Why Proposal Branded a Wedding Crime Was Not What it Seemed

There are a lot of images out there that are reasons to get uptight about - people being beheaded and persecuted, for example. I would suggest this is not one of them.

For an hour on the radio as I drove into work yesterday all of the conversation was about an incredible wedding faux-par in which a man proposed to a woman right in front of the bride and groom at a wedding. The female voice on the radio informed listeners that she would bitch slap anyone who had upstaged her wedding in that manner, adding that women are planning their big day from the age of three onward. Really?

The picture was posted on Reddit where it was viewed 1.3 million times in 24 hours. It attracted more than 1,000 comments - most of them scathing.

The Daily Mail ranted about the picture. Its reporter had clearly been granted an exclusive to the inside of the bride's head. "Her smile says 'congratulations', her eyes say something else entirely," the article stated while noting the guy who proposed went to the trouble of placing his bottle of beer on the bridal table before getting on one knee.

William Hanson, author of the Buffer's Guide to Etiquette was enlisted to say that while happy couples can be irritating on their wedding day (or any other time for that matter), it's never acceptable to upstage the bride and groom by proposing on their wedding day.

A day later some of the outrage at the commission of the ultimate wedding crime was removed from the situation. It turned out the bride - the same one whose expression clearly masked hate - had suggested the proposal. Oh and the lady being proposed to was the bride's sister.

But, of course, a viral picture paints a 1000 words - most of them scathing and we know best cos it's on social media - right.

Is This The End of Palmyra?

One sultry night in Luxor I got into a conversation with a group of Australians outside a hole in the wall cafe. I still recall the thick heat of the air and the walk a few hours earlier through the majestic ruins of the Temple of Luxor.

The pretext of the conversation was to borrow a roll of toilet paper. My partner of the time was having issued and inevitably there was no paper in the rest room of the cafe. Toilet paper is something of a must-have in Egypt. Even if you jettison the other basics of living. Fortunately, the Australians were well equipped hardened travelers.

The girl told me that had backpacked trough Syria and Lebanon and visited the lands of the Bible and the great temples of antiquity. She had seen the great ruins of Palmyra rise from the desert in Syria. This great city was built in the 1st and 2nd centuries, combining the influences of ancient Greece and Rome with that of Persia.

Although the Middle East has never been stable, I was fascinated by the girl's comments and decided I wanted to see Palmyra myself. Of course I never did. I got back on the Nile cruiser and drank some more cocktails. Even so the notions of these ancient civilizations continued to fascinate me. I visited Ephesus in Turkey, Caeseria in Israel and Dougga in Tunisia.

Such places seemed to defy the notion of the past as a place of darkness and barbarism. There was romance and the thrilling sweep of history in these cities in the sand.

I haven't thought about Palmyra much until this week. I never made it there and probably never will. Today the savage armies of ISIS are in Palmyra and it will probably be leveled by the end of the week. A city that had withstood 2,000 years of conflict including two World Wars in the last century may soon be no more.

I'm not sure who visits Luxor anymore but Egypt is governed by a regime so paranoid that you can be arrested for photographing certain places and the country's first democratically elected president in many decades has been sentenced to death.

On one side are the despots and on the other the maniacs. Egypt's new rulers may be frightening but at least nobody is dismantling the pyramids.

It's hard not to feel a lingering sadness at the death of civilization and the darkness that is descending on the desert. That sense of decay, ruin and the loss of glory the was described by Shelley in Ozymandias as as relevant today as ever.

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Days of Dust and Drift

I drive or walk past the house every day but it still disturbs me. Some of the old whiteness lingers but its dark heart is showing through the valiant white paint. The creepers have strangled the chimney, glass has fallen out inside the windows and the rampant vegetation has taken over the back yard.

It bothers me to see it because it bothers me to be back in this small town, even though it was my choice. River City was a pin on the map between the beach home of a now departed relative and the big conurbation. It reminds me of how I have been too long in this place, this country, this phase. The road out of here to there and back gets longer every day.

That old house disturbs me more because I remember when it used to be a home. Of sorts. I remember the kids' bicycles on the lawn. They guy who worked next to me. An odd guy. Introverted. Depressed maybe. I liked him.

