Who hasn’t been on one of these, particularly if you have an older brother or sister, and they have nothing better to do than give you a hard time.
You know what I mean, going on a mission to find or do something, knowing full well that you won’t find it, or complete it because it was a lost cause to start with.
Yes, it goes very well with another saying, a dog chasing its tail.
We’ve seen that, too, watching the poor dog go round and round without ever achieving anything.
Sounds like my day today.
And it doesn’t stop there, the pointless search could also be described as ‘searching for a needle in a haystack’.
That is, to my mind the very definition of a living nightmare.
The origin of the idiom, well that’s a little more complicated because there isn’t just one definition.
The first:
Coined by William Shakespeare, but not necessarily in the sort of language we can read easily – it’s a bit like my ability to translate Spanish to English. It does, however, refer to a ‘wild goose chase’.
The second:
Refers to, of all things 16th Century horseracing, and because I don’t have a time machine I can’t go back to fact-check. However, it refers to the other riders following the leader around the course, in much the same formation as geese flying through the air.
…
My little story to go with it:
…
If you are good at your job, and that is beginning to be noticed, your boss will find one of these ‘wild goose chases’ just for you, in an effort to make you look bad.
It happened to me once: my task was to search the basement, where old records were stored, for a folder that a former employee had thought they had filed it in the wrong storage box, a supposition supported by the fact the folder was now needed to clear up a clerical error and the file wasn’t in the specifically marked storage box.
My job was to search every one of the other 765 boxes stored haphazardly in the basement until I found it.
It was, I was told later, sitting on his desk the whole time, and when I couldn’t find it, was going to swoop in and say he’d found it.
Of course, it went missing before he could, so he got a bollicking for not storing the files properly, and I got the job to clean up the basement. I’m not sure who got the worst punishment.
David is a man troubled by a past he is trying to forget.
Susan is rebelling against a life of privilege and an exasperated mother who holds a secret that will determine her daughter’s destiny.
They are two people brought together by chance. Or was it?
When Susan discovers her mother’s secret, she goes in search of the truth that has been hidden from her since the day she was born.
When David realizes her absence is more than the usual cooling off after another heated argument, he finds himself being slowly drawn back into his former world of deceit and lies.
Then, back with his former employers, David quickly discovers nothing is what it seems as he embarks on a dangerous mission to find Susan before he loses her forever.
Yep, another of those interesting little words that mean more than it appears.
Aside from the fact it is the air that we breathe, it can also be used to describe music.
It can be a breath of fresh air, though it’s hard to say where in this ever increasingly polluted atmosphere than we could literally draw one, except on a mountain top, where conversely it would be hard to breathe at all.
Have the air sucked out of us, well, that literally isn’t possible unless some madman comes up with a weird sort of vacuum cleaner, but that might be an episode for the X-Files.
He had an air about him, or her, as the case might be, which might refer to a sort of deference or manner. There again that air might be one of boredom, which is what a lot of students seem to have in class.
Sorry, been a teacher, and know well the expressions on their faces. Had one myself once, and finished up on the end of a chalkboard eraser. Yep, in the good old day’s teachers used to chuck stuff at us recalcitrant students to get our attention, and not undergo a storm of protest from irate parents.
These days those same parents would most likely air their grievance, opinion, or view to the headmaster.
I’m guessing that same headmaster would be wishing those same parents to vanish into thin air, though I’m not sure how that would be possible.
And lastly, television stations air shows.
Weird, eh, how such a simple word can be used in so many contexts.
For a story that was conceived during those long boring hours flying in a steel cocoon, striving to keep away the thoughts that the plane and everyone in it could just simply disappear as planes have in the past, it has come a long way.
Whilst I have always had a fascination with what happened during the second world war, not the battles or fighting, but in the more obscure events that took place, I decided to pen my own little sidebar to what was a long and bitter war.
And, so, it continues…
Rolf Mayer had only ever wanted to design and build rockets for exploration of space.
Somewhere between the germination of that desire, and where he was right now, in the back of a black Mercedes SS staff car heading south towards Nuremberg something had gone horribly wrong.
