connections have changed. I have shed one skin for another. One life for another. Again I have taken refuge in the mountains. I have retreated into the heart of the forest. Now I live on the northern shore of the lake.

I walk alone. Yet she is with me. I have seen her. I have been with her.
I came to her in front of an old church. In a distant city. Rain fell around us. There was a clinging mist. We knew at once.
She was finely dressed. She stood on the cobblestones of an old quarter. Her life was of elegance, of luxury. 'Yet,' she said to me that evening, 'I am locked in grandeur.'
We walked to her avenue apartment. It overlooked long gardens. The trees all neatly trimmed and in a line. In front of a palace of past royalty. From her bedroom I heard the sound of traffic. It slunk by like an endless procession of mourners.
I took her hand. I caressed her face. Feeling it blindly as though my fingers were eyes. As though her bones, her skin were pages in which were written our past. Age had not come to claim us. We were as young as when we first met. We were as old as the panoply of lives between us.
Again I wanted to see her cotton dress over the back of the chair. I wanted to see her boots on the floor. Once again I wish to sit quietly by the river; to watch it flow over the stones as the silence enveloped us.
We had held each other. I felt the warmth of her breath on my neck. She listened as I whispered in her ear.

I stood by the window, looking to the street below. I watched the figures move over the pavement. I saw the taxis pulling up in front of doorways and hotels. There were buses, cars, youthful faces on motorbikes. The sky turned from rain-grey to orange and blue.

We ate in an old room. It had a high ceiling and long table. The chef brought the dish himself. A silver bowl full of a delicate stew. He set it at the centre of the table. It gleamed in the warm candle light. He asked us to appreciate it. A rich sauce with herbs and the meat of many fish. She opened a bottle of vintage wine. We drank a toast. To time. To its passing, its trajectory. A fire burned in a large hearth at the end of the room. The smell of wood and smoke mixed with the food, the warmth, the kiss of the wine in our throats. A clock ticked reassuringly in the background.

Then we walked on the boulevard. Alive with the night. It was a sea of bodies. Cafés were full and noisy. The hum of metros came from below ground. Light fell in shafts over all. Bright, untouchable, continually moving. At the river we crossed a wide stone bridge. A castle, a prison, rose on the far bank. The sky above us became lost in the glow from the streets. It obscured the blackness of the night. And we went down the steps to the rivers edge. We strolled under the lights of the walkways, strolled along the bank, our bodies reflected on the ripples of the water. The stone, old, smoothed by uncountable feet, felt firm beneath us. We stood under the bridge and watched the moon's glow break and reform.

And the feeling of many lives rose in me again. I felt our souls mix in the run of all our time together. But she put her finger over my mouth and stopped me. Her eyes met mine, held my gaze, and did not look away. The traffic crawled over the bridge above. The water from a passing boat broke and lapped against the stone sides of the river's edge.
I had to accept. I read it in her eyes. This was not the time.
The words that leaped to my lips were held there, unsaid. She looked at me and walked further up the pathway. We would meet later, tomorrow, some other time. Maybe we would wait for another life.

The cool look of her avenue apartment came back at me. Its rococo facade. The great iron gates were silent. I stood and stared as the city rested. I left in the silently spreading dawn.

I found her yet lost her. Parallel lives, time out of synchronisation. Somewhere we crossed over, somewhere we stood in the wrong place and made the wrong connection. Somewhere the time, the date, the arrangement was misunderstood. Two universes side by side, two nuclei spinning in different directions. Night and day. North and south; a breach in the confluence of worlds.

I retreat again to my forest. I have the cabin we once shared. I love the creak of the wooden floor beneath my feet. As before I have sought silence. I produce little work. I prefer to think and contemplate. It as if the inactivity has become a purification, a cleaning out of restlessness, of all the confusion of past lives. The brushes sit by the palette before the window. The canvas is stretched, the paper waiting to be marked.
I still think of her. She is never far from my mind. I still await word saying I should come. It does not. Occasionally there is a message in the small post-office of the village nearby. It always contains some oblique observation, a riddle. I take it greedily and tear it open. I puzzle over it for days. I turn it back and forth in my mind. I have never come to any firm conclusion.
Perhaps she works subtly, changing my perceptions, ideas, without me being acutely aware. Perhaps she is like the wave wearing stone into sand. Perhaps she washes over me as a sea, the ebb and flow of her tides gradually changing me.

