North of Nowhere

The dividing line between my house and that of the neighbour is marked by a tall beech Miriam wants to have felled. Herr Engels, the neighbour, believes the roots grow straight down and are doing no damage to our valuable properties. Our pretty terrace in Chelsea is noted for its trees and those trees add to the value.
We are driving to Windsor to visit Miriam's undeniably nice parents. She is using this rare time together to outline both sides of the argument. To axe or not to axe?
'We could poison the roots and say it just died?' she says, pondering the subterfuge.
I flashed my lights at the rusting white van in front. The driver raised two fingers as I shot by. I did not react. From a Range Rover we don't acknowledge other people.
Miriam's sigh as she opens the window an inch is a mild rebuke for my lighting a cigarette. My wife is a model of forbearance, an English rose with English fair hair she wears drawn back in a velvet bow, her thin face with small features perched upon a variety of high-collared shirts from Peter Jones in Sloane Square. We make love, when the issue arises, and I close my eyes and hold in my mind a picture of Sally Locke rising from my palms like a clay vase in progress.

I had met Sally a month before. We had been inspecting an empty warehouse acquired from Railtrack by Weir Estates. The building in Victoria was subject to a protection order, explaining my presence at a meeting with the architects. As Sir Norman's lawyer, I would be required to find a way to circumvent the law and open the façade for more windows.
Sally was making sketches, glancing up through the dark tassels of hair that fell floating over her eyes, recasting bare space with false walls and tall windows. I couldn't take my eyes off her as we climbed flights of old wooden stairs, walked corridors through the eddies of dust kicked up by Sir Norman, a bull in an interminable corrida. Finally, we were alone.
'You draw very well.'
She blew hair from her view in order to meet my gaze. 'Thank you,' she said, and her eyes, I realised, weren't focusing on my face, they were focusing on me.
I couldn't remember the last time anyone had looked at me in that way and, in the moment's heady rush, spoke uncharacteristically without thinking. 'What are you doing for lunch?' I asked her.
She took another long hard look at me. 'Let's go to the pub for a sandwich,' she suggested.
Nervous sweat dripped from my armpits. It was like overtaking on a bend.
Norman Weir was at the far end of the room with the chief architect and the surveyor, the winter sun piercing the skylights in silvery threads. They approached slowly, as if time were standing still, icicles of light melting over their shoulders like rain. Sir Norman was suntanned from his trip to Melbourne, the lopsided smile about his fleshy lips taking the menace from his amorphous features. The knighthood had softened his voice. He had grown more agreeable, younger than his sixty years. The poor live their lives at a different speed, racing for age as if it were an end in itself. He glanced at his watch.
'Lunch?' he suggested.
'We're just off to grab a sandwich,' Sally answered, surprising me by the swiftness of her reply.
I went to speak, but Sir Norman held up his hand to stop me. Lines fanned his eyes as he glanced at his companions, teeth glinting. 'Looks like it's just us, then,' he said. He studied Sally Locke, turning away with that man-of-the-world expression that was meant to be revealing to me but vague to the girl.
He moved me to one side, as if to pass on a confidence, something jurisprudent. 'You're bloody quick,' he said.
'That's why you employ me.'
He grinned. 'Then get that bloody permission just as quick,' he added.

The Graveney is an ugly, grey stone house circumscribed by a low wall. Pallets of new bricks had been deposited around the perimeter and workmen had begun the job of making the wall higher.

My inlaws are waiting for us beneath the Gothic porch with mouths unfurling pennants of vapour. Dennis, ex-Squadron Leader, wears a grandiose moustache, tweeds, the pipe he carries a constant reminder of campaign rooms filled with pin-laden maps and old shag, the Battle of Britain, his finest hour. Diana, in plaid skirt and cashmere, kisses me on both cheeks, the consequence of a year at finishing school in Switzerland. Diana is the daughter of a Scottish baronet; Dennis is proud of his wife's pedigree, her imported ways. That good blood had pushed her up an inch more than Miriam could manage, sharpened her hipbones, deepened the blue in her eyes. I have often imagined seducing Diana, a key part of the fantasy being that she is a willing participant. I could bugger Dennis, kill my progeny, turn the humdrum into Oedipal drama.
Miriam brings our Wellingtons from the car. A walk before lunch? She is an only child. She has provided grandsons, fresh tiles on the yellow brick road of their life. I sip sherry, stare absently out at the frost-coated lawn. Two blackbirds move like lost souls through the spindly boughs of the denuded cherry trees. The wall at the back of the house has already been raised.
'Got to keep the rabble out,' says Dennis. He has the billowing jowls of the self-satisfied, the slow movements of an endomorph, a background figure in every black and white war film ever made.
'The Pethringtons were robbed while they were lying in their beds,' Diana adds solemnly, as if passing at bridge.
She moves swiftly about the room, shifting the balance of light, adjusting the line of a crooked landscape. Together, they are one person, their lives a painless symbiosis. It was easy being them. It was easy being us. This, one day, would be our house. Miriam would prune the roses and I would work two days a week, take sporadic trips overseas. Men, after all the lying and grasping required to reach the top, have a terrible energy that needs air in order to spare them from neurosis, heart attacks, tedium.
'Yes, I have started smoking again?'

