This is the famous clock tower of the Flinders Street Station (the main train station for suburban trains) in Melbourne.
We were staying in a hotel (The Doubletree) directly opposite to the station and our room overlooked the station and the clock tower. I took photos of it during the day:
and this one, at night. It came out better than I thought it would.
I’m not a fan of romance novels but …
There was something about this one that resonated with me.
This is a novel about a world generally ruled by perception, and how people perceive what they see, what they are told, and what they want to believe.
I’ve been guilty of it myself as I’m sure we all have at one time or another.
For the main characters Harry and Alison there are other issues driving their relationship.
For Alison, it is a loss of self-worth through losing her job and from losing her mother and, in a sense, her sister.
For Harry, it is the fact he has a beautiful and desirable wife, and his belief she is the object of other men’s desires, and one in particular, his immediate superior.
Between observation, the less than honest motives of his friends, a lot of jumping to conclusions based on very little fact, and you have the basis of one very interesting story.
When it all comes to a head, Alison finds herself in a desperate situation, she realises only the truth will save their marriage.
But is it all the truth?
What would we do in similar circumstances?
Rarely does a book have me so enthralled that I could not put it down until I knew the result. They might be considered two people who should have known better, but as is often the case, they had to get past what they both thought was the truth.
And the moral of this story, if it could be said there is one, nothing is ever what it seems.
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Available on Amazon here: amzn.to/2H7ALs8
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This book has been sitting in the ‘to-be-done’ tray, so this month it is going to get the final revision.
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With Zoe gone and not looking like she will be coming back, John has to get back into the mainstream of life.
Or he could do something a little more positive, try and find Zoe and seek out her intentions. To that end, he comes up with an idea, phone an old friend, Rupert, who once had aspirations of being a private investigator, and employ him to find her.
But, as he quickly remembers, Rupert has a sister named Isobel who hates him, and despite her, John hires them, though when Rupert learns he’s looking for a Russian/Chinese assassin, he has momentary second thoughts.
Money always speaks the right language.
But, lurking in the background, Sebastian now had a tail on John, almost knowing that he was never going to take his advice and leave Zoe alone.
And, like John, he knew of Rupert, and his sister, yet another of Sebastian’s once upon a time hot dates that failed, and of her situation, which means he was about to kill two birds with one stone.
Find out what John was up to.
Isobel is about to liven their lives up considerably.
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Available on Amazon Kindle here: https://amzn.to/2CYKxu4
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With my attention elsewhere, I walked into a man who was hurrying in the opposite direction. He was a big man with a scar running down the left side of his face from eye socket to mouth, and who was also wearing a black shirt with a red tie.
That was all I remembered as my heart almost stopped.
He apologized as he stepped to one side, the same way I stepped, as I also muttered an apology.
I kept my eyes down. He was not the sort of man I wanted to recognize later in a lineup. I stepped to the other side and so did he. It was one of those situations. Finally getting out of sync, he kept going in his direction, and I towards the bus, which was now pulling away from the curb.
Getting my breath back, I just stood riveted to the spot watching it join the traffic. I looked back over my shoulder, but the man I’d run into had gone. I shrugged and looked at my watch. It would be a few minutes before the next bus arrived.
Wait, or walk? I could also go by subway, but it was a long walk to the station. What the hell, I needed the exercise.
At the first intersection, the ‘Walk’ sign had just flashed to ‘Don’t Walk’. I thought I’d save a few minutes by not waiting for the next green light. As I stepped onto the road, I heard the screeching of tires.
A yellow car stopped inches from me.
It was a high powered sports car, perhaps a Lamborghini. I knew what they looked like because Marcus Bartleby owned one, as did every other junior executive in the city with a rich father.
Everyone stopped to look at me, then the car. It was that sort of car. I could see the driver through the windscreen shaking his fist, and I could see he was yelling too, but I couldn’t hear him. I stepped back onto the sidewalk, and he drove on. The moment had passed and everyone went back to their business.
My heart rate hadn’t come down from the last encounter. Now it was approaching cardiac arrest, so I took a few minutes and several sets of lights to regain composure.