They are good to me in the village. I eat there occasionally, work there if I need money. Sometimes when the moon is full and I long for company I drink with the poor, the sad and world weary.
Maybe I shall age here. Perhaps the rest of my life will be spent here. Waiting on her word. Waiting to return to her, to that city, to the wide boulevard, the high apartment.

In my mind I stand in front of the old church and the rain falls silently and continually down. The fish stew is not yet eaten, the vintage wine not yet drunk. The night is still alive, still waiting to be crossed.



Copyright (C) Peter Millington 2006

zaandvoort.

It is a blustery afternoon near the end of October. The beach is almost deserted.

Above the sea, wisps of clouds are scattered in the sky. They catch its colour, like intensities of space, concentrations of light. Over the sea the sun hangs, bright and golden. Its glare darkens the water, highlighting the foam of the waves. The breeze blows, pulling at my hair, my face, grabbing the ends of my raincoat.

She comes down the stairs of the apartment. The light in the entrance is refracted, splays out in lozenge like shapes along the wall. There is a quiteness there and she is aware of it as of a long silence, a question waiting to be answered.

I am walking. I feel an unusual sense of motion, of time contracted. It is similar to the way in which a film jumps across experience. The way in it alters the real not to make it unreal but to heighten its reality, to render it hyperreal.
Small gestures take on a significance, amplify and expand. With each step I feel as though my feet sink into the sand only to be pulled out again, to be forced forward into other steps. Each call of a gull or flutter of a flag from the promenade, strikes my ears as if snatched from its source. I almost feel each grasped sound reverberating within me.

She steps out onto the street and pulls her coat around her, her hat down over her eyes. The sun fractures through the branches of a tree. It comes back off the black frames of the bicycles chained to the railing.

Along the edge of the sea is driftwood. It is twisted into arbitrary shapes and novel forms. Rough and smooth.
Waves pound slowly and heavily, foam rushing in long sheet-like movements up the strand.
The repetition wears down all resistance. It pulls the sand of the seabed up into eddies, into swirling patterns before depositing it again, changed. With every rush, the endless rhythm bears down on me, stretches my defences and moves in uncompromisingly.

Under the rail bridge the pavement is dark. It leads onto the square. The wind sweeps across the open space. Sometimes there are old Turkish or North African men playing chess under the trees. Wrapped in long coats, they sit patiently, talking at length between each move, their lined faces serious.
She likes to see them. There is something reassuring about them. Their feet in sandals and their hands fingering prayer beads.

Only one thing goes through my mind. Is everything I have built to this point, every centimetre of the pathway I have beaten here, disappearing?
Am I approaching a core? Is my life about to reach some watershed?
How many times before have I walked this stretch of strand, how many times passed the hours of an afternoon while the years were silently building up, sneaking their irretrievability past me? Moments never to be recovered from time, from the ceaseless flow of life.

She comes to a junction where the street cuts right along a canal. Above her head a clock shows it to be mid afternoon. The houseboats rock in their berths and windows are tightly shut. A man with a black and white dog rounds the corner and stares at her. She walks on.

I have come here many times with my children, my son and daughter. I think of how they play, stepping in and out of the water, their eyes open and eager to learn. That trusting expression of children, no polish, no defence. Their backs to me and the sunlight flaring like copper across the sea's surface.
I have watched them grow and change, watched their steps become surer, their words and actions gain weight, confidence. And all the time the years have been moving past.
I still see my son bent intently over something, a shell, a strangely shaped stone, his blonde hair falling in front of him. Then calling out in happiness, turning and running back to where we stand. Or my daughter sitting, her knees pulled up in front of her, her cheeks flushed red from running, the line of freckles across her nose. She is eating an ice-cream.

She takes the canal. The wind pulls at the trees, making them sway and creak, scattering leaves in bursts of yellow and brown.
The water moves and throws up its reflections in bronze or gold, shimmers off the inside of bridges. A shutter rattles or a tarpaulin from a terrace snaps. And eddies of dust swirl up and cause her to squint, to pull her scarf over her mouth.

For hours I have walked up and down. The wind has blown stronger and stronger along the seafront, pulled harder and harder. Earlier the sun was so bright, the late autumn light on the sand and sea so acute I needed sunglasses. My eyes hidden, I felt relieved, briefly, of my identity. As if the emotion to be read in my face was somehow deflected, diverted. And in the deflection there was escape.