The Barley Mo could have been a half-way station for refugees fleeing nuclear melt down, a brash, melancholy chaos. The music was piped live from a car breakers. Helixes of silver smoke circled the lights. A splash of denim foils the effect of our having joined a caucus of undertakers, filing by in funeral garb, as if a death wish has entered our subconscious. The barbed walls of Buckingham Palace appeared in flashes between the opening and closing of the pub door as if some allegory was being drawn, something mediaeval.
The warmth dried the sweat under my arms. There was the smell of roast pork, spilt beer, wet coats. We shuffled along in the lumpen mass of secretaries and office boys lining up at a glass counter. I choose leek quiche, walnut salad, a sausage that threatened to roll from my plate. She watched with an air of amusement, willing the sausage to fall. I was a boy again at a mixed grammar school with vulgar dreams, the hint of an erection. I adroitly grabbed two stools the moment they were vacated, beating two girls juggling the accoutrements of glasses, plates and bags.
'I'll get the drinks,' she called.
'Half a bitter.'
She ordered pints. A boy with hair scythed to stubble was sitting at the bar repairing his watch, tapping it against the woodwork, lifting it to an ear sparkling with a loop of rings like the links of a disconnected chain, his head bobbing like a boiled egg through a froth of dirty water.
She returned, hands wet with beer. We touched the rims of our glasses. Her name was Sally Locke; I sampled the alliteration, assimilated the final e.
'Edward Clavell.'
'Yes, I know.'
Two men played darts, the slapping of steel into cork like bare skin in urgent congress. She pulled at her hair, rolled a curl through her fingers. While we ate she spoke about a film I hadn't seen, a book I'd hadn't read, an artist I didn't know. She was young like the watchmaker and it occurred to me that their concerns were of more consequence than my own. Beyond the shabby services I rendered Sir Norman, my quotidian responsibilities held little interest for me. Matthew and Mark, my sons, were at boarding school. They were self-possessed, dull and brutish like life in the suburbs. I forgot they existed outside the holidays and often wondered why we are constrained to love our young. The male of most species rarely does. I was lost in speculation and didn't notice the mayonnaise dripping on my tie. Sally Locke dipped a napkin in her beer mug, leaning over to rub at the stain.
She looked up into my eyes. 'I've made it worse.'
'I don't care.'
She pulled my tie, jerking my head forward. 'You don't care about anything, do you?'
That made me think. 'No,' I replied.
She laughed, her small, perfect teeth budding from behind lips carved in a bow of the sort hunters carry in the pursuit of unicorns. She made me imagine sunlight in forests, her dark eyes, a shade of old stained-glass, giving lustre to the Renoir face of a girl seen through fading mist on an old-fashioned swing. Yes, I felt poetic. Worse, I felt alive.
'Will you be designing the flats for Sir Norman?'
'I wish,' she replied. 'I'll do the first drafts. Someone further up the pecking order will finish it off.'
'Have you been an architect long?'
She sat back, lowering her head, staring at me from under the lids of her eyes.
'I'm twenty-three,' she declared. I went to speak. 'Old enough.'
Were my dreams so clearly on view? I watched her peel off her coat to reveal a slender body in a black suit half a size too small. She dug in her bag for cigarettes. The tip blazed as she lit up. I took it from her, tarry sprites streaming through me, a pogrom for all those thanatoid cells infected by banality. Smoke: the breath of life. The darts thudded. The music grew louder, vapid and vigorous.
'Are you married?' she asked.
'Yes, I am.'
'Good,' she said. She was studying me, as I had studied her in the deserted warehouse. 'Do you love your wife?'
'I don't know,' I replied, surprised by her directness, refraining from the lie itchy on my tongue.
'You should.'
'Why?'
'It's always sad when marriages end.'
'Are you married?'
'Heavens, no,' she shrieked. 'I like to be free.'
Her eyes were big and wild. A button on her blouse had popped open.
'Can I see you again?'
She jerked my tie once more, pulling me forward. 'Of course,' she said, touching her lips to mine.