When he gave up his job to be alone with his books for a year or so, I never bothered to visit him. Maybe I would have looked through him in the same way as I look through so many people I once knew in this town. There were rumors about things his wife was doing; a job in California that never came through. Then nothing, Just this house that fell apart by the day until it stood abandoned with a For Sale sign that is teetering over in the yard. The For Sale signs in this town are permanent fixtures. The houses never sell.

Sometimes I wonder whatever happened to them. Do families rot away like old houses or re-form and re-align and find new vistas? I wonder what dark deeds occurred between those four walls. Or maybe the darkness is in my head and there was no drama - just long days of dust and drift. Which are far more frightening when you think about it.

A General Election a Long Way Away

There's an election back at home on May 6 but you'd be excused for not knowing living over here.

When I was much younger than today the General Election was a massive defining event that dominated media coverage for weeks and whipped the whole country into a frenzy. It, therefore, gives me an odd sense of dislocation being over here and hardly being aware of the main players, let alone every twist and turn. It's not even easy to get British news on the British news sites because sites such as the Guardian, the Daily Mail and BBC have been Americanized - even if you type in .co.uk. Thank goodness for the reactive folks at the Telegraph.

I feel rather sadly disconnected from it all now. I met David Cameron, who happens to the the Prime Minister, on one occasion. I may have met Liberal Leader and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg once, but seem to have forgotten. Labour leader Ed Miliband looks like he should be a playground monitor, I don't want to think too closely about the UK Independence Party and some Green party person.

The polls are close but demonstrate that while much has changed much remains the same - the election will either be won by Labour or the Tories, even if they need a bit of help from someone else.

When we grew up in the 1970s people were either fundamentally red or blue and it's still that way. You believed in the working man or woman in a flat cap or you had floral curtain and china cups and fondness for fox hunting. we were Labour in a fairly unenthusiastic way. There was a minor rumpus when my mother voted for Margaret Thatcher one time. She never repeated the mistake again but continued to flirt with the Liberals for some time. In the divisive 1980s I did some canvassing for the Labour party and joined a university group where people shouted a lot, sported frightening hair cuts and went on about Trotsky until I realized there were more exciting temptations such as beer and women.

Later in life I wrote about politics, although the people I interviewed have mostly vanished to sunken old homes in Surrey or wherever politicians go to be put out to grass. I remember a terse exchange with a grumpy Michael Heseltine at a suburban railway station and a pint with John Gummer who remarked on the noteworthy cleavage of the woman behind the bar. One time at the House of Commons while involved in a scintillating talk about badger culls I turned around to see a frail but somewhat fierce elderly woman and momentarily made eye contact with Margaret Thatcher.

For many years the Tories dominated and Labor was the underdog. Then the tables were turned and the country was ruled by Tony Blair who may as well have been a Tory anyhow and infamously got stuck up George W Bush's pants leg.

From a distance much of the emotion has gone out of British politics. I can't really relate to much of the Facebook hatred I see about David Cameron who seems cuddly compared to Margaret Thatcher - although the same could be said about a nest of wasps. And it's hard to feel much sympathy for the Lib Dems who spend the last four decades saying their time would come when they could be part of a coalition government and would push through voting reform that would change their fortunes.

Four years ago the Lib Dems finally got their moment in forming a coalition government known as Con Dem Nation. Now they are struggling at about 10 percent in the same old voting system that dogged them in the past.

When it comes to British politics, the faces may be different but the old notions of red and blue and left and right, still linger.

Goodbye to All That A to Z Angst

So that was the A to Z Challenge. It's all over for another year and with it those nights of hastily completing a post before midnight. I'm not sure why we do the A to Z Challenge. Maybe we just do it because it's become an institution like that other April institution, taxes. OK it's more fun than taxes but most things are apart from French kissing a camel.

That old apple badge - so passe - embrace your inner snake

This year I experienced very little A to Z angst due to the fact I wrote all of my posts in advance. There were a couple of chapters where I realized I had lost parts of a document and had to hastily revise but I didn't sweat the challenge much.

Nor did I hop as many blog as I would have liked or get as many diehard followers as I have picked up in previous year. Some of them followed me on this exhausting blogging road before finally fading away like the spectral ghost on the last days of Shackleton's trek who faded in and out of the snow.