At the next intersection, I waited for the green light, and then a few seconds more, just to be sure. I was no longer in a hurry.
At the next, I heard what sounded like a gunshot. A few people looked around, worried expressions on their faces, but when it happened again, I saw it was an old car backfiring. I also saw another yellow car, much the same as the one before, stopped on the side of the road. I thought nothing of it, other than it was the second yellow car I’d seen.
At the next intersection, I realized I was subconsciously heading towards Harry’s new bar. It was somewhere on 6th Avenue, so I continued walking in what I thought was the right direction.
I don’t know why I looked behind me at the next intersection, but I did. There was another yellow car on the side of the road, not far from me. It, too, looked the same as the original Lamborghini, and I was starting to think it was not a coincidence.
Moments after crossing the road, I heard the roar of a sports car engine and saw the yellow car accelerate past me. As it passed by, I saw there were two people in it, and the blurry image of the passenger; a large man with a red tie.
Now my imagination was playing tricks.
It could not be the same man. He was going in a different direction.
In the few minutes I’d been standing on the pavement, it had started to snow; early for this time of year, and marking the start of what could be a long cold winter. I shuddered, and it was not necessarily because of the temperature.
I looked up and saw a neon light advertising a bar, coincidentally the one Harry had ‘found’ and, looking once in the direction of the departing yellow car, I decided to go in. I would have a few drinks and then leave by the back door if it had one.
Just in case.
© Charles Heath 2015-2020
So, I wonder if it’s true, any port in a storm, except perhaps Marseilles.
Or, if you are a lothario-type sailor, you would have a girl in every port.
Yes, the most common definition of a port is a place where ships dock.
And, while talking of ships we don’t call the sides left and right, we call them port and starboard. Just in case you didn’t know, port is on the left side of the ship when facing forward.
And of course, ships have portholes, i.e. windows, traditionally round and rather small.
It could be an alcoholic drink, imbibed mostly after dinner with coffee and cigars, though no one seems to smoke cigars anymore.
There is still coffee, for now. No doubt sometime in the future someone will link it to death and dying, and it will fall out of favour, like sugar, weedkillers and asbestos.
The best port seems to come from Portugal, strange about that.
You can port a program (app in phone speak) from one platform to another, which basically means from Android to Apple IOS, but not without a reasonable amount of work.
It can also be an outlet plug on a computer that accepts cables from other devices (USB) and many years ago, a printer port, and a serial port.
In certain places in the world a port is a child’s schoolbag, a definition I was not aware of until we moved to a different state.
I’m still having a problem with it 30 years on.
50 photographs, 50 stories, of which there is one of the 50 below.
They all start with –
A picture paints … well, as many words as you like. For instance:
And the story:
It was once said that a desperate man has everything to lose.
The man I was chasing was desperate, but I, on the other hand, was more desperate to catch him.
He’d left a trail of dead people from one end of the island to the other.
The team had put in a lot of effort to locate him, and now his capture was imminent. We were following the car he was in, from a discrete distance, and, at the appropriate time, we would catch up, pull him over, and make the arrest.
There was nowhere for him to go.
The road led to a dead-end, and the only way off the mountain was back down the road were now on. Which was why I was somewhat surprised when we discovered where he was.
Where was he going?
“Damn,” I heard Alan mutter. He was driving, being careful not to get too close, but not far enough away to lose sight of him.
“What?”
“I think he’s made us.”
“How?”
“Dumb bad luck, I’m guessing. Or he expected we’d follow him up the mountain. He’s just sped up.”
“How far away?”
“A half-mile. We should see him higher up when we turn the next corner.”
It took an eternity to get there, and when we did, Alan was right, only he was further on than we thought.”
“Step on it. Let’s catch him up before he gets to the top.”
Easy to say, not so easy to do. The road was treacherous, and in places just gravel, and there were no guard rails to stop a three thousand footfall down the mountainside.
Good thing then I had the foresight to have three agents on the hill for just such a scenario.