The library at The Graveney contains a reliable book on trees. Miriam had been right all along. Beech tree roots do fan out, growing just as thick and long below ground as the boughs and branches above. Her father raises the book like a piece of evidence in court.
'You'll have to get on to it, Eddy, old boy, can't let the Hun get the better of us.'
I glance back, smiling professionally. They have untold faith in my abilities: a lawyer; every family should have one; Trinity Hall, a rugby blue. I had been a good catch for Miriam assuming once she had been a good catch for me.
'Shoot the bugger down,' adds Dennis, stropping his hand along his tie: midnight blue with a double white stripe, the Harrovian colours.
The Squadron Leader forgets when he speaks of them that only in a very loose sense am I one of us.

She called the following day.
'Are you busy?'
'I'm never busy,' I answered. I could hear people moving around in the background and imagined her in an open office filled with glass and light.
'Good. I'll see you later, then.'
I listened to the voices. 'What time?'
'Six,' she said. 'Why don't you come here. We'll grab a cab.'
I hung up. I had been thinking about calling her and hadn't done so in case she made some excuse and left me in that awkward position of not knowing whether I should call again. I hadn't done this for a long time; the rules had changed.
It was the end of the day. I stood gazing out the window, the drones hurrying for tubes that would take them to Victoria, Waterloo, Paddington, to the teeming trains that shunted them home to the honeycomb-semis surrounding the City, shanties beyond the castle walls. I couldn't see their faces from five floors up but knew they would be pale and harried, afraid of terrorists, cutbacks, mortgage rates, downsizing, train delays. Memories of a forty-hour week must seem like a cruel joke to those people with their umbrellas turning inside out. One becomes without realising a different species and however much I identified with that fey grey frightened mass out there, I was glad to be up here in my glass-walled sanctuary, a phalanx of assistants guarding my door with their long legs and toneless voices, the telephone and fax labyrinth like an electric fence, computer screens blinking, pallid green, like toad water. I'm so sorry, he's in a meeting!
I made my way to her office building, apologising at each touch of a stranger's shoulder, avoiding their eyes. Even black people grow ashen working in banks, don' beat me masser writ on obsequious faces, polished brogues, white shirts crisp as a fall of snow. The lifts in the lobby were opening and shutting like bellows disgorging mechanical golems. Scraps of Wordsworth come into my mind as she appeared, an oversized portfolio in her arms.
Sir Norman strolled out behind her.
'Ah, what a surprise,' he said. We shook hands. 'Any good news?' He was wearing a charcoal suit and a bright yellow tie.
'Not yet, Norman. You know how long these things take.'
As he rested his palm on Sally's shoulder, I imagined a sated tiger appraising future prey. His mouth with bonded teeth was a white gash with the perennial suntan. 'Watch these chaps, they'll have you tied up in red tape as soon as look at you.'
She smiled at me as she replied, a little ripple on her brow. 'I'll bare that in mind,' she said.
People funnelled by, Sir Norman vast and immovable, dividing the stream.
'If lawyers were half as easy to deal with as architects the world would be a much better place,' he declared and we both chuckled as if with the touch of the sword it is wit that a knighthood confers.
'I'm having lunch with someone at the Ministry Thursday,' I explained, and he moved his face to within an inch of hers.
'That's how it's done. Eddy's my bureaucracy-buster,' he said, lowering his voice as if to pass on a Stock Market tip. 'We'll have those walls down quicker that you can say New Labour.'
'Bye, Sir Norman,' she said, and he waved a stern finger at her.
'Norman to my real friends,' he told her. 'That Aussie bastard to everyone else.'
We all shook hands a second time, then he strode briskly down the entrance steps and into the rear of a red Bentley.
The car had disappeared before we found a taxi. They were always full. Factories in Northern towns were closing but there was no sign of recession in the City. More money was sloshing through the system each day than there were investments to connect it with. I initialled documents prepared by juniors, my secretaries set their long legs in motion, bearing accounts to the Post Office and dropping cheques equivalent to a pensioner's yearly income at the bank.
A cab slowed across the street and I beat a man in an untidy mac to wrench the door open.
'You're very quick,' she said.
'You have to be.'
'Not too quick, I hope.' The bow of her lips quivered and shot light into her eyes.
'Where shall we go?'
'Home,' she answered. 'I'm tired. I don't want to drag this around.'
I took the portfolio from her. She gave the cabbie directions. 'Battersea Bridge, this side,' she told him.
He zipped through the back doubles to Aldgate, then followed the looping course of the Thames, the river to our left hurrying out to sea. As the taxi swayed the girl's body rested against my own. I hadn't done this kind of thing before, except with prostitutes, and that didn't have the same thrill, the same danger. Paying for sex. It was just too déclassé. As I stared out the window I felt as if I were standing on the top of a tall building suffering vertigo. The river shimmied like sand in high winds. The National Theatre, reflecting itself in the water, could have been a power station and, if they put a roof back on the power station at Battersea, it would make a fine theatre. It's irony that saves London, not the inhabitants. We are a grey, lacklustre people afraid of colour. Even the taxis are black.
I paid the fare and followed her along the Embankment to steps leading down to the houseboats moored against a wooden jetty.
'We're virtually neighbours,' I told her.
'That's convenient,' she said.
The walkway swayed. The boats were rocking against each other like affable drunks. The wind skating over the water ruffled her hair. She stopped and withdrew a brass key. The boat was white like houses on Greek islands with a trim the colour of bougainvillaea. The square frame seemed too large for the hull and made me think of the Ark, a safe place to salvage the future. A bird with spread wings carved in wood hung over the entrance above the name The Phoenix.

