He wouldn’t give up now; there was no point. The smoke wound, blue and delicate, through the warm air. The bottle of rosé wasn’t quite finished. After the first sips of coffee, he knew it would taste bitter. Crumbs of fig cake stuck to the little dessert fork on the uncleared plate. He didn’t want the meal to end. He ordered a brandy; he’d sleep later.
The sun flared from the dust jacket of the book lying on the table in front of him, obscuring most of the title, though he could still read the black words ‘…of Pain’. He’d nearly finished it. The descriptions of the author’s worsening condition were becoming more graphic, more terrible. He hadn’t known the disease existed in that particular form, the evolution of its crippling agony a new and yet, strangely, not unwelcome discovery. There seemed no reason now not to immerse himself in it, like a guidebook to an unfamiliar, impending destination. He felt more and more a creature of unchosen movement, surrendered to ancient currents.
The restaurant occupied the ground floor of a building at the end of a row jutting between the start of two streets. One disappeared back into the town, winding among tourist shops, dropping in steps and slopes down towards the river. The other shortly became one side of the main square, opposite the colossal old Holy Palace. At the far end the square terminated in a bluff overlooking the bend in the river half-spanned by the famous ruined bridge. Between the Palace’s river-facing flank and the first tumbling rocks of the bluff was the small park where he’d walked that morning, stunned by the white gold heat and the blueness of the sky and the pale bright Palace rising vastly behind him as he looked at the green and glittering river below.
Standing there, it had seemed so simple to him. Each of these things, each component of the day, bold and exact, combined around him with architectural sureness, its edges hard against the others’, its qualities unarguably displayed. These few expressions of place and quality and moment buttressed him with their certainty. Among them he felt calmer and reassured, something restored that had begun to drain from him in that surprisingly small office, two months ago and hundreds of miles away, as soon as the thin, immaculate, matter-of-fact specialist had begun speaking. Here, where a handful of elements supported the world with such beautiful authority, he breathed more easily, blessing every sight.
He blew smoke upwards; it drifted slowly, fragile and weakening. Above it, arcing like dark formulae against the lapis brilliance beyond, swifts screamed. He’d always thought them lucky. Soon he would pay and leave, tipping this happy day extravagantly. He would walk the short distance to the hotel, the alcohol thickening his senses as he moved between deep shadows. In his room he would lie on the sunlit bed, staring out at the crowding, red-tiled roofs. Vainly, he would try to read his book but, in the stillness, he’d drift off to the noises of the town and to the sound of the swifts overhead, increasingly high and far.
Craig Dobson lives in the UK and works for the local council library service, watching the books dwindle in number year after year but still pleased about how many people turn to them when it’s important. Aside from that, he ages and fattens spending much time staring into the middle distance, where he is sure that some revelation lies, waiting.