Back at Nordhausen, he may have been terrified most of the time from the demands of the Reich, and the horrors of how the Reich was achieving its goals, he was, at least, safe.
Now he was a traitor, with stolen plans, with two Britisher spies, heading for Italy and from there to, well it hadn’t quite been specified where he might end up, but he assumed it would be England.
As yet they had not asked him whether he had the answer to stop this new weapon, and, if he really thought about it, there wasn’t an answer. Perhaps, with a sense of irony, he could say that in kidnapping him, they might not fix the gyro guidance system which caused a lot of the rockets to go off course and miss their intended targets, but still, a large number would still reach their destination with devasting effect.
As for stopping it, he doubted it could be done. They were fired from mobile positions, there were no static launching sites so the enemy couldn’t bomb those sites, not could they stop the production of them because it was underground. A lot of lessons had been learned since Pennemunde.
And that brought another thought to mind. Who was the enemy now, if he was willing to go with these spies? He was German, and he loved his country, but seeing what he had seen, it was hard to balance that patriotism with the means to achieve their goals. Perhaps the blame lay with the Fuhrer, but no one ever spoke of what they really thought, only of their undying allegiance to the mother country and its heroic leader.
No doubt, when he reached his final destination he was going to hear a lot of things that may or may not be true about Reich and its leadership.
Mayer noticed the Standartenfuhrer had a map and at various times they would stop the car and consult the map, an older touring map that predated the war.
Listening to their conversations he had learned that the car had a 50-liter tank that was full at the start of their journey. From Nordhausen to Weimar had been 120 kilometers and had used about 18 liters of petrol. From that, he deduced that the car would go about 300 kilometers per tankful. This means they would need more petrol before they reached Nurnberg.
It was one thing to say they were going to take care of the details but getting one of the most heavily rationed commodities in Germany, or anywhere within the sphere of the Reich was nigh on impossible. He knew this simply because his superiors at the Nordhausen site couldn’t get any petrol for their vehicles.
At this stage of the war, a war they were continually told they were winning, there seemed precious little of anything still available or not rationed, especially food. Because they were SS they fared reasonably well, but the others not so much, making him feel guilty that he was not going hungry like everyone else.
In fact, he was feeling hungry now, and he didn’t remember seeing any food in the car.
Some distances from Bayreuth, after passing through another checkpoint, they stopped a further 10 kilometers up the rood, in a layby that sheltered them from any other traffic, not that there had been anything other than army convoys. Several ties there had been airplanes overhead, either coming or going in small groups, perhaps training runs, so perhaps there was a Luftwaffe station nearby
Outside there was another consultation of the map and then the driver headed towards the rear of the car and opened the trunk. The Standartenfuhrer opened the door. “You can get out and stretch your legs.”
Mayer climbed out and found just how stiff and sore he was, and it hadn’t been a very long drive, but the roads were not as good as they once were, before the war.
Then he noticed the driver lugging a large can to the petrol cap, opened it, put a funnel in and with some assistance, started refilling the tank. When he walked towards the rear of the car he saw six such cans in the trunk. They had come prepared, and given the nature of how they had collected him, he realized that he had been targeted, which meant someone inside the Nordhausen complex was an agent working for British Intelligence.
They emptied two of the tanks into the car, replaced the cans back in the trunk.
The Standartenfuhrer called him over to show him the map.
It had a line roughly drawn from Nordhausen down to Florence, and notes on the side in red, the most pertinent being the distance by road, if they could take the direct route, which now he knew the circumstances, they could not, was about 1,150 kilometers.
Even in the best of circumstances that would take about three days, maybe more. And there was certainly not enough fuel in the rear truck to go the whole distance.
The Standartenfuhrer ran his finger down the line, “This is the intended route we decided on, though not exactly sticking to the main roads. WE do not anticipate problems in Germany, but once we cross into Austria and onto Innsbruck there might be a few problems. We’re not quite sure what to expect at the border.”
“There is no border, not as far as the Reich and the Fuehrer is concerned.”