Lunch is served by Mrs Gray, a little woman who comes in from the village. She is stoop-backed with a face like a jigsaw puzzle of faint blue lines.
'You don't know how lucky you are, Di-Di,' Miriam whispers to her mother. 'You'd never find her in London.'
'Lucky I'm not in London then,' Diana answers.
'My new one's from Colombia. Another Pilar. Can you believe her excuse on Friday: she didn't do the ironing because, wait for it, she couldn't find the iron. I said to her, Pilar, it's on the shelf - where you left it.'
'Ha. Ha. Ha. They're all the same,' Dennis laughs.
'Missis Clabay, I luke, I luke. Then you should luke a little harder, I told her.'
She is good at accents, my wife, head bobbing as she brays, the velvet bow shaping her hair in a geodesic dome and giving her a resemblance to Minnie Mouse.
Mrs Gray returns with a fresh bowl of potatoes. The aviator stabs three crispy specimens and replenishes his plate with a fan of British beef, pink as his cheeks.
'No, not for me,' I say.
Mrs Gray wrinkles her brow and gives me a look that reminds me of my mother. 'Go on, have the one. You could do with a bit of building up,' she urges.
I was a little afraid of her and was more at ease with the stream of South American girls who flowed through Miriam's kitchen. Mrs Gray has that keen, intelligent look that working-class women often acquire in middle-age and I always wondered if she knew my secret.
She departs with Diana's plate, the food untouched. Miriam is deftly weaving a shroud from resident parking, school fees and the enemy lodged in Downing Street being in thrall to Washington, a phrase she had borrowed from Radio 4. Her father is nodding vigorously, mouth full, moustache abristle. I glance at Diana and the look in her eyes makes me think of Sally Locke.