The city is peculiarly empty. Trams pass as if in another world and the gables of houses stretch up into the sky, their stonework or spire the only thing that does not move as wisps of cloud race by.
She is on her way to the park to meet their son and daughter. They will be waiting for her in the café after skating. Perhaps they will all sit and drink some hot chocolate, eat some apple cake.

I have pushed my hands deeper into my pockets, changed the pace of my steps from slow to fast to slow again. At times I have stood simply by the water's edge and watched the waves break and break.
It seems in every quiver, every pulse of my body, every rise, fall of my breath, every thump of my heart in my chest, the sea is there.
Its sway is the very movement of my life itself, its incessant rhythm permeating all I do. As though I were really deep within it, were actually part of it, only imagined I had ever stepped out of it.

She wonders where he is. What he is doing. He has not been home for some days. The curtain in the living room has not been open. It is draped against the window, only a chink showing the street, the railings of the balcony.
It is only in the kitchen she looks out onto the world. The backs of other apartments, balconies, the dried flowers in a tall vase by the window.

The light intensifies and the sun burns its fire over the sea. The sky, earlier white, pale, deepens its blue. In the late afternoon light, the water moves with the sky, forms a line where they meet and then in a haze are gone.
Along the seafront the summer kiosks are closed and the promenade nearly deserted.
I stop before turning, before walking to the street that leads to the station. The air is colder, damper.
My footsteps, their curious crackling in the light layer of sand coating the pavement, sound in my ears.
There is a sense of a break, a moment when I feel as if I were being stretched, being pulled over a fissure.

Her son and daughter are standing in front of the café. They have their skates slung over their shoulders. The grass along the gravel looks vivid under the half-naked trees.
A cyclist goes by in a blur. And she bites her lip.

Searching in my pocket for change, my hand impatiently sorting through keys, crumpled papers, I look around. Its green paintwork shines.
Walking quickly, I pull the door closed after me. Inside is the burning fluorescent of all telephone cells, the metallic opaqueness of efficiency.
Then I am dialing the number, wanting, waiting to speak to her.
I leave a message saying I am coming home, asking her to be there for me.

~

Will we once again uncover each other, close down the spaces of their relationship by making every curve, every reflex, every pleasure of our bodies, an answer?

When she wakes in the night, looks at him lying in the light of the moon, she wonders what it is he is searching for. Wonders what they are both searching for. Why sometimes she feels the certainty they wish for evades them.
And for a moment their children cross her mind and she thinks she senses the sea. That the sea is whispering to her. As she sinks back into the arms of the night, puts her head to the pillow, it rolls and breaks, runs up the beach, leaving its mark in her like the foam in the sand with a long sigh.



Copyright (C) Peter Millington. London.

fire over lake.

We took to the mountains. A group of us. We became partisans. These were the same mountains I had come over many lives ago. They were to be a barrier, a line of defence. Now they would be a hiding place. They would be hostile terrain; a place difficult for the enemy.

She stayed in the city. She wished to be with her family. They needed her. Difficult times lay ahead.

I missed her and felt guilty. I felt I should have seen it coming. There were warnings enough. The newspapers were full of the war each day. We were as blind as we wanted to be. We were deaf in that we blocked our own ears. The question haunted all of us. Could we have avoided it?. Did it matter that we chose to ignore the signs?. Were the events in their own way inevitable?.

In the years before they marched in we had become lazy, indolent. We forgot our dreams, our beliefs. We forsook our hopes. We grew old on the land, soft in our rocky coastal home. The town was a city. It traded in steel, in coal. It had grown into a renowned port. The once small harbour was full of large ships, ships that sailed half-way around the world. We had developed. We grew and fell into a pattern. We took for granted our security, its familiarity. We became self-satisfied and did not notice the decline.

In those years I ceased to look with wonder at the world around me. I no longer noticed the blooming of the wild flowers along the shore. I no longer walked carelessly through the woods, listening, aware of the great dream of life around me. I grew stiff and retarded. My mind was only able to grasp at possibilities that were commonplace. I sat for day in rooms counting trading invoices. I spent days on the docks, watching the swing of cranes, loading and unloading cargo. I was a young man yet I felt old. And it was not an age of wisdom. Rather it was the bitter age of those who live without living. Those who do not give something of themselves.
I walked home each evening tired; tired in a way I hardly understood. Climbing the steep streets, walking under balconies, hearing the sound of families eating together, children playing, I often felt lonely. Yet I told myself it was loneliness with a purpose. I could climb above the poverty, the lowness of these back-streets. I would build a fine house and live like a king. I would become a great trading magnates. A dream that had come to symbolise the aspirations of our city. My old life had no place in this new world.