“Let’s hope you’re right. But I think it’s about time we had a talk about what happened if anything happens to the two of us. We’re not planning to get captured, or killed if it’s possible but there’s a lot of risks involved in an operation like this.”
“You expect me to go on alone?”
“Yes. With the plans and drawings. You have to get to a town called Gaiole in Chianti which is about 70 kilometers south of Florence. There you will need to find a man named Luigi Fosini, who will take care of the rest of your journey. There is a code you will need to give him, but we’ll talk about that later. All you need, for now, is the destination.”
Discussion over, the got back in the car and continued on their way.
Then he realized he’d forgotten to ask about food, but judging by the dark expressions they wore, he decided to wait a little longer.
In 1974 a 26-year-old farmer, Yang Jide, was drilling a well and found fragments of the terracotta soldiers and bronze weapons.
What was discovered later was one of the biggest attended burial pits of China’s first feudal Emperor, Qin Shi Huang. In the following years remains had been found in 3 pits, yielding at least 8,000 soldiers and horses, and over 100 chariots. The soldiers were infantry, cavalry, and others.
Emperor Qin was born in 259 BC and died in 210 BC. He began building a mausoleum for himself at the foot of Mount Li when he was 13. Construction took 38 years, from 247 BC to 208 BC. It was divided into 3 stages and involved 720,000 conscripts.
The pits of pottery figures are 1.5 km east of Emperor Qin’s mausoleum. Pit 1 has about 6,000 terracotta armored warriors and horses and 40 wooden chariots. Pit 2 is estimated to have over 900 terracotta warriors and 350 terracotta horses with about 90 wooden chariots. Pit 3 had so far yielded only 66 pottery figures and one chariot drawn by four horses.
Official records say it was discovered later that it was likely Xiang Yu, a rebel, intentionally damaged the Mausoleum and the soldiers in the pits, by setting fire to the wooden roof rafters, and these fell on and broke the warriors into pieces.
However, we were told that after the terracotta warriors were completed, the Emperor ordered the builders to be killed so that they would not tell anyone about the warriors, and then of those that remained alive deliberately smashed all of the artifacts.
The thing is, all of the terracotta figures that have been found are in pieces, and they need computers to piece them back together again.
The visit: The first impression is the size of the car park and the number of buses parked in the lot, and a hell of a lot more outside up the road an off on side streets. Obviously, it costs money to park in the parking lot.
The other first impressions; the numbers waiting to get in were not as many as yesterday outside the forbidden city, in fact, a lot less.
Be warned there’s a long walk from the entrance gate where your bags are scanned and a body scan as well, before admittance. This walk is through a landscaped area which it is expect might sometime in the future reveal more soldiers, or other artifacts.
At the end of the walk that takes about ten minutes, you can get a one-way ride to the second checkpoint, but we opted not to as no one else in our group did.
That walk is the warm-up exercise to an organized viewing of the exhibits after going through a second ticket checkpoint. On the other side, we had to hand our tickets back to the tour guide which was disappointing not to end up with a memento of actually having been there.
So, on the other side in the courtyard, the guide told us the most important parts of the exhibition, that we should spend most of the time looking at pit 1, and then spent a little time in 2 which is only there in the first stages of excavation. Then move onto the museum if only to see the replica chariots.
We do.
The chariots were small but interesting
The horses were better and intricately detailed
These are soldiers, perhaps complete examples of those types found in the end pit.
This is one of the archers. You can tell by the way he wears his hair.
Pit 2
The excavation of this pit has only just begun, so it is possible to see where they have carefully removed the top cover, and you can see the broken parts of the warriors lying in a heap.
Some parts of the warriors are more discernible closer up
These parts are carefully extracted and taken to the ‘hospital’ where they are digitised and the computer will match each part with the warrior it belongs to.
Pit 1
This has quite a number of standing soldiers that have been glued back together, but not necessarily complete and I notice a number if the statues were incomplete. And if they cannot find the missing pieces, then they are not added to or filled in.
The scale of the pit is enormous, and they have hardly scratched the surface in the restoration process.
What is there is a number of horses as well.
That’s at the front of the pit, a long line of statues, and what is clear is the location of the well where the first fragments were found by a farmer.
