A Room with a View

A Room with a View

(Prose, 10th July 2008, 9.58am, 528 words)

The window beckons and I heed her calling. As I cross the room, she lights my face with morning sunlight and tantalises my senses with a soft breeze, flickering in through her gaping chasms. She holds half the sky for me in a frame, offering up a landscape that no painter has yet tried to capture. There is no point in attempting to paint this; perfection cannot be topped.

I think it is the contrasts that call to me. Green, rolling hills, scattered with trees, and that huge yellow manor nestling, surrounded by oaks and commanding the slope which drops away from the front of it, leading my gaze down to closer, cluttered red rooftops, jostling for space at the edge of the city.

The industrial buildings dominate the left side; tall towers, white expanses, a chimney stack. A seagull leads my eye to a church spire, and the years wind back to when the church possessed a splendid isolation and industry was conducted in front rooms and brick mills.

The gulls wheel beneath the dispersing clouds; it rained all night, and all day yesterday, until the river had risen by four feet and turned, Hulk-like, from a calm, green mirror to a tumultuous brown anger. I cannot see the river from here, but my memory picture superimposes her, briefly, until the landscape reclaims me. A block of flats with blank eyes stares at me, unblinking. Two tall spruces wave, and I almost lift my hand in acknowledgement.

Below me, the sounds of laughter and play. The noise drifts up, breeze-lifted, breaking my reverie. I am waiting. Waiting for the treasure hunters to stagger into the room, breaking the quiet stillness with movement and sound. ‘We can’t find number seven, Miss!’ they might yell, as previous groups have done. Or ‘finished!’ far too soon, when all I sought was peace and quiet and all I got was interruption.

All I wanted was to sit and write, spilling words into word documents, filling up my memory stick, trying to put the thoughts into complete lines of prose rather than containing them, cutting, squeezing, summarising, into poetry. My fingers are not used to the lack of containment. They need exercising, the muscles building up, until they are comfortable with their freedom. The words are confused; I want so many more of them; they are used to my demands being small, focused and particular, and cannot quite keep up the supply to meet the new demand.

The window is not helping. She has pulled me yards that seem like miles, to the side of the room I am unused to inhabiting. I stand, transfixed, absorbing a new revelation every minute; I light on details I have not found before, from my usual limited vantage point. I thank the contractors, silently, for placing the wiring in the far corner, locking the desk to the non-window side of the room; if the desk had been here, aligned with the view, I would sit, staring daily at the outside world, and the screen would remain empty, the cursor blinking, the words spilling out through the window from head to breeze, missing my fingers completely.