If I am to be honest some of the blogs I found along the way left me as cold as the explorers on that nightmare ordeal across the ice. They left me asking why. I wonder now if blogging has lost some of the novelty it seemed to have five years ago or maybe I'm jaded and disconnected. I've seen a lot of good bloggers disappear along the way but this is probably symptomatic of life, friends, lovers and all of the rest.

Maybe because I spend so much of my day in the blogisphere I don't get out enough to choose life. Or maybe life changed imperceptibly over the last few years and became bloodless, our pulse replaced with a Tweet or an invitation to wish someone we barely know happy birthday on LinkedIn.

I'm not going to blame the challenge, though. My blog views were shrinking as fast as Bruce Jenner's man parts before this challenge. Now I am celebrating a very big spike. Call me fickle but there's such as thing as blog hit high.

Of course, like many people out there I have had invasive thoughts about not doing the A to Z Challenge again but the one year I sat it out it felt a bit like being in solitary confinement while the cool kids got to play on the adventure playground. I'll be back next year but I don't want to just go through the motions. It will be spectacular - no more A for apple right.

Z is for Zoetrope

Sometimes I felt my life was like a zoetrope spinning in a circle, giving fascinating glimpses of light and dark in the cylinder before finally slowing down. One autumn evening somewhere in France, I found myself sitting at the table of a pavement café with a strange hunched up fellow who reminded me obliquely of Quasimodo, or at least my perception of the Victor Hugo character from the novel and the film.

I had spent the day in the town square, painting the lovely limes and sycamores with their russet, yellow and vibrant leaves strewn like a tapestry across the windows of the old stone houses. Nobody had bothered me except a few visitors and one had attracted my attention and promised to see me the next day. As I filled up the long hours turning my brush on the canvass, I allowed myself to think ruefully of the brief period when I was a household name in Britain, if not France. Today when I gave people my name, nothing registered.

The art world had moved on a long time ago. Painting was passé. You only made a name for yourself if you displayed your filthy bed or a pile of bricks and called it art.

Quasimodo slugged back his absinthe. He had an English accent which was incongruous with his appearance as a ragged French peasant.

“So when did you last see Yvette?”

“It was about a year ago when I was invited to her 30^th. I can’t say I fancy her new husband much. I offered to do a painting of them and can you believe he turned me down?  Said he didn’t have the time to pose. Yvette seemed a bit mortified.”

“Is he an utter shit, or just a shit in the making?”

“Oh not utter. Just too busy for family claptrap. Well who isn’t?”

And a distasteful image of Geraldine calling me a drunk came to mind. It slid away again with my second absinthe. The wedding had been the last time I had seen Geraldine too, although that had not been the time she called me a drunk. She called me it quite a bit after re-finding God. God and Marcel. I distanced myself from the Holy Trinity with a few drinks too many on occasions.

“Is he as bad as me?”

“Who?”

“Yvette’s husband, of course. Thought I’d lost you then.”

“Christ no. I keep meaning to give them that big, empty villa.”

Quasimodo grinned to himself and his fat shoulders trembled and strained his cheap shirt. Finally he continued.

“Look. If I haven’t said it enough, I wanted to thank you for putting me up at your place all this time while I get back on my feet.”

I started at him sharply. Now I had severe grey eyebrows my gaze could shatter a glass at 20 paces.

“Please do not get back on your feet again, as you put it.”

“Yes I know. I mean not like that. But not every fellow can paint like you. I used to be eaten up with jealously but now I mean it’s different. I can really appreciate your work.”

I laughed and refilled his glass. “Everything is different. That’s life. If you stayed the same you would have died. That or I would have killed you.”

“Like I tried to kill you,”

“Ha. Something like that, but I would have done it properly,” I told him. “You know my place is humble but you can stay here as long as you like. You may be interrupted by traveling artists or musicians but they are usually fun. Get to know them. You may learn a lot. You may learn how not to become an ass again.”

I looked him over from his irregular stubble to his overgrown brows. Monty was unrecognizable from the Monty of a previous age. Monty had been humbled and humiliated in jail. His spirit had been broken but here he was hunched over his absinthe. Middle aged, overweight, unattractive and yet far closer to perfection than he had ever been before in his life. There was a cool breeze now under the trees and the sounds of a mandolin drifted across the square. The silence between us was as comfortable as the worn out bar and the easy glances of the middle aged American across the bar who had heaped lavish praise on my work today.

