…

Some things happen randomly.  Some things are unexplainable.  Some things happen for a reason.

What happened to us didn’t happen for a reason, nor was it random or unexplainable.

Well, not at first.

…

I remember that day as if it were yesterday.  I came home from school and there were seven police cars in the street.

I was not sure what I thought from the top of the street, but it wasn’t that the police were in our house.

They were.

I had to plead my case that I actually lived in what they were calling a crime scene.  No one would tell me what happened until a woman about the same age as my mother came out to see what the shouting was about.

I was trying to tell people who wouldn’t listen that it was my house.

I’ll never forget the way she looked down on me like I was dirt beneath her feet.  A person who would want to reach me would have come down to my level.  She did not.

“Who are you making all this noise?”

“I live here.  This is my house.  My father and mother and my sister live here.  Is my mother here?”

“Wait here.”

She went back inside and came back with my mother.  My mother’s face was expressionless, and I only saw that look once before in my life, when she was told her brother had died.

I remembered that day too, and what she said.  ‘Do not trust these English people, they lie, they twist your words.  They say they do not hold grudges, but they never forget.  Never.’

I had no idea what she meant at the time, but seeing the woman and the fact a man was standing close to her as if she were a criminal, was enough.

“Your father is dead.”  It was a simple and succinct statement.  She would say no more until the police left.

The only question in my mind then was who that woman was because she certainly wasn’t the police.  Not the normal police that is.

They said my father committed suicide.  I didn’t get to see the crime scene but was taken to a friends place where my sister was, and we were not allowed to return home for a few days.

My mother had been questioned for three days by both the police and other people, people she thought were security agents, though she had no idea why my father would interest them.

Except, of course, he was German.

We were never asked any questions and allowed back after the house had been cleaned and restored to normalcy.  A day later, when looking for the first time ever, since we were never allowed in his study, I found a small smudge of blood.

It didn’t seem significant.

My mother, our mother, outwardly was the same as she had been, except now, without her husband, she seemed different, not so frightened.  I could see the fear in her eyes every time he came home.  In her eyes and my sisters.  I didn’t know why and didn’t ask.

Not then.

A week passed, and I came home to the same scenario.  Five police cars, flashing lights, and they were at my house.

Again.

I didn’t have to go through the same identification. The policeman at the door knew who I was.

He asked me to wait, and a few minutes later, the same woman came out.

“This is getting to be a regular event,” I said.

“It won’t happen again.  Come inside.”

From the front door, I could see the tail of destruction.  Someone had searched the place and looked everywhere.

And I mean everywhere, down to ripping the plaster off the walks and ripping up floorboards.

“Who would do something like this,” I asked.

“Exactly the question we would ask.  It seems someone thought your father had something worth stealing.  It’s equally obvious by the damage they didn’t find it.”

“That’s because he didn’t have anything.”

She gave me that grown-up, I don’t believe you looked and then took me to my mother.  Equally resolute and angry as the time before.

“You might want to consider moving.  These people might come back.  They did not find what they were looking for.  I suggest you think long and hard about what it might be these people want.”

“I do not know anything about my husband’s business. I did not want to know, and he didn’t tell me.  I never went into his office. None of us did.  We are not being chased out of my home.  My husband did nothing wrong, I have done nothing wrong, and we are not moving anywhere.”

We were forced to stay with a friend while the house was put back together, and life returned to a semblance of normalcy.  An elaborate alarm system provided security so we could sleep at night, but odd noises kept me awake for a long time after.

But they did not come back.  Whoever they were.  At times, I used to think there was a similar car sitting down the street watching us.

In time, it all passed.  In sccprdabc3 with my father’s wishes, I studied engineering and eventually graduated.  My sister eventually married the boy she started dating at university and then moved to France for his work, leaving my mother and me alone.

My mother found a job, something she had not been allowed to do while my father was alive and kept mostly to herself.  We kept the house, and my father’s study exactly as it had been before he died, and life went on.

Then, instead of taking up an appointment at my father’s old engineering company, I changed my mind and decided to do journalism instead.  My mother wasn’t pleased but didn’t try to change my mind.  She just stopped talking to me.

Then, almost to the day, ten years later, it all started again.

This time, the person who broke in hardly left a trace, and everything had been put back, all except one piece of paper.

Whoever it was, they were interrupted because I thought I heard a mouse from downstairs, and instinctively, I knew it was in the study.

At first, I thought it was my mother. She sometimes went down there to read a book. All of the novels on two of the shelves were written in German.

It was not her, but I did see a shadow, and by the time I reached the back door, that shadow had disappeared.  That door had been opened with a key because I had stuffed the lock with a putty substance and fragments if it were on the inside floor under the lock.

Back in the study, I checked the papers in the top drawer, and one was out of place.  In the middle, as if it had been hastily replaced.

I looked at it.  A letter from his father to his son, very short, reminding him to send the book he had recently mentioned.  That was all.

Except…

It could not possibly be from my father’s father he had died many years before the date on the letter.  Or could it?  A fragment of a conversation I overheard a long time ago when my grandparents had visited, came back, a name, and if I was not mistaken, a very familiar name.

I put it back neatly and went back to bed.

I will check everything else that was in the drawers tomorrow.  And I would send a letter to the German Government in charge of Stasi files.  If I was not mistaken, my father’s parents had been stranded in East Germany when the wall went up, and that made my father East German too.

And if that were the case, it would explain everything.

…

If you were to ask any child what their first scary memory was, it would more than likely involve a relative.  I think I was unlucky.  I had two, relatives that is, and both were scary.