In the mountains it was different. We moved by night and slept by day. Contact with the enemy was frequent. It was always without mercy. We were mostly desperate, hungry, on the run. Our original group was quickly depleted. Arrest often meant instant execution; your body left where it fell. Betrayal was a constant threat. Our missions involved sabotage, and disruption. The cities were under curfew each night. We operated in twos and threes, working as fast and efficiently as we could.
I was a radio operator. I became an animal, my instincts reacting to every bleep and crackle of a transmitter. I was responsible for co-ordination and maintaining contact with the outside world. We had allies in other countries. We had contact with resistance groups in other occupied areas. I was nearly caught many times.
There was no question of heroism in what we did. I often felt only fear; or hatred. They were the twin motors that drove me. When I slept I brought only a cold empty hollow with me.
My bed was the pine needles of the forest floor, the stone of a mountain cave. We lived on what we could. Vegetables, cheese, milk, meat occasionally, all provided by farmers and peasants. Camaraderie was minimal and often accompanied by the ghost of an uncertain future, a future that at any moment could end. Occasionally we would get a couple of bottles of wine and sit around a fire swapping stories, memories, of those left behind.
The mountains I had almost forgotten became my home. The mountains I once crossed to find refuge, became my only refuge. I learnt to value and respect them, to live from them, appreciate their unique character. I became a mountain goat, nimbly, but unceasingly making my way among them, knowing their every mood, their every possibility.

They once again drew a line between me and danger. Between a vanishing past and an uncertain future.
They sustained me for nearly two years.

Copyright (C) Peter Millington

the office worker.

It was the time she went away. Regularly I would come home late at night. Often I would have drunk too much and walked along empty streets, lost myself among empty office blocks, asking where she was, trying to focus on things around me and not really worried I could not. I knew the route well. From Bloomsbury, past the Royal Exchange to Liverpool Street.

When I looked up those nights the sky would seem closer and if it was a clear night I would look at the stars and feel I had always been looking at the stars and really in my life the stars had never yet revealed anything. The only thing I was sure off was once I looked at them differently, once I had felt they were telling me something. Once the endlessness and mystery of space was somehow reassuring. But then they appeared cold and static. They said nothing except it was night and it was dark, there was only space and it has always been like that. The only things moving are the satellites with their decaying paths.

When I felt empty, the fact she was not there was like a dull, heavy pain inside, a pain I could not shrug off but could only numb. It was those nights I would drink. Perhaps sitting by myself with a cold beer, lighting a cigarette and then drinking another cold beer until eventually I would reach the point where the pain subsided and I would feel better and then at least could admit to myself how much I missed her. That she was not there would become all tangled up with the alcohol, the cigarettes, the way I would have to search around in the pocket of my rain coat for a lighter or another crumpled note to pay.

Sometimes I would talk to strangers. Striking up arbitrary conversations. Mostly I only wanted to hear someone speak, to fill up the emptiness with words. The words of a stranger were like padding in my head, kept my mind from wandering back to her and the fact I did not relish the empty house, the train journey home through deserted stations. Somehow a stranger's words broke the silence around me and would follow me along the rails, under the power lines, past the empty, litter-strewn platforms.

It was those nights I would welcome the fact the light was out on the stairs. I would get into bed and lie there, my head spinning, staring into the ceiling until I would start to hurt again. Then I would turn, bury my head in the pillow and close my eyes on the world, searching out the space inside. I would feel her there but because I had been drinking I would not care I was only imagining running my hands through her hair, that I could feel her arms around me, her fingers in my back, her breath warm against my face and smell her, touch her. Then I would imagine asking where she had been, saying I missed her and did she not know I loved her, how much I loved her. But it would not matter because I would be tired and about to drift off to sleep and because in those moments before I drifted off to sleep it was as if there was only warmth and blackness ahead so I would forget there would be the dawn. I would forget how often the light would be cold and grey, would be raw and my throat would hurt from having smoked too many cigarettes and my head would ache and in my chest would be this tight feeling, this clenched-up fist where my heart was because I knew I was alone.