We drank red wine, cold from the refrigerator. I admired the plans, the Georgian brick wall we intended removing festooned with windows and balconies, the drawings like concertinas unrolling and rolling themselves up again.
'Sir Norman must be pleased,' I said.
'He says he is.'
'I was surprised to see him at your office.'
'He drops in almost every day.'
'Really? He doesn't usually bother with details. He has his minions to do that.'
'Are you one of his minions?'
'I suppose so.'
'Silly boy.'
She leaned forward, pulling my tie. She was teasing, I realised, staring over the rim of her glass. Cold red wine. It was like discovering E = mc². The bed filled most of the cabin and we faced each other across its length. We had removed our shoes; there was something indescribably intimate about this act and I kept noticing my black socks among the pillows, imagining I were seeing two blackbirds out of the corner of my eye. The glow of the candles grew brighter as the light over the Thames turned from silver to gold.
She began to massage my foot, then peeled off my socks. 'You have nice toes.'
'Do I?'
'You know you do. You're so vain.'
Her words were funny and flippant, a rippling flow that bubbled up from inside her, submerging me in a familiarity I'd never shared with anyone. I began to massage her toes, her foot. Her breathing caught in her throat as my palm passed over her calf. I felt the boat move beneath us as she rolled forward and pinned me down, kissing my lips, pulling at my shirt. She stripped off my clothes, peeling back each item as if she wasn't exactly sure what she was going to find. Sex is a mystery.
It was my turn. I unbuttoned her blouse, her breasts rising before me, a terrible reminder that half my life had gone to dusty books and ambition when all I wanted was this, a girl, soft flesh, this glimpse of...what? The future? She allowed me to pause, to gaze in wonder like a man at the end of a long journey when he first sees his final destination. She unhooked the back of her skirt and wriggled the material down her legs. She sat on her knees, allowing me to pull down her white panties, then moved her smooth thighs up my chest so that I could taste her, and when I tasted her I wanted to remain with her sex in my mouth forever. Her liquids were an elixir. I was alive again.
She slid down my torso, guiding me inside her with long fingers. The headboard drummed the wooden hull, gathering speed like a horse in a race. She stopped suddenly. Her breath grew still, as if she were swimming under water, her body growing tense before jerking in a sequence of lush greedy spasms. Then she laughed.
'You're wonderful,' she said. She leaned forward, kissing my lips before I could speak. 'And don't say 'Am I?'
'Thank you.'
'What for?' She curled into my arms, turning to reach for her cigarettes. 'You were a good choice. You're just out of practise.'
'I was chosen?'
'The woman always chooses.'
'You could have chosen anyone.'
'I'm very choosy.'
I must have understood this is the wrong way, in the joy of her brass bed, with my body glowing like an electric pulse had turned on a row of fairground lights. I had almost forgotten I was middle-aged; twice her age. I brushed a corkscrew of dark hair from her eyes.
'I'm a lot older than you,' I said, as if it were a confession.
She rolled over and rubbed her nose against mine. 'Fishing for more compliments, are we?'
'No.'
'I can't stand boys. They're so full of themselves.'
We rubbed noses again and made love again and I was inordinately proud I was able to do so. Forty-six and two orgasms. If only I'd kept a diary.

Matthew and Mark had begun to copy their mother by calling Diana Di?Di. Not that they needed to distinguish one granny from the other. Mine they rarely saw. They never knew what to say to her, and she didn't know what to say to anyone.
I visited my mother infrequently, without pattern, and asked Sally to join me to celebrate our affair coming of age: it was twenty-one days old and she was an addiction. I had to see her at every possible moment. After work we made our way to The Phoenix and I strolled home through Chelsea after rolling around on her big bed knowing Shakespeare had got it right: a man in love grows more noble. I was polite to Miriam. I was even returning clients' calls.
The sun was glistening on the surface of the Thames as I pulled into the parking bay above the houseboats that morning. She was in bed still and we made love in her sleepy perfume. Her taste on my tongue was health food; I had lost that grey pallor, the face in the mirror when I shaved each morning was younger. I watched her hips moving inside white jeans as she led the way down the gang plank to the jetty. The boat next to The Phoenix was being repaired and the pile of decayed wood made the walkway so narrow I almost missed my footing and fell in. She reached back to take my hand.
'The name Clavell comes from Latin. It means key,' I told her as I started the car.
'You're a terrible romantic.'
'Key, lock. You know¦I never used to be.'
'I don't believe in romance. It never works.'
'You're such a cynic,' I said and she laughed.
'I'm a realist,' she assured me.
"A surrealist," I said.
She laughed and slapped my leg. This is what love's all about, I thought.
We drove east across London, turning north to pass through a science fiction scene of bombed and shuttered shops nestling in the shadows of tower blocks that rose over the debris like arthritic fingers, the highway pitted like old skin, a livid scar teeming with joyriders and ramraiders, pigeons the size of jackals in a ravenous struggle with abandoned dogs and the urban poor.
'I was born here,' I said.
She stared through the windscreen with the distracted look of people confronting lepers in India, the green Range Rover nosing like a camouflaged tank through Dalston, Stamford Hill, Tottenham, Edmonton, Waltham Cross, Cheshunt, in the rim of Hertfordshire, a dormitory town for the eternally dormant.
Mother was propped up in the nursing home bed like a giant toy. She scratched at the parcel I'd brought her, unable or unwilling to open it. My gifts were always too expensive and embarrassed more than pleased her. She looked at Sally and wondered if she were Miriam. I wiped away the dribble that ran down her chin.
'How are you, mum?'
'I don't like it here. I want to go home. Why won't they let me go home?'
'You've got a lovely room.'
'I want to go home. I want to be in my own home.'
The house where she had lived, where I grew up, had been replaced by a multiplex cinema and superstore. Her memory was the dust of something gone.