“So are we going to head down to the Riviera soon?” said Monty.

His eager puppy dog voice seemed so incongruous in a big hunched over character with Dickensian brows.

“I’m sorry Monty. Like said I’m going away tomorrow. I need to go back to the Greek islands. I may be gone some time, hopefully not like Captain Oates.”

“How long?”

I shrugged. “ I met a drifting kid in the square today. I got him to do some painting and he showed great potential. I haven’t seen that sort of thing for a while. I said he could come along for the ride and learn the trade.”

Monty looked oddly perturbed for a moment and then he swigged back the absinthe.

“God. This is good stuff. One more and I’d convince myself I could be an artist too,” he said.

“Well I’ll drink to that. Just don’t become a stockbroker again right.”

And with that I helped the large figured get to his feet and saved him from knocking chairs across the bar.

Many thanks for reading the novella Transitions on the A to Z Challenge.

Y is for Yvette

She had told me we would call the girl Yvette even before she knew it was a girl. It was a name with long roots in Geraldine’s family and my interest in a name had gone no further than flitting through a book of baby names and arriving on the name “Gertrude.”

There was a forcefulness about Geraldine on this point and others that related to the baby, such as decking the room out for a girl before we knew the sex. Inevitably, Geraldine was right. For two months we did the perfect designer family thing. We built cribs and lined up wallpaper in the turret room overlooking the pool and the gentle hills. Anyone who saw us there touching each other lightly with the late afternoon sun in our hair would have imagined us to be the perfect couple in our designer villa overlooking the Umbrian countryside. I was a successful painter and Geraldine was pretty and wan, even in the late stages of pregnancy and surrounded by her pale blue vases and window boxes choked with camellias.

Despite the perfect symmetry of our lives, I would catch myself wondering. I would see Geraldine’s far off expression and ask her about in on occasions.  She would tell me of her homesickness for France and the smell of fresh croissants from the tiny bakery on the corner of her street. She would wake up from bad dreams about cold hours spent under stained glass windows amid the statutes of the dead. I wondered sometimes at our rootlessness and displacement and how we never fit into any landscape like the ruddy faced peasants in the work of Constable.

Yvette got in the way of our circumspection. Geraldine was right, of course. She was born with a healthy set of lungs and appetite in the small hospital of the nearby town. I had been born in a vast industrial hospital overlooking the smoke stacks of Manchester. I marveled that anyone could come into the world to the sound of bells and the sight of the old palace basking in the morning sun. It was a landscape to visit, not to be part of.

From the outset the child displayed a strong will. I took to painting her screaming, to the consternation of Geraldine who wanted me to help with the feeding. My brush was unfiltered. I painted Geraldine breast feeding her and the child’s bizarrely blue eyes. In those days all of my senses were heightened. The sun seemed to shine every day and I saw the world again with child-like clarity.

One weekend Gracie came to visit with her fiancé, a fine fellow who had studied classics at Oxford. They had driven a classic MG over from Britain and were heading to see the antiquities of Rome. Gracie looked over my sparkling new collection of paintings, the ones that the very colors of Umbria danced out of the canvass on.

“They are splendid,” she said, her Champagne tipping over on the bare floor. “Not a poor person in sight.”

We drank and talked into the night. Gracie’s fiancé had a knack of bringing the excesses of the Roman emperors to light in the most vibrant and hilarious ways, even Caligula who was by most accounts mad and frightening.

Later Gracie squeezed my arm as she headed upstairs to bed. “Who would have thought you would become my clever, witty and successful brother while Monty slops out in an Italian jail?” she said.

I had a vision of my cousin hunched over that was not altogether pleasant. One evening down by the pool I saw another figure doubled over. It was Geraldine. I crept closer to her but she did not hear me. I heard suppressed sobs coming from the hunched figure. It not occurred to me that I had not seen Geraldine for many hours.

I look her slender arm. “Geraldine. What’s up love?”

She turned to me and her face was a shocking mass of smudged mascara. I pulled her closer but she said nothing.

“What’s the matter?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me.”

Still she was looking over the darkened hills and a small rim of lighter sky where the moon illuminated a cloud.

“It’s pretty here Campbell, but so much space. So empty.”

I saw a pale pinkness on her hands. A residue of blood, perhaps. There was something desperate and unhinged in her voice.