Ten minutes later, we were in sight of the car, still moving quickly, but we were going slightly faster. We’d catch up just short of the summit car park.
Or so we thought.
Coming quickly around another corner we almost slammed into the car we’d been chasing.
“What the hell…” Aland muttered.
I was out of the car, and over to see if he was in it, but I knew that it was only a slender possibility. The car was empty, and no indication where he went.
Certainly not up the road. It was relatively straightforward for the next mile, at which we would have reached the summit. Up the mountainside from here, or down.
I looked up. Nothing.
Alan yelled out, “He’s not going down, not that I can see, but if he did, there’s hardly a foothold and that’s a long fall.”
Then where did he go?
Then a man looking very much like our quarry came out from behind a rock embedded just a short distance up the hill.
“Sorry,” he said quite calmly. “Had to go if you know what I mean.”
I’d lost him.
It was as simple as that.
I had been led a merry chase up the hill, and all the time he was getting away in a different direction.
I’d fallen for the oldest trick in the book, letting my desperation blind me to the disguise that anyone else would see through in an instant.
It was a lonely sight, looking down that road, knowing that I had to go all that way down again, only this time, without having to throw caution to the wind.
“Maybe next time,” Alan said.
“We’ll get him. It’s just a matter of time.”
© Charles Heath 2019-2021
Find this and other stories in “Inspiration, maybe” available soon.
Anna’s arch-enemy
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I was woken to a bunch of messages arriving on my phone just after the time I’d designated as ‘switch on’. I had only recently realised the phone had a ‘sleep’ function.
Among the messages was one that said he had arranged for the will matters to be finalised in a week’s time, and that he had organised a stay of proceedings based on what appeared to be legal mumbo jumbo.
It doesn’t matter. It was the week I needed.
I didn’t have to wake Cecelia; she was an early riser and an exercise freak. She’d already been out and back, showered and dressed and was ready.
“You have an assignment.”
“From all that stuff we got. It looked like we needed a lawyer to decipher it.”
“It’s simply given us a week to close this case. I want you to go to the main Dicostini resident and stake it out. I suspect you might see some familiar faces before the morning’s out.”
“What are you going to do.”
“Break the news to our three charges, if they’re still there.”
“And you think…”
“We’ll soon find out.”
“Can I take the sniper rifle?”
“Have you got one?”
She just gave me one of those condescending looks of hers.
“Yes.”
“Good. There might be some prospective big game hunting.”
I showered and dressed and headed over to the hotel where, hopefully, the three women were still waiting. I guess the fact they might be still in someone’s crosshairs might be incentive enough to sit still.
For them, it was only another day. I wondered what they were going to sat when I told them it had been put back a week.
When I arrived, they were cooking breakfast, and it appeared they were all good friends, almost as if they were on holiday together. None seemed to look like they were going out for the day, though Juliet had dressed, so perhaps she was the one going out for supplies.
She was sitting at the table nursing a mug of coffee. It smelled better than the one I made from the hotel minibar, and I was still slightly annoyed I hadn’t got down to the hotel breakfast room.
“One day to go,” the countess said.
I wondered, in that moment, just who she really was. To look like the countess, enough to fool the Burkehardt’s she could not be one of the Dicostini family. Dicostini had gone to a lot of trouble to make this work, including kidnapping and attempted murder.
If he was the one behind the deception.
“That’s what I came to discuss. There are some legal issues to be ironed out and the signing will not happen for another week.”
The countess looked annoyed. “Those Burkehardt’s are up to something, trying to find a way around it. We can’t let that happen.”
“And we won’t. I’ve alerted your solicitor, and he assures me that he’s on the case, and will be calling on Anna tomorrow. I saw her yesterday, and whilst she would rather it didn’t happen, she recognises that in the absence of a will, the state determines your claim. I presume that you searched for a will and couldn’t find one?”
Or more to the point, she had not been there to search for anything, but the real countess had. What would she have done? It was a question I’d asked when we finally met.
“Benito?”
“The one and same. We met, and he seems to me to be quite stodgy. I can tell him, if I see him, you’re here.”