There are about eight lines of soldiers, and some lining the sides.
Midway down there is a large area currently under excavation
At the back is the hospital where the soldiers are reassembled. There’s nearly a hundred in the various stages of rebuilding. These days the soldiers are rebuilt using computer imaging.
The hospital area is where they are put back together
And these are some of the statues in various stages of reconstruction
Another two views of the size and scale of the reconstruction project
The coffee shop is also a sales centre, but there are too many people waiting for coffee and too few places to sit down.
Zoe is now painfully reminded why she did not get involved with other people, why it was better to be responsible only for herself. It was easy perhaps to blame John for making his own problems by not heeding her advice, but, just the same, she felt a small shred of responsibility for his current situation.
After learning that John has been kidnapped by Olga, Zoe first goes to see an old colleague, and Yuri’s friend, Dominica to interrogate her, then meets up with Yuri, and it does not end well for one of them. After telling her he’s the elusive Romanov, Yuri informs her of the fact Olga has taken John, and that Worthington is about to use John’s mother as leverage against her.
Not knowing immediately where Olga is, but believing she will not kill him because Zoe will come to her, she detours to take care of Worthington, having finally realized why he was searching for her. In another of her many disguises, room service visits his room, and Worthington gets more than dinner served up to him.
Of course, Yuri lies. He is not Romanov, and Romanov is not trying to kill her, but find her.
Who is her, well, you’ll have to read the book to find out.
And, as for Olga, well, hell hath no fury than a woman avenging a woman avenging her son!
…
Today’s writing, with Zoe languishing in a dungeon waiting for a white knight, 1,923 words, for a total of 59,911.
From the age of 23, my life had been a complete work of fiction, and I have been so wrapped up in that web of lies that I no longer knew what was true and what wasn’t.
23 years and 1 day to be exact, the day after my birthday. It was the last thing I remembered about who I might have been.
Before a truck nearly wiped me out, destroyed my car, and very neatly me with it.
My survival had been described as a miracle, a triumph for the bionic engineers who got a subject to implant their technology, overcoming the bans for creating and installing such technology in humans by simply not telling anyone.
It was why, when I work up, I was in a small room buried a long way from the surface of the planet, a sort of Frankenstein’s secret laboratory.
But I didn’t know any of this, not for a long time, not till things started to go wrong.
All I knew was what I was told, and that was that I was very lucky to be alive, that I had the best team of surgeons, and they had quite literally glued me back together.
Judging by the number of bandages, I could believe them. It took six months for all of the operations to be completed, and another few for the skin grafts and physical healing.
Not only they were impressed by the way I had recovered, but when I finally got to look at the new me, it was as if nothing had ever happened. Certainly, this time around, I was much better looking, physically fit, and tired, but mentally, I was still on a knife-edge.
That accident replayed in my head at least once every day, and that would probably never leave me. There were other jumbled memories in my head that I couldn’t make sense of, of people who looked like aliens, to be in what might call a laboratory.
And then one recurring, of a woman who might have been an angel or a doctor, or both. She never spoke, just remained by my side nearly all the time, sitting there observing me.
It felt strange, but it was not uncomfortable. And it was hard to tell if the memories were real or just my imagination because since I’d woken and returned to what they called the real world I had not seen her again.
…
I never understood what the expression red-letter day meant, other than in the current context, it was to be the day they sent me home.
There were moments when I never thought I’d see home again, and then moments where I knew no one would recognize me.
The reality is they wouldn’t. In saving me, they completely reconstructed me, from the face down. When I first looked in the mirror my face was bandages. Then I’d was scarred and almost bloody pulp. In the end, staring back at me was the face of someone I didn’t know.
It was the price of being saved, but somewhere behind the tonal inflection of the plastic surgeon was the real reason for the transformation, and perhaps it didn’t have to be that way.
But I was grateful and didn’t want to rock the boat. It just makes it that little bit more difficult to consider re-joining the world.
I’d been escorted to a large lounge that overlooked a snow-covered mountain range, where the sky was blue and the sun shone brightly, giving the whole scene a sort of shimmering effect.