It was those mornings I would have to pull myself from bed, push myself toward the shower. Then I would stand trying to wake myself beneath the warm jets of water as morning light broke through the window. There would not be a sound except the turning of taps, the hum of the electric razor stubbornly missing those hairs it always missed before the splash of cold water in my face and the increasingly anxious look at my watch. The morning twist was sometimes the harshest. I would step onto the pavement and if the sun was coming up it would sting my eyes and I would feel it was mocking me.

It was the time she left. The time before I got used to it. Before I realised she may never come back and then I just felt nothing and felt nothing for a long time. For a long time I just walked about and did what I had to do, as if waiting for something to fall.

It was then I would go down to the river and stand over it and watch the water flow and wonder why it flowed so fast and get dizzy from watching it flow fast. I would feel I was falling, falling down into it.
Then I would turn and go back up the street and maybe sit in the small park with the leaves coming out for spring and the pigeons cooing under benches. They would coo and I would notice the dirt up along the sides of buildings, the streaked grey of stone walls and maybe a broken window. I would open a newspaper or fold my arms and shiver a little, my eyes following all the passing faces.

It was the time before the cherry blossoms fell and the trees were full and blowing and one day I found myself on a street corner. There was traffic racing past. The street came up from the river crossing a circus and in the distance was an overpass.

I thought this is the way it is. Things are like this. There are people and buildings and traffic and cities. And there is love. Love is something squeezed into all the corners. Squeezed between the buildings, the city, the people. Sometimes it escapes, catches you unawares and then goes right past, shoots off into the distance. Around you the noise hammers on and you become fixed, learn to keep your eyes focused on that something ahead and go on.


Copyright (C) Peter Millington.

Short Stories

water over wood.

It was long ago. In another life. I came upon it as if by accident. I was thirsty. The dust from the road stung my eyes. There was a dry parched feeling in my throat. I had been travelling for weeks. My boots were broken, my feet burned, my head swam. My lips were swollen, cracked and my voice weak.

I had come from the plains and across the mountains. I noticed the change only slowly. The cultivated fields giving way to wilder landscape. Then the winding pathways with sheer drops either side. By day the sunlight was bright, at night it was hollow and cold. The coast was still ahead of me. I knew it lay just beyond the mountains. I believed I would be safe there. It would be a refuge.

They were bitter days. Days when hand rose against hand. I first saw the fighting in the cities. Hatred. Hysteria. The carnival becoming a feast of killing, of death. The banners, the royal golds and purples were replaced with simple black, white, the red of blood. It drove the crowds on. I saw death itself dancing over the corpses in the streets. I smelt the stench of decay, of the rotting flesh.

It was learning they first attacked. Reason thrown aside, the fruits of the mind torn in two. Books, documents, manuscripts were burned. Bonfires, piled high with paper, flamed up into the night. Paintings were torn from walls, from churches and palaces. Beauty trampled under the feet of an angry mob. And ash, thick like a rain, fell over streets.

I was attacked by a crowd while walking one evening. An evening when the light of sunset was dimmed by the glow of bonfire. The insults, the taunts, the venom were directed against those who did not take part. I was afraid. I was concerned I had been marked, had been followed to my studio. Among the pigments, the paints, there would have been no denying the evidence of where I stood. I only narrowly escaped, turning, when the crowd, distracted by the sound of horse's hooves from a nearby square halted, and I fled quickly down a dark winding alley.

I decided that night I must leave and determined immediately to find the mountains, to cross the border at all costs.
It was painful to go. In my small studio I had spent many evenings working, the brushes gliding over the rough canvas. I could not say I had known the patronage of the court, or of the wealthy, but I had lived, prospered in my own simple way.
I took little with me. A book of poems, paper to write on, some food, and the clothes I stood in. I counted on travelling inconspicuously.

I left the city before dawn, heading south-west. It meant I would travel with the sun at my back. It was the dry season. Cicadas could be heard from the roadside. Birds still dared sing in the trees. The grass was dry and yellow. There were oranges ripening in the groves. I hoped for the generosity of wayside farms, small villages, that the peasants would not have lost their principle of hospitality. I reckoned the journey to take eight days.
When I had reached it I had been three weeks on the road. I looked through my swollen eyes and it had seemed like a dream. I thought it must be something sent to torture my fevered senses. Bit it was real.
A girl standing by a well, a town in the background. When she offered me the water, I fell on the ground in a stupor. I could have eaten the dust with gratitude. I heard her words, sweet, and foreign. They fell on my ears like music. I had crossed the mountains. I had crossed the border.