“Geraldine. What have you done with Yvette?”

No sooner had spoken the words than I heard a wail from the baby from an upstairs room that sounded high pitch and off-key.  I sprang up from the marble bench I was sitting on and ran like a madman  toward the balustrade that led to the child’s room.

X is for Xanthocarpous

The tree outside the hospital window was xanthocarpous. It wept the color of cowardice through the long hazy afternoon. It sent its flowers subtly down like a veil at a wedding in the far off Orient until the ground outside my window was a bright carpet.

It was a strange and insubstantial afternoon. I held Geraldine’s hand and it seemed flimsy and bird-like to the touch. I feared it would break away. My story had seemed fragile too. I saw the officer look at me as if I was a madman. Surely Monty’s tale that I was drunk and he had escaped as I headed toward the precipice had more substance.

It was his word against mine. But Geraldine seemed determined that I would prevail. She had hired one of the best attorneys in this part of Umbria. He told me he had already dug up some dirt on Monty who it seemed had assaulted a friend in a drunken brawl last year. The charges had been dropped after the friend was paid a tidy sum of money to change his story but the lawyer Mr. Vinchenzo suggested his reputation was already tarnished. And then there was the media. The lawyer had contacted the British press before Monty’s people could get to them with the tale of how my cousin, jealous at my success as an artist, had tried to kill me.

I was discharged from the hospital after two days. I had torn ligaments but there were no breaks in my leg. Once I was back at the villa I felt a curious emptiness that took its cue from the hills around. There were angst ridden calls from my parents about how the family was being destroyed by the press. The presence of Monty at the villa had been obtrusive but I started to miss the idea of family. I started to miss the person I imagined Monty could be if things had been different. I took my paints and headed high into the hills. It was cold up on the bare spine of the hills now but I wanted to feel chilled to the bone. It drove me to pain a bleak series of landscapes that ripped the hills to their skeletons and exposed what lay beneath. I contemplated centuries of murder and death. Even the pleasant hill village seemed like a veneer that hid Medieval barbarity away from the manicured piazzas.

It took almost a year for the attempted murder case to come to trial. By all accounts Monty had complained about conditions in an Italian jail where he was forced to rub shoulders with ruffians and sex starved characters who saw his fine flanks as fresh meat.

Mr. Vinchenzo, a picture of pocked sized efficiency in his dark suit and prinz net, built up a picture of Monty as a wealthy and spoiled thug who had as little respect for his artistic cousin as he had for the Italian authorities who he obviously took for fools who would fall for his ruse. His case went over well with an Umbrian jury that was sick of wealthy Brits coming over and buying up their properties. Mr. Vinchenzo seldom mentioned the fine villa I found in my ownership.

The members of the press from Britain were more divided. There were the arts correspondents who had championed me a few years earlier who were apt to pain Monty as a Luddite but others appeared to easily swallow his story that I had blamed Monty for my own drunken actions because I had held a longstanding grudge against him. One publication even dug up my history of drug abuse and described how Monty had staged a compassionate intervention by taking me to rehab in France. The editorial writers of the conservative rag painted me as a feckless artist who had exploited liberal causes to make my fortune off the back of misery. A classic left – right split was opening up with the more liberal and arts-minded media tending to me on my side and the conservative papers championing a man who had made his fortune from hard graft rather than paintings of homeless people.

Monty himself was articulate and convincing but only I could discern some retreat from the great orator of previous years. I speculated that the time incarcerated had affected his poise.

After a week of evidence and cross examination, I walked into the town square to see the yellow blossoms on the air again, like a pretty veil of spring drawn across the dryness of the court house. I breathed the scented air and returned in time to see the jury lined up. The foreman a squat olive farmer and an emotional man could not bear to look at me. Monty was rocking back and forth grinning. I prepared myself for further torture.

“Have you reached a verdict?” the judge asked the foreman, although it was clear he had. He muttered his assent. “And?”

“We find the defendant Monty DeVere guilty of attempted murder.”

The tension receded but I could feel little joy in the situation. Monty stood there impassive like a big, dumb white rock. I walked over, gave his wide arm a quick squeeze and walked out into the pale spring sunlight. As I watched the late afternoon rays play on the leaden windows of a church I was hit by the strange light feeling that was coursing through me. It had started so many years ago on a pale spring day and it was ending now as nature was waking up around me.