A touch of the glass that separated outside from in was very, very cold to the touch. Was this a secret hideaway in the Swiss mountains, and had I been in a secret laboratory?
Or was this another planet?
Was it the drugs they’d been going me every day making me like this, unsure, uncertain, unsettled, and afraid?
I’d been brought to the room and left there, and for a half-hour I alternately sat, made coffee, stood and admired the scenery, checked all of the books in the bookcase, the bottles of alcohol in the bar, then sat again, trying to dispel the nerves.
Then the door opened, the one I tried and found locked, and to my surprise, the angel walked in, looking more beautiful than ever.
I watched her walk across the room, mesmerized.
She stopped in front of me, smiled, then sat in the chair opposite, or rather not so much sit as curl up into the contours of the seat, feet tucked under her, and arm outstretched across the back, almost as if she was inviting me to snuggle into her.
“How are you this morning Matthew?”
Her voice was equally mesmerizing, and I would be happy to listen to her reading a book or the definition of rocket science.
“Very well.”
“It’s been a long road, sometimes difficult, sometimes almost impossible, but we got there in the end. You are, according to the doctors, fully recovered, and it’s time for you to leave.”
“About that…”
“You have questions, I suspect, and a lot of them. They will be answered, all in good time. But for the present, we will not be casting you out to fend for yourself. I will be coming with you, your intermediary so to speak while you reassimilate. Of course, you cannot go back to the life you had before, that life, that person no longer exists. For all intents and purposes, you had died on the operating table after the accident.”
“That was not what I understood.”
What I had understood was very hazy, after they had brought me to the facility. Bits and pieces of that night, of the accident, and the aftermath, of being in the hospital, and what I thought was me looking down at me on an operating table, being declared dead.
And then being whisked away in an ambulance to somewhere else where there were more doctors and nurses, and a man in a suit saying ‘sign this if you want to live‘.
I was not sure what I signed, then, but now, it was to save my life, but at what cost?
“Things are not always as they seem. You have been treated with largely experimental treatments that otherwise could not be performed on people within the current medical regime. Your life, however, was never in any danger, and, as you can see, you have recovered remarkably. All we ask is that you accept the responsibility of being one of the few that have been granted a second life. I am also another such person, and it will be my honor to help you through what can be a difficult stage, reintegration. You are, for all intents and purposes, Andrew Tavener, but as he is no longer alive, your name will be Mathew Welles. I was once Mary Ballen, I’m now Felicity Welkinshaw. Names are only a part of who you are now.”
It was beginning to sound like I was one of a select group. That Felicity was like me, and she accepted who she was, now. Perhaps things were not so bad, a good job, and a girl like Felicity as a friend, perhaps that was only a small price to pay.
Except…
“So, I cannot go back to where I lived, where I worked, see those people I once knew, friends, family?”
“Not as Andrew, no. But, when we believe you can manage it, you will be able to see those people but only as an outsider who has forged a relationship with all or any of them. However, there is one exception, Wendy. You cannot see her, not even accidentally meet her. For that reason, your new life will be as a new junior executive for the company that oversees the medical research that you have been treated, in England. It is for the best, and you will come to realize that.”
I shrugged. It could be worse. But there was something else on my mind. Something borne out of a lot of fractured memories, after coming to the facility.
“This is going to sound very freakish, but I have to ask. Am I still human?”
Those odd memories, I thought I was being ‘assembled’.
“Yes, though a number of what may seem like robotic changes have been made, what we regard as the next step in human evolution. Now, I think it’s time for our going away party. Everyone will be there.”
She stood, and held out her hand.
I took it and had an immediate tingling sensation, such a human reaction.
Followed by a single memory that came back right at that moment, a snippet of a conversation I’d overheard.
“He’s the best god-damned robot we’ve made to date, even better than Felicity, and that’s saying something.”
And the face of the man was the first one I saw as I entered the room.
Every time I close my eyes, I see something different.
I’d like to think the cinema of my dreams is playing a double feature but it’s a bit like a comedy cartoon night on Fox.
But these dreams are nothing to laugh about.