A river ran through the small town centre. It split lazily in two before rejoining and flowing on to meet the sea. People crowded around me. I was a stranger. Someone was found who could speak my language. I explained where I had come from, why I had come. I learned I was not the first refugee; and nor would I be the last.

I stayed there months. Resting in the cool of a small room. Stone walls and the breeze from the sea blowing in at night. The girl would sometimes come to me, shyly, offering me a bowl of water. I would look at her. She would look away. Her face was tender yet knowing. She had dark eyes and long rich hair. I wanted to touch her. I wanted to thank her. It was there I dreamed. There I woke sweating one night, frightened, confused.

I dreamed I saw the country I knew ringed by a great grey wall. It was made of a metallic substance, something I had never seen before. The surface was smooth and shiny, cool to touch. Within it, the once rich lands, the wooded hillsides, the husbanded fields were dying. They were coated in ash. In the cities the walls of buildings were faded. They were fragile to touch. They could be scraped at with little effort. The fabric of life itself appeared only to be held together with the barest of threads. And nothing bled. Faces had a ghostly pallor. This was only a shadow of life, a shadow of living. It was there in eyes. Eyes, contracted, frightened, unable to respond.
I moved through this in confusion, able only to look, to observe.
I came to a river. It was stagnant. Its water lay motionless. It appeared familiar, yet not quite recognisable. Great pipes, like tentacles, stretched up from it to houses. Some were on stilts. Others it appeared were stacked one on top of the other. A silence, a peculiar fearful silence was everywhere. I felt if I raised my voice loud enough, shouted, everything around me, would have fallen, crumbled to dust. I would have brought everything down. Only, I could not shout. And I knew the wall would have remained. I would have destroyed only what lay within it, but not it.
Its strangeness, its unknown quality was what confused, what frightened. It seemed impenetrable. Immovable. I beaten my fists against it, but they only bled. I knelt down in front of it and cried.
Then I woke with the same tears in my eyes, the same tears running down my face.

I stayed in that town until I was sufficiently strong, sufficiently recovered. Then I moved further down the coast. I went back sometimes to visit. Occasionally on market day there would be the thunder of horse's hooves and a messenger would appear bringing news of where I had come from. In those moments, I would feel sadness, some longing for the home I had once known. Yet later, as I headed back up the coast it would pass.
I built myself a small house overlooking the sea. I took the girl to live with me. And once again I put my, as then yet unsteady hand, to canvas. Once again the brushes moved, dipped into a palette, rich in colour. The colours of the sea mixing with those of the land, those of the coastline. Blues, greens, browns, reds, yellows. Our bodies, their shadows falling on the wooden table in the flickering candle-light.
I prepared to let the images burning on my dream-haunted mind mark the space, run wild from out of my mind, into whatever future awaited me. They started with the well and the girl.



Copyright (C) Peter Millington

hradcanska.

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.

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 (C) Peter Millington

earth above mountain.

To learn to become smaller in order to become bigger. To learn to walk slower in order to run faster. To learn to decrease in order to increase. To learn to fill one's mouth with stones in order to be heard clearer. To lie down in order to stand up.

Many nights I watch the moon. I watch it change its character. Its grows, it declines. Its silvery rays fall on the pathway outside the back door. This is the forest around us.

She sleeps beside me. Her shoulder is bare. Her hair lies loosely on the pillow. She is quiet, at peace. When she looks at me her eyes contain knowledge not spoken. She no longer runs to me with water. She is free.

The night is gentle. There is a full September moon. I hear an owl from somewhere. The rustle of branches. Or perhaps a fox in the undergrowth. It is warm. The leaves shine in the moonlight.

Sometimes we walk under the trees. Sometimes we sit by the river. We have little need of words. We watch the water run over the stones, push its way through the forest. We sit there, arm against arm. A piece of long grass between my teeth.

I think of her cotton dress over the back of the chair. Her boots on the floor. Then the aeoliated tangle of our bodies. The sweetness of her mouth, her skin. The beating of my heart. Full. Hers. Full.

The creak of the old bed. Warmth. Silence returning. Sleep. Only the sounds of the forest remaining. The moon. The dew at dawn. The stain of the night fading away.

Copyright (C) Peter Millington

le bois.