“No. I don’t quite trust him, simply because he once worked for the Burkehardt’s and may still have some allegiance towards them. I’d rather he not know where I am.”
“As you wish.”
I would have thought she if she was the real countess, would want to see him. Another nail in her coffin.
Juliet handed me a mug, and it had a nice aroma about it. Our hands touched, and there was a tingle. Damn her. Despite everything, she was still in my thoughts, and that was not good.
Especially if I had to shoot her.
I sat next to her at the table. The others kept cooking breakfast.
“What are you doing with yourself? I bet that Cecelia type is keeping you amused.”
“She is a colleague. If I want anything to keep me amused, it’s working out why you are here, and there, and everywhere I go.”
She smiled. “Serendipity.”
“Or a curse.
“Perhaps it’s fate trying to bring us back together?”
“Why?”
It had been a mismatch and ill-fated relationship the first time around, perhaps one of those things a patient has for their doctor. She was there, she treated me nicely, and she needed someone to pour out her troubles to. We mutually kept each other sane. I was disappointed when I discovered she had gone off the deep end.
But, as Rodby said in his usual pragmatic way, shit happens.
But, the question loitering in the back of my mind was how she could find me when I was so deeply buried in a new persona in a place where no one could possibly find me.
Venice.
“Why are you here?”
“To tell you about the legal proceedings.”
“You could have called.”
“And you should be working for us. A third degree if I’m not mistaken.” She was not a fool. A distracting answer was needed fast. “I hate to admit this but I was thinking about you last night, and I got it in my head that I had to see you.” I shrugged. “Now I have.”
It seemed to assuage her curiosity. “What’s going to happen after this is over?”
“You’ll get to live happily ever after with your mother. It had to be what you call serendipity to be reunited with her after all these years?”
“You might think so.”
“You don’t.”
“There’s a reason why she left me behind. I doubt a leopard is going to change it’s spots. Once she gets her money she’s gone.”
“What money?”
“On one hand, if she had to verify the countess’s identity, on the other, putting me in the frame as an heir. I don’t want it, but it is worth quite a lot, and she says I can just sell it and both of us could have the life we were meant to have.”
“You believe her?”
“Everybody in my life has screwed me over, Evan? What do you think?”
“I think, if you’re rich, I could come and live with you. That Burkehardt residence is something else, and, it has servants.” I stood. “Just a thought.”
I’m not sure what she made of that, but it certainly wasn’t what she was expecting.
© Charles Heath 2023
50 photographs, 50 stories, of which there is one of the 50 below.
They all start with –
A picture paints … well, as many words as you like. For instance:
And, the story:
Have you ever watched your hopes and dreams simply just fly away?
Everything I thought I wanted and needed had just left in an aeroplane, and although I said I was not going to, i came to the airport to see the plane leave. Not the person on it, that would have been far too difficult and emotional, but perhaps it was symbolic, the end of one life and the start of another.
But no matter what I thought or felt, we had both come to the right decision. She needed the opportunity to spread her wings. It was probably not the best idea for her to apply for the job without telling me, but I understood her reasons.
She was in a rut. Though her job was a very good one, it was not as demanding as she had expected, particularly after the last promotion, but with it came resentment from others on her level, that she, the youngest of the group would get the position.
It was something that had been weighing down of her for the last three months, and if noticed it, the late nights, the moodiness, sometimes a flash of temper. I knew she had one, no one could have such red hair and not, but she had always kept it in check.
And, then there was us, together, and after seven years, it felt like we were going nowhere. Perhaps that was down to my lack of ambition, and though she never said it, lack of sophistication. It hadn’t been an issue, well, not until her last promotion, and the fact she had to entertain more, and frankly I felt like an embarrassment to her.
So, there it was, three days ago, the beginning of the weekend, and we had planned to go away for a few days and take stock. We both acknowledged we needed to talk, but it never seemed the right time.
It was then she said she had quit her job and found a new one. Starting the following Monday.
Ok, that took me by surprise, not so much that it something I sort of guessed might happen, but that she would just blurt it out.