Once again there’s a new installment of an old feature, and we’re back on the treasure hunt.
It was an understatement to say I was dreading going to Boggs’ place.
In fact, in the hour it took to get through the morning chores I had time to consider how and why I was in this position. Boggs was a friend. We were friends at school and as best we could we had each other’s back when the bullies came out to play.
At times that didn’t amount to much because as everyone knows, bullies hunt in packs. Six against two wasn’t much of an equation. And it those days, the teachers spent more time hiding from the students than being in front of them.
It was simply a case of what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
It didn’t feel like that, not for a very long time.
But, in the end, misfortune can make strange bedfellows, and in a town that depended on a single industry, it soon became apparent that there were more people against the Benderby’s and the Cossatino’s than for, and in small-town politics, that was more than an evening up. Out of school and separated from their acolytes, both Alex and Vince found that whatever influence they had once, was now gone, and all that was left was a grunt, and we were basically left alone.
Boggs was the dreamer.
He had idolized his father and when he went missing it broke him.
This map thing was the first signs of Boggs finally coming back to life, but the problem was, it was all pinned on false hopes. The Sherriff was right. Boggs was in over his head, playing with the two most vicious families from around here, and it was bad enough that his father had fallen foul of them, the Sherriff was not about to see his son go the same way. I was going to try and talk Boggs out of it.
Yet, on the other hand, it was people like us who needed a win, just to show there was still hope in this place. With threats every day that the factory might have to close, there were dark clouds hanging over everyone’s head.
If the factory closed, there was going to be a very large hole in the local economy and a lot of people in financial trouble. I’m not sure how finding the treasure might solve all of that, but I suspect Boggs’ had something up his sleeve.
I knocked on the door and his mother answered. She looked harried. She was a nurse and looked as though she just got home from the night shift at the hospital.
“Boggs is in his room.”
“How are you this morning?”
“Tired. And an afternoon shift, which I might not get to if I don’t get some sleep. You know where he is. Try not to make any noise.”
“Will do.”
I came in and closed the door, watching her dash off down the passage to the other end of the house.
She could not work endless double shifts for much longer, but like all of us, it was not out of desire but necessity. She had implored Boggs to get a job and help, but he seemed oblivious to the problem. I’d tried to speak to him, but he had that insufferable way of just not listening.
Boggs was in his room, sitting on the bed and staring at the ceiling.
“If only. I could use it right now to find something that’s missing>”
“Your cell phone?” Boggs was always misplacing something, of forgetting it. I’d lost count how many times he’d misplaced his phone.
“No. An underground river.”
OK. That was out of left field. I had no idea any rivers were missing, or, in fact, they could actually go missing.
Apparently, they could.
“There’s two,” he said. 300 years ago five or take this part of the coastline had several rivers that ran down from the mountain range. What we now call the hills on the edge of the coastal plain. There was also a lake, not very large, but it used to have several streams flow into it all year round and had an aqua flow that came out along the coastline.”
“And you figured all of this out from what? A copy of the treasure map.”
The moment he started quoting rivers, streams, and lakes, I remembered each of those geographical features appeared on several of the map versions. I had suggested, rather comically, that it would be funny if the treasure was buried in the lake.
It wasn’t all that funny. It was also possible.
“Imagine this. Drop anchor out to sea, in other words on the other side of the natural sandbar that formed at the seaward side of the river, get in the longboats and row inshore to the lake, across the lake, up another river to the base of the hills. Then do a little exploring, north or south, and find a cave. I reckon the treasure was buried in a cave. We know there are caves up there, not many, but I think there used to be more.”
“Someone already did a survey with some rather fancy electronic equipment with the same idea in mind. He found three, not very long, and certainly without treasure. Two had substantial falls inside, which is why they were buried.”
“There’s more.”
He jumped up off the bed and went over to the robe and opened the door. Tacked on the back was a copy of an ordnance survey map of this part of the coastline, and a tracing of the treasure map, to the same scale on top.
“As you can see, I think ‘I’ve found the correlation between the real, and what was real 300 years ago.”