I tell her when I was a child there was a woman in the apartment next to where I lived. She played the piano. Often, she would practice and particularly on a winter's afternoon, I loved to hear the silver notes hang in the muffled air between the walls. They seemed to tinkle, to turn around on themselves, to call out quietly of some sort of sadness, some sort of longing.

Every summer we would leave the city, would go with the family to a little house we owned on the coast.

I loved to wander off alone, to find the fields behind the house, walk as far as I could into them, stop, look up and spin. Stretching my arms out, I would turn and turn and turn until I would fall. Then I would lie there, watching the sky move about me, watching it swim before my eyes, imagining I could sense the beat of the wings of birds high above me, the stiff grass of the dunes along the strand, smell the glassy sea.

She smiles. Her arm slips through mine. The branches cross our path, the bushes to our side become, thicker. Here, the path is not so beaten away, the undergrowth not so broken.
Suddenly I say to her, 'run'. I hear her ask what I am doing, but I have already broken away.
My feet, awkward at first, move quickly over the ground. The dry, brittle branches snap against my body, their tips brushing and stinging my face. I run, not caring, not knowing why. My breath is sharp in my throat, comes in gasps, and in my chest, my heart begins to thump. The blood presses against my forehead. Behind me somewhere, I hear her footsteps, her voice shouting to me to slow down.

Except for the sound of us crashing through the branches, the occasional call of a bird, there is nothing, only quietness. Then I stop, stop and look up, put my hands into the air.
It has begun to snow in large, soft, twirling flakes. It falls down around me, floats through the heavy sky, seems to arrive, to form unexpectedly out of the greyness, out of the quietness.
It lands on my face, like some energy appearing and evading the network of spindly trees, the tangle of wood, the occasional leaf.
Then I start to spin around, to spin the way I would when I was a child. I move my feet over the rough, cold ground. The sky and the tops of the trees form a circle. Faster and faster, I go. Somewhere inside my head, a voice is saying that I will fall; I do not care.
I spin and spin until I find myself lying on the floor of the wood. Delicately formed snowflakes fall next to me. The dead leaves, the leaves that have not yet rotted into the earth, smell bitter, smell sharp. Against my face, is the firmness, the trueness of the ground; the stillness is complete, the silence, complete.

I am listening, but there is nothing. It is as if there is another level of sound, a level of hearing that has always been there, a level, recovered.
Then she reaches me, comes up beside me. Her cheeks flushed, her hair loose and falling across her eyes. She is gasping, is completely out of breath.
I turn over on my back and begin to smile. She drops down on her knees beside me.

We both begin to laugh in deep, breathless laughs. We lie laughing in this hushed world, the sound of our laughter running up into the white, thickening air, into the snow silently and softly descending around us."

Copyright (C) Peter Millington

elephant and castle. (extract)



When I open the door the room smells stale. There is a metallic, green light falling into the hallway in shafts, rainy and wintry. The walls are cold.

I move in quietly, trying not to make a sound. Something inside me says he might be here, he may have doubled back. He could be behind a door or waiting the other side of a wall a blunt instrument ready. Or that small revolver he carries with him.

It was co-incidence I saw him. Stepping off the Underground train onto the platform and among all those people. His back was unmistakable. Its scrawny shoulders and that tight hair cut and the way he walked, as if defiantly striding somewhere. Forceful but a walk that had something not quiet true to it. I thought he glimpsed me, because he turned and seemed to be looking through the crowd, around the faces of sleepy commuters or unknowing faces and I was not sure if he quickened his pace then. Either way I began to walk that little faster, bumping into a girl in front of me, almost knocking a bunch of red carnations from her arms. And it seemed he disappeared faster and then was around the corner and I knew he must be on the short stairs and heading for the lift. It was then I broke into a light run, feeling an increasing anxiety, sweat coming out on my brow. Suddenly I was aware, if I was on my way to see her, then he could be too and those threats he had once made to me in a doorway, on a freezing cold night backed up against a wall in St Petersburg could be true. There was no reason to believe he would not carry them out. I had learned since he was capable of many things and that his was a mind that worked only on ends, on strategy and accomplishment and that he was capable of making the most calculating of decisions.

Then I was taking the steps two at a time. I came around onto the lift and elbowed my way through the waiting crowd, my raincoat open, my eyes now frantically scanning every face ahead of me until they met his eyes, grey and inscrutable, angry. The set forehead, the nose short and the straight line of his mouth. He was already in the lift, locked in closely among the bodies and backs of heads. Then he gave one of those wry smiles, his almost milk teeth dull in the underground light and lifted his hand in a half gesture of recognition before the doors were beeping and shutting over with sinking solidity. "Damm it" I shouted, "damm it - damm this" and turned, wondering if the three hundred and fifty steps of the stairs were manageable and then bolting up them, my breath coming tighter in my chest, the sweat beginning to come out on my brow and under my arms.