W is for War

Lying on the hillside as the sun came up, I examined the new round of lacerations on my leg. It was the same one that had been broken in the Balkans and the raw new wounds were melding with the old ones. The desperation of war that I thought I had left behind on those broken streets was upon me and I felt I had no time to sit in the open looking at my wounds. I feared Monty was nearby and after last night, he would fight me to the death if he thought I was still alive.

My only hope was that he had seen the car fall off the hillside and ran far away after jumping out. I wasn’t convinced. Monty was thorough. He would want to check the accident scene again before contacting the authorities and making up his tale. A searing pain ripped down my leg but I could move it. I was relieved it did not seem to be broken but I felt light headed and weak. I moved a few hundred yards from the place where my car had hung on a tree branch and entered a thicket shielded from the light. Through a small gap in the branches I could see the road up above me. 

About an hour after I had found the thicket I saw him. There was no mistaking Monty’s thick frame at the crest of the road against the skyline. As I looked I felt a weight fall in my gut as he limbered down the slope and inched in my direction. I knew I would be dead out here if he found me. This was war and Monty would give no quarter. Monty had a heavy looking staff in his right hand and the instinct of a hunter that he had learned on many pursuits of the fox.

I saw him prod the scars on the steep hillside where the Citroen had scoured the ground. Would he work out the car had not fallen in one movement? He continued, moving down the steep slope, showing great dexterity for a man of broad frame. Alarmingly he was making a path directly toward the bush I was hiding it. 

The discomfort in my leg was ratcheting up and I wanted to move it. It twitched and throbbed and I grimaced in pain. Monty stopped. He was about 20 yards away from where I was lying. He was listening for something. There was a low buzz of a car engine on a far off hill that rose and fell with the contours. I held my leg and resisted the urge to moan. Then I saw it.

In a dark mass of roots close to my face, vibrant colors were moving on a branch. I stared at the chilly eyes of a snake as it uncoiled fast down the branch and swung toward my head. Instinctively I jerked my head back. The bushes shook and a large bird rose out of the trees, squawking.  I looked again out through the gap and was horrified to see Monty was staring straight at me. He had picked up on the movement. He took another two steps closer to me and stopped again in his tracks in the moist grass. He was almost close enough to touch. I readied myself for a crushing blow of his cane. Then suddenly I noticed he was looking again down the hillside. He took a few steps away from the bush and looked down to where the grass gave way for a rock face. Monty was looking at the wreckage of the 2CV more than 100 feet below. He gave out a grunt that sounded self-satisfied and started climbing back up toward the road. I did not dare to move until he had vanished from sight. After more than an hour in the bush I crawled out.

 I managed to pull myself to my feet but I was weak and the hillside was steep. Gradually I limped about half a mile until the hill became more manageable. There was a small walled stone town in the distance beyond the Lombardy poplars that rose like spears from the sides of the hills. The sun was becoming hot and I was desperately in need of water but I walked slowly on, until I found myself in a path shaded by high banks. It took me two hours to reach the village and it had passed noon. The locals looked on warily at the ragged and bloody figure that had arrived from the hills. 

There were small pavement cafes here and a clear silver fountain. The beauty was not lost on me and it mixed with the heady feeling that was coursing through my ragged body. It was the joy to be alive and I felt like embracing random strangers. Instead I headed to a small brick police station to file a report to a startled little man who looked like he had dealt with little more serious than missing cats and shoplifters for the last five years.

V is for Visitors

Monty and Carolina were staying in the pool room. On a summer morning a delicate sun would flood the terrace and the fragrance of oleander and jasmine would drift across the sun loungers.

Monty had taken to the villa like a natural. He had put on some weight but looked like a stately cruise liner in his dressing gown, his teeth white as bow paint and a cocktail glass in each hand.

“You have fallen on your feet old boy. Who would have thought it? You were frightful as a teen. I always joked with your parents that you’d wind up in an orange suit,” he said. “Of course they didn’t see the funny side.”

And with that he collapsed into a heap of self-satisfied belly laughs. Carolina hung on his every word and tittered at his abject buffoonery. Monty was due to be made a partner at his firm, giving Carolina, a secretary at the firm, a small glimpse of riches beyond her imagination.