Except there’s no rivers and no lake. And no sand bar as I recall. There was a small marina in what might have been where the river met the sea, but that’s gone. They filled it in and build a shopping mall on it. A huge, now half empty, shopping mall. A modern wonder 40 years ago that was supposed to bring business and shoppers to the town. For a few years it did, until another town 50 miles away got the same idea, sold the land for half the price, and made the rents a quarter of what they were here.
They called it progress.
We called it piracy.
“Then we can hardly row our boat inshore and up the stream, if it’s not there.”
I hated to state the obvious.
“But,” he said, looking like the cat who’d swallowed the canary. “What if it is still there, but we just can’t see it?”
It could be said that of all the women one could meet, whether contrived or by sheer luck, what are the odds it would turn out to be the woman who was being paid a very large sum to kill you.
John Pennington is a man who may be lucky in business, but not so lucky in love. He has just broken up with Phillipa Sternhaven, the woman he thought was the one, but relatives and circumstances, and perhaps because she was a ‘princess’, may also have contributed to the end result.
So, what do you do when you are heartbroken?
That is a story that slowly unfolds, from the first meeting with his nemesis on Lake Geneva, all the way to a hotel room in Sorrento, where he learns the shattering truth.
What should have been a high turns out to be something else entirely, and from that point every thing goes to hell in a handbasket.
He suddenly realises his so-called friend Sebastian has not exactly told him the truth about a small job he asked him to do, the woman he is falling in love with is not quite who she says she is, and he is caught in the middle of a war between two men who consider people becoming collateral damage as part of their business.
The story paints the characters cleverly displaying all their flaws and weaknesses. The locations add to the story at times taking me back down memory lane, especially to Venice where in those back streets I confess it’s not all that hard to get lost.
All in all a thoroughly entertaining story with, for once, a satisfying end.
You can pick your friends but you can’t pick your relatives.
So sayeth my sister, who for years refused to acknowledge I was her brother.
The point is, as I was trying to tell Nancy, the woman who had agreed to marry me, “my family has long been ashamed of me because I refused to become a doctor.”
“That’s no excuse, I’m fact that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
To most people, it would. I agreed with her. But then, her family had not had a forebear who stood shoulder to shoulder with George Washington at the Siege of Yorktown.
It was a statement my mother had often pulled out of nowhere at dinner parties, and sometimes in general conversation, just to impress. I thought of trotting out as another example of ridiculous statements, but though better of it.
It was a situation I had not bargained for, and probably why it took so long to find someone to share the rest of my life with.
Perhaps I hadn’t quite thought through what would happen once I asked the question, and it was a yes.
It was not as if Nancy and I hadn’t taken the long road with our relationship. She had been burned a few times, and I always had my family in the back of my mind as the biggest obstacle.
In fact, I always had considered it insurmountable, and because of that, rarely made a commitment. But Nancy was different. She was very forgiving and had the sort of temperament saints were blessed with.
Her family sounded like very reasonable people who lived up state out of Yonkers on a farm she simply said had been in the family forever.
She didn’t have big city aspirations, was not impressed by wealth, travel, large houses, or a resume a mile long with achievements. It was everything I didn’t have and didn’t want, and my job as storeman and fork life driver was one where I could go to work and leave it there.
Nancy on the other hand, was a checkout clerk at a large supermarket, with no aspirations to be a boss or run the place. She had a run in with a tractor early on in life and could manage a lot of the farming basics.
Her parents sent her to the big city to learn a different trade, but she just wasn’t interested. She was a country girl and would never change.
We met when she was attending the same pre wedding party that I was, both with different partners at the time, and both of whom were more party animals that we were.
A week later we ran into each other in the same bar, and it grew from there, and after a rather interesting six months or so, we had ended up making the ultimate commitment.
…
“I guess, now, we have to tell our parents,” she said, stating what was to her, the obvious.
Such a simple statement with so many connotations. I had deliberately steered the conversation away from all of them, and so, at this point in time, she knew I had parents, grandparents, and three other siblings. And that they lived on the other side of the country.