I reached the top and pushed forward, ignoring the objections of an old Indian man, whose grey hair and melancholy eyes looked at me with some sort of reprove about speed and manners and who called after me that I would get there one day, that we all did in the end.

I ran out onto the street, just missing a car and could not see him and knew if he was going where I was going he must be moving fast now. I cut across the open court-yard and up the stone steps until I was on the balcony, heading for her door and gasping to breath, my heart thumping and tearing in my throat.

*

I step into the flat. I let the door close quietly behind me. Every part of me, every nerve and cell wants to call out her name, see her suddenly appear in front of me and smile questioningly at me, her eyes asking why I am out of breath and what the problem is. But the atmosphere is quiet; too quiet. Catching my breath, I feel the hairs on my neck rise. I am aware that every muscle is alert and that somewhere deep inside me I am expecting something to happen, something not pleasant.

A thin sliver of light is coming from under the living room door and I walk toward it. I notice the smell of stale cigarette smoke on the air and then again as if by instinct, my memory searches out her perfume or the remains of cooking. There is nothing. Only this second-hand smell as if the rooms were empty of anything other than the greenish winter light and impending threat.

The living room is empty and I see that the furniture looks all in place though over by a steel tulip-shaped lamp, there is a pile of fashion magazines lying untidily on the floor.
I turn back into the hallway, going down toward the bedroom and then I freeze. It is as if the floor is giving way beneath me, the walls are collapsing and pressing in on me and all I can do is stop, stand immobilised and just about prevent myself retching up on the carpet.

Through the doorway of the bedroom I can see a leg over the floor. It looks the way a leg would be if it were stretched out and the other was loose and tucked back under the body and the body was lying inert. And it is a leg. It is unmistakably her leg. The sandal-like shoe, the black leather strap across the instep and the way the ankle tapers up and onto that thin, elegant calf and I know then her knee and her soft thigh. I am momentarily paralysed. I feel myself being assaulted by a sort of anger and confused despair. Suddenly I no longer feel inside myself. I am floating away, becoming part of the greenish light that in fact is not greenish but white and then a sort of ash grey. And I am putting out my hand to steady myself against the wall.

For a moment I have forgotten him. He has gone from my mind. Through the spinning, the tears stinging up into my eyes, I am aware only of her leg. Wanting not to think of what I will find if I push open the door.

Then I hear the long dry sigh. The lips being moistened. The almost priestly exhalation of breath. Eerily benign and mockingly threatening.

The door swings open slowly and he stands there. His legs astride her stretched-out body. I want to run at him. I want to beat him with my bare fists until he falls in a heap. I want to take any instrument I can lay my hands on and strike him, strike him till there is not a whisper of breath left in his being. But he holds the gun. The small silver revolver. He is smiling. Strangely. His clouded eyes narrowing.
"She's not dead yet," he almost whispers. "Not dead yet.........?"

*

He waves the small silver revolver at me, motioning me to raise my arms and back into the living room.
"Sit," he says, and indicates a sofa. I look at him. He must see the anger, the bitterness in my eyes; the desperation.
"If I don't want to," I say.
His arms tenses. He lifts the revolver somewhat, bearing it on my chest.
"Sit I say. I hold the gun."
I sneer but sit. He backs, cautiously into an armchair.
"Now take of your raincoat - slowly - and throw it at your feet. Then turn out your pockets. No sudden movements or I shoot."
I do as he says. Peeling off the raincoat and turning out my pockets, keys, wallet, change, old receipts falling onto the sofa. All the time he holds me in his gaze. His grey eyes curiously searching.
"One more thing," he says when I have finished. "One at a time, roll up your trouser legs. To just below the knee."
Then he leans back and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. He throws it to me, saying,
"Smoke if you like. Because I want you to talk."
I look at him, angrily.
"You want me to talk?"
He leans forward.
"I want you to remember."
"Remember?"
"Remember where this all started."
"Why?"
He motions with his head to the open bedroom door.
"Her life depends on it."
'Go back,' I think. 'Go back - go back.'


Copyright (C) Peter Millington