The summer I was sixteen I kept watch one night while a boy from the estate stole the Flying Lady from a Rolls Royce. We sold it for £2. That weekend I was invited to a party by Martin, a new friend moved to our school after some scandal at Charterhouse, exchanging his pink, red and dark blue tie for the bottle green of the local grammar. Martin once told me he was bisexual, a word I said to myself in bed at night; the sound had the ring of class about it.
The party was at a cottage called Le Fleur. I met Martin's brother as we arrived. He was standing palms spread beside his old Rolls telling some guests that the scum from the estate had stolen the Flying Lady. My O-levels results had not been particularly good and it was only when I went into the sixth form that I started to work. The boy who had stolen the radiator cap while I kept watch began his first term in prison about the same time that I was going up to Cambridge.
'Why are you telling me this?' she asked.
'I don't know. I've never told anyone.'

I hadn't planned to say anything to Miriam that Sunday on the way home from her parents. A week had separated my visit to the nursing home and, during that week, I had hardly seen Sally at all. She had been in Edinburgh working on a new project for Weir Estates. We had grabbed an hour on Friday. On Saturday she had other plans. I had asked her what they were and she answered by biting my shoulder, biting until it hurt. I was thinking about that bite as we left The Graveney.
It is seven, bright but cold; black ice gathering on the road.
'Di-Di looks so well. It's such a relief I don't have to worry about them,' Miriam was saying.
In front of me a small car is trying to pass a truck the size of an ocean liner. I despair at waiting. Life is too short. What's satisfactory for Miriam isn't enough for me: the boys, her clubs, the eternal search for the right chintz for a girlfriend who has moved to New York.
'I'm going to call someone in next week. We'll have to cut down that tree whether Herr Engels likes it or not.'
I light a cigarette.
'I do wish you hadn't started again.' She fans the air. 'Especially in the car.'
'You won't have to put up with it much longer.'
I drag deeply on the tobacco.
'What's that supposed to mean?'
'I'm leaving you,' I say, the smoke pouring from my mouth, filling the car like mist.
She is quiet for a moment. 'What did you say?'
'You heard what I said. I mean it, Miriam.'
She draws air through her teeth. 'Is there someone else?' It's always the first thing that comes to mind.
'Yes.'
'Who?'
I turn my eyes away from the road and look at her. 'Me,' I tell her.
The little car pulls over and I pass the truck. Glints of lightning spark across the sky. Miriam sniffs and says no more. I drop her at the house and keep going. I don't have a plan. I am being spontaneous for a change. I could rent a flat. Buy a bigger houseboat. Go abroad. The possibilities are endless. I pull off my tie and throw it on the seat.
Like a creature forced against nature to live underground, I feel as I race towards the river as if I am coming up into the light. The Bentley parked in the bay above the dock is bright red below a coating of frost. Of course it's the same one but I study the number plate for several moments just to make sure. Are they working still? If the Edinburgh project is so important, why hadn't I seen the documents?
I hurry down the steps and along the jetty. I hear her cries before I reach the boat. The brass headboard hammers the hull, regular as a heart beat. Then it stops, the moment frozen. I hold my breath, imagining I am a part of something. I wait for the sound of laughter, that long, loud laugh that finally comes, echoing across the water, striking a tight chord stretched inside me.
It suddenly grows dark. I hear rolls of thunder. The drumming starts again, growing and diminishing as I move the dead wood from the boat being repaired up the gangplank and around the door. I find a tub of tar and some turpentine. The fire spreads quickly, roaring like a cornered animal.
I climb back up the steps to the Embankment. Searching from my cigarettes, I find my car keys, weigh them in my palm and, on instinct , throw them into the river. The flames are embracing the boat like the arms of a lover. I remain there under the brittle sky, watching until The Phoenix turns to ash and the ash floats away on the melancholy tide never to return.

© 2007 Clifford Thurlow
www.cliffordthurlow.com