Asked why I had moved so far away, I told her that I’d failed to meet their expectations and preferred to be as far away as possible. My brothers more than made up for my failings, so it was not necessary I stay there.
It was only recently I’d told her those expectations were of me following the family tradition into medicine. It was when I told her my father was a pre-eminent thoracic heart surgeon, my brothers top of whatever field they’d chosen and my sister, a well-regarded general practitioner.
When she asked in what way I’d failed, I said it was not in the education because like all Foresdale’s, we were always top of the class, and as much as I tried to fail, the teachers knew better.
I just refused to go to University. Instead, I tried to disappear, but my father had the best private detective at his disposal. It took a very long, loud, screaming match to sever that tie, get disinherited, and leave to make my own way in the world.
Perhaps, I said, it would be best to just say I was an orphan.
That, of course, to Nancy, was not an option. She came from practical people who always found a solution to any problem, and they had had a few really difficult ones over the years.
But, for the first time, there was an look of perplexing on her face. Maybe she was thinking that she should have asked more probing questions about my family before agreeing to be my wife.
“I think I can safely say that your parents will be more approachable than mine. Those expectations on me will also fall on you.”
And having said it aloud, it sounded so much more like a threat. The problem was, I knew what there were like, living in that rarefied air where the upper classes lived.
I might be a forklift driving storeman, but I was still a Foresdale, and my match had to be commensurate to the family values.
“Then we’re just going to have to go visit them and lower those expectations. I’m not afraid of them.”
No, I expect she was not. I’d seen her deal with all types of miscreants at the checkout counter, rich and poor alike. She had the sort of gumption I always had wanted but was too much of a coward to confront the problem.
Perhaps now, it would be the perfect opportunity.
“We should go next week. I’ve got some vacation days owing, and I’m sure the boss will let you go if you tell him the reason.”
Practical as ever. Confront the beast and get it over with.
“Sure. I’ll talk to the boss, arrange the tickers, and let someone know we’re coming. But I will not be staying at the house. That way if it gets too intense, we can leave.”
I saw her shrug. I’m not sure she agreed that was a good idea, but I didn’t want to see them corner they way they had a habit of when any of us children brought anyone home. I did once, and never again.
“It will be fine.”
Famous last words.
…
I had the phone number of my sister Eric’s, stored on my phone, not that I’d ever intended to call her. It was there because she had called me, I had made the mistake of giving it to her when I left, because she asked me for it.
I hadn’t spoken to her since I left home all those years ago, nearly ten by my reckoning, and perhaps it was a testament to my father that not one of them had called, or even reached out.
Being cut off literally meant that. But it was not something that irked me. I was glad not to see them. I could easily keep up with them in the newspapers and magazines, such was their visibility.
I was surprised Nancy hadn’t made the association.
I don’t know how long it was that I stared at that number, finger hovering over the green button. My first concern was whether I’d remain civil, or how long it would take before I disconnected the call.
Then, courage summoned, I pressed the button.
An anticlimax might occur is there was no answer, or the number had been disconnected, but such was not the case. It rang.
Almost for the full number of rings before a familiar voice answered. “Good morning, this is Erica speaking.”
If only I’d learned to answer a phone properly like that.
“It’s Perry.” Damn, I hated that name, and once I left home, I adopted my middle name, James.
“Now that’s a blast from the past. Never expected to hear from you again.”
“Believe me, if I had my way, you wouldn’t, but there’s a person who insists she meets the family. I tried to talk her out of it, but she’s a force to be reckoned with.”
“Good for her. I always knew you’d meet a sensible girl who wouldn’t put up with your nonsense. I’m assuming you asked her to marry you?”
“I’m beginning to wonder if I should have just outright lied and said I was an orphan.”
“Yes, and how would that have worked when we finally ran you to ground. Besides, your father has known where you’ve been hiding all along. You are still a Foresdale, and that will never change.”
“Even when I’ve been ex-communicated from the family.”
“That’s only your assumption. Everyone here might have expected you to change your minds somewhat earlier, but we never doubted you would return. Now, just who is this Nancy, and who does she belong to?”
Thrills, Spills, and just a dash of Romance 