The high vistas of Umbria has given Geraldine back some of her panache. Although she spoke little of her last few years and steered clear of Monty’s drinking games, she had a ruddy glow and a swelling in her belly. Sometimes as the sun slipped off the distant mountain peaks I would think about what I had lost and what I had gained. Sometimes a vision came to me late at night of Marcel, constructed of the small fragments she had let me see. I saw a puritanical and aloof figure who had forced his wife into days of solitary confinement with just a statue of the Virgin for company, to force her to mend her ways.

One afternoon Monty pulled me aside at the pool. “Look Campbell, much as I like hanging out with the women here I think they guys need to go out for a few beers. I know this great little place in Perugia.  Went there on a rugby trip once.”

“It’s quite a drive over the mountains.”

“Oh come on Campbell. You are getting to be so staid in your young age.”

I didn’t want to tell Monty I would be hard pressed to bear his company on the drive.

“OK. I’ll see you on the terrace at 6.”

As it turned out the jaunt seemed to be more fun than I imagined. Monty’s talk about his ambitions turned into self-parody and I had to enlist him in the joke about his pompousness.

“Yes. OK. I have always been a bit self-absorbed. But it’s a ‘me’ society. You know that. This beer’s good.”

“Strong too,” I said. “Very hoppy. But frankly Monty – don’t you think success is overrated?”

I caught an odd look in his eyes, as captured in the antique yellow lights in the square of Perugia.

“No. Why?”

I abandoned the line of conversation and we were soon out in the town square where a light rain was falling. I found the 2 CV with some difficulty. “Christ. Do I have to drive this thing?”

“Drank too much?” quipped Monty.

“I don’t know. I just feel a bit unsteady.”

“It will pass old boy.”

"Perugia 079" by Georges Jansoone (JoJan) - 

We took another walk around the town square before we got back on the narrow roads. There was a low evening fog and the damp road came and went like an indistinct tide before my vision. Still we climbed up into the great humped backed hills and I was conscious of the gaping nothingness to my left that was the side of the hill and lights twinkling below a great abyss of night.

“I love Italy but I hate the roads,” I said tersely.

Monty didn’t reply. I saw his head lolled back as he slept in his chair. I cursed to myself at the notion of traversing these hills with no company and imagined a steaming pot of coffee. Higher up the rain became more persistent and the visibility caved in. I slowed down into the hairpin bends. Something moved to my right. I was perturbed to see Monty’s large form sitting bolt upright. He was staring into the rain.

“It’s fine. Sleep,” I said. I was alarmed to see his eyes boring into me in the half light. They were vacant but for a small pin prick of hatred.

“Monty.”

“Fuck you.” And after growling the insult, his large body was on my side, shoving and pushing. I yelled at him and flailed out. Brakes squealed and the car lurched across the road toward the gap. I smashed at Monty’s face with my first and I felt something give. Then his great first made contact with my jaw and I felt something go loose. I tried to push back but he was strong. He had the steering wheel and there was still some motion left in the car. His grip was unwavering. I saw the rocks below me. Monty sprung away from me and was out the passenger door. To my horror I saw the tiny lights jump at me and realized I was going over the edge. My head crashed against the side of the window, I felt the sickening rush of descent and there was blackness. Later some small nagging voice told me I was dead but I didn’t think I was dead if there was a nagging voice. The metal of blood was thick in my mouth. There was a jarring pain in my leg. I felt something alien inside the 2CV and saw the branches of a tree. I moved the window and the whole car swayed sickeningly. I saw the light again far away.

I sat back and recalled what had happened, but there was no reality to root my experience. Then it occurred to me that a tree had stopped the car’s plunge and I was dangling over a vertical height. It felt like an impossible situation and I thought I should wait for help. However, I doubted if Monty would have told anyone. I could be here for hours. There was another sickening lurch as if the tree was unable to keep its grip on the Citroen. I realized I would have to get out. With a pain shooting down my leg, I moved across the passenger seat to the open door. The 2CV swayed again. I saw the gradient sloping away. It was steep but not a sheer rock face as I had feared. It looked like the kind of hill I could climb down if my legs would oblige. There was another groan from the Citroen and something gave. 