I think that right then, at that moment, I could feel her frustration with everything around her.
What surprised her was my reaction. None.
I simply asked where who, and when.
A world-class newspaper, in New York, and she had to be there in a week.
A week.
It was all the time I had left with her.
I remember I just shrugged and asked if the planned weekend away was off.
She stood on the other side of the kitchen counter, hands around a cup of coffee she had just poured, and that one thing I remembered was the lone tear that ran down her cheek.
Is that all you want to know?
I did, yes, but we had lost that intimacy we used to have when she would have told me what was happening, and we would have brainstormed solutions. I might be a cabinet maker but I still had a brain, was what I overheard her tell a friend once.
There’s not much to ask, I said. You’ve been desperately unhappy and haven’t been able to hide it all that well, you have been under a lot of pressure trying to deal with a group of troglodytes, and you’ve been leaning on Bentley’s shoulder instead of mine, and I get it, he’s got more experience in that place, and the politics that go with it, and is still an ally.
Her immediate superior and instrumental in her getting the position, but unlike some men in his position he had not taken advantage of a situation like some men would. And even if she had made a move, which I doubted, that was not the sort of woman she was, he would have politely declined.
One of the very few happily married men in that organisation, so I heard.
So, she said, you’re not just a pretty face.
Par for the course for a cabinet maker whose university degree is in psychology. It doesn’t take rocket science to see what was happening to you. I just didn’t think it was my place to jump in unless you asked me, and when you didn’t, well, that told me everything I needed to know.
Yes, our relationship had a use by date, and it was in the next few days.
I was thinking, she said, that you might come with me, you can make cabinets anywhere.
I could, but I think the real problem wasn’t just the job. It was everything around her and going with her, that would just be a constant reminder of what had been holding her back. I didn’t want that for her and said so.
Then the only question left was, what do we do now?
Go shopping for suitcases. Bags to pack, and places to go.
Getting on the roller coaster is easy. On the beginning, it’s a slow easy ride, followed by the slow climb to the top. It’s much like some relationships, they start out easy, they require a little work to get to the next level, follows by the adrenaline rush when it all comes together.
What most people forget is that what comes down must go back up, and life is pretty much a roller coaster with highs and lows.
Our roller coaster had just come or of the final turn and we were braking so that it stops at the station.
There was no question of going with her to New York. Yes, I promised I’d come over and visit her, but that was a promise with crossed fingers behind my back. After a few months in t the new job the last thing shed want was a reminder of what she left behind. New friends new life.
We packed her bags, three out everything she didn’t want, a free trips to the op shop with stiff she knew others would like to have, and basically, by the time she was ready to go, there was nothing left of her in the apartment, or anywhere.
Her friends would be seeing her off at the airport, and that’s when I told her I was not coming, that moment the taxi arrived to take her away forever. I remember standing there, watching the taxi go. It was going to be, and was, as hard as it was to watch the plane leave.
So, there I was, finally staring at the blank sky, around me a dozen other plane spotters, a rather motley crew of plane enthusiasts.
Already that morning there’s been 6 different types of plane depart, and I could hear another winding up its engines for take-off.
People coming, people going.
Maybe I would go to New York in a couple of months, not to see her, but just see what the attraction was. Or maybe I would drop in, just to see how she was.
As one of my friends told me when I gave him the news, the future is never written in stone, and it’s about time you broadened your horizons.
Perhaps it was.
© Charles Heath 2020-2021
Coming soon. Find the above story and 49 others like it in:
The Toowoomba Carnival of Flowers is held in September, and generally runs for ten days at the end of the month.
We visited the Laurel Bank Park, where there are beds of many colorful flowers,
open spaces,
statues,
an area set aside for not only tulips but a model windmill
and quite a number of hedge sculptures
There was also the opportunity to go on a morning or afternoon garden tour which visited a number of private gardens of residences in Toowoomba.
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 solace after disappointment, turns out to be something else entirely, and from that point, everything goes to hell in a handbasket.
He suddenly realizes 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.
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Available on Amazon here: https://amzn.to/2Xyh1ow
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