Tree branches cracked. It occurred to be that pushing myself through the passenger door was my last hope. With one great effort that sent sharp blue pain flying through my right leg, I lurched out  of the passenger door. I was on the sodden hillside. Using my arms and my other leg, I crawled away from the 2CV. Five minutes later there was a final snap as my beloved car broke away and rolled down the hillside. I saw a fire leap up in the valley as her gas tank was ruptured. I was alone in the vastness of the Umbrian hills.

U is for Umbria

I located Jacques’ old 2 CV in a rusty lockup on the outskirts of Budapest. It was covered in a fine layer of dust and looked like an ancient farm car. But once I wiped it off with a cloth it saw the fine sunflower yellow and blacks of the bumper shining through the dirt.

It was a curiously minimalist car with flap windows and a roof that rolled up like a tin of sardines. I was surprised when I turned the key in the ignition and the car started up the first time. The old man who ran the garage said he had regularly started her up. He said he would have buffed the car up had he known I was going to show up and shooed me out into the sunshine for 20 minutes while he got out his rag.

Soon I was driving across the bridges of the Danube in the minimalist car with the top rolled down and the late afternoon sunshine in my hair. I only had a vague idea where I was going but I headed west for cornfields and then to Vienna and Munich and views of the distant and majestic Alps. For three days my mood was carefree. I stopped in Alpine meadows and painted sweeping vistas that were so at odds with my gritty work on the banks of the Thames.

Then, as I entered Alsace, my mood changed and I was filled with apprehension at my meeting with a girl I had not seen for more than two years. When I drove into her village, the air was thick and heavy with bees and pollen. I saw ivy clad round towers peeking out over the thickets of weeds and the black woods behind. I felt myself dismount from the 2CV as if in slow motion and each foot forward was as if I was walking in thick water. 

I pulled a piece of paper from my pocket and squinted at the address. The humming of the bees clogged the air. Geraldine’s home was the grand and shuttered square building at the end of the avenue. The iron gates topped with dragon heads were more like a warning than a barrier. I opened the small gate with a squeak. Each step forward felt like one I would regret. There was a young, wall eyed girl in the front garden clipping a bush.

Alsace

Her blank expression met mine and her eyes narrowed as if she detected something. “Geraldine,” I mouthed. She looked at me but did not move. I repeated the name. She got up, brushed dirt off her dress and walked into the house.

I looked back and saw how this grand house behind shutters marshalled the whole village that cowered before it. Rooks hung in the dense air and here and there I saw the back of a villager in a scene that seemed little changed in 500 years.

I heard a small voice and turned to see a girl wearing a dowdy brown dress in the doorway. There was something about Geraldine in her eyes but her face seemed careworn and there were dark lines swirling under her eyes.

“Geraldine?”

“Yes.” Her voice was toneless and flat..

“It’s me Campbell.”

“Campbell.” For a second she was distracted by the call of the rooks. Then she turned back to me. “If you are Campbell, you should come inside.”

Mute, I followed her across an uneven stone floor to a parlor infused with the yellow light of dandelions.

In the delicate light, some notion of the old Geraldine came back to me.  I saw she was smiling at me quietly.

“So what have you been doing Geraldine?”

“Oh not much. I have been here. Waiting for you, right.”

“Right.”

The girl clasped her hands in her lap as I tried to reconcile the figure in a shapeless dress with the bikini at the rehab center. “So what have you been doing  Campbell?”

“Too much to talk about here Geraldine,” I stumbled over my words. I didn’t want to sit here in the suffocating old house anymore, fearing one of her devout family members would show up. “Look, I want you to come away with me.”

The girl looked blankly at me as if I had mentioned a mission to Jupiter and turned her glistening eyes to the lattice window.

“OK.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I said OK Campbell.”

I stood up feeling flustered. “Alright. When?”

“Now, of course, silly.” Her arm slipped around my waist and propelled me to the door. I almost dragged her to the Citroen. Days later we saw the city of Assisi, a vast fresco of pink marble on the hill. I turned to see Geraldine’s ghost of a smile. The girl had hardly spoken for two days and here we were about to play happy families in new villa overlooking the Apennines.

Umbria

Geraldine was more drawn than I remembered her but she was still a vision of loveliness against the Medieval skyline. I ran my hands through her hair and she turned to me.

“Will Marcel be visiting?” she finally asked.

“I’m sorry.”

“My husband.”

Chapters from my novella Transitions are entirely fictitious and no resemblance is intended to real people or events.