It might be that they were from a different country, across the sea, and for a child what was a long, long way away.  We were not rich so unless they visited, which as far as I was aware, was once when I was about very young, we never saw them at all.

My only memory of them was that they were tall, dressed in dark clothes, and spoke differently to us, though it surprised me that my mother could speak that way too.  Later I learned a different way was a language called German, and my mother decided to teach me it.  My father wasn’t pleased, especially when she and I spoke in German, because he never bothered to learn it himself.

It should not have come as a surprise that I was told not to annoy them.  Perhaps someone forgot to tell my parents I was a child, and invariably inquisitive, and that we rarely did as we were told.  Pity then that first encounter was fleeting and decidedly unmemorable, and being too young to care, erased the almost from my mind.  I don’t think I endeared myself to them.

Move forward 20 years, and although there were some references to these strange people that my mother referred to as distant and unforgiving members of an intransigent and disinterested family, we had not seen them again, but my mother had travelled to where they lived several times, always returning very upset and angry.

Until one dark and gloomy morning when a letter arrived, delivered to the door by the postman.

That morning she had been putting away some of my father’s stuff in the study, and, being nearest to the front door, went to see who it was.   When I called out to ask her who it was, there was silence, except for the ticking sound of the grandfather clock in the entrance hall.  Yes, it was that loud and, at night, sometimes annoying.

I slowly came down the stairs, unconscious trying to avoid the creaking steps, and stopped at the bottom.

 “Mother.” 

I knew she had been in the study, so I went up the passage and stopped in the doorway.  She was sitting in my father’s chair, something that would have been forbidden, for any of us, when he was alive.

She looked as though she had seen a ghost.

“Is everything alright?”  I could clearly see that it wasn’t.

In her hand was a piece of paper and what I assumed was the envelope it came in on the floor.

She looked up at me.   “Your grandfather is dead.  My mother wants us to go to the funeral.”

Was it significant that she called her father my grandfather, and did not refer to her mother as my grandmother?  But what was more significant was the look on her face was the same as it had been when she had been attacked.

It wasn’t hard to put two and two together; the breaking had something to do with my grandfather, and she had been dreading this day.

“Where?”  It was a question I knew the answer.

“Germany.”

We had in recent times started to have conversations about where she came from and how she arrived in England.  We’d got as far as her mother’s grandparents leaving before the second world war to escape the Nazi regime, how she had returned to Germany as a child and met and married a German engineer, my father, a boy from a good German family approved by her father.  It felt, she said, as if it had all been arranged in her absence, but he had been attentive, polite and generous in those first years before and after marriage.  It was only later he changed.

She said after she married him and they returned to England where he had transferred for his work, that he became a vain and possessive husband who had virtually cut her off from all her friends and relations until his death.  My father’s parents had passed away at the time of the pandemic, much to my mother’s relief, and as for her father, it seemed that he and her mother were more supportive of her husband than her daughter.

Since my father’s death she had been a lot more at ease if not wary of people she didn’t know, although she still tended to prefer her own company.

“Perhaps it would be prudent to simply ignore the letter, pretend you didn’t get it.”

“I had to sign for it.  They are nothing if not thorough in dealing with matters such as this.  It would have been far worse if Gerhardt had been alive.”

“Do you have to go?”

“You know the answer to that question as well as I do.   It might have been better if I had returned to Germany after Gerhardt had died, but I refused, and it resulted in being excommunicated.  I can’t for the life of me understand why I’m being summoned now.  I told them then, when I was leaving, I never wanted to see or speak to them again.  When his parents died and we had to return for the funeral, he wanted to stay there, telling me only after we got there that he was going to transfer back to Germany, and we could live near my parents.  Gerhardt was always their favourite, and when my parents insisted, I obeyed my husband’s wishes I told them my life was in England and I had no intention of moving back to Germany especially anywhere near them.  Gerhard admonished me, taking their side, and I told him in no uncertain terms that if he still wanted to have a wife when he returned to England, he should not speak of the matter again.”

This I was learning for the first time, and it explained the frosty relations on their return, though that had been when I was younger and didn’t understand why grown-ups were always so cranky.

“What would have happened if we had gone back?”

“You would have been taken away from me.”

It was a simple response, but one if I let my imagination run wild could have had any number of connotations.  My father had always told me I was going to be an engineer like him and his father before him.  It was not a request or a suggestion.

It was not what I wanted, but I was terrified of him.

It was only after he died that I was able to switch to a less intense field of study, a journalist, and one day, to become a best-selling author.  It was hardly the occupation of a Schroder would be what he would say in barely restrained anger, his usual mode of addressing me.

“Then we have much to be thankful for.  I guess it means we have to go, but this time I’m old enough to look after you.”

“It may not be that simple.  My family are not noted for being what one might subjectively call normal.”

“Then let’s be unpredictable.”

I remember a few weeks before my father died, he had dragged me into the study and proceeded to give me a dressing down, not for the first time, but that time I had deliberately pushed him. It was the lecture on what the Schroeders stood for, and that was not flippancy.  Then when I back chatted with him, for the first time, he completely lost it.

And wittingly or unwittingly he let slip that family honour went back centuries that generations of his family had served their country proudly in many wars and that if his great-grandfather was alive, I would be shot.  German soldiers, given the wealth and standing of his family, were the chances…

At the time I just didn’t want to think about it.

When she didn’t respond, I said “I think it might be time to let you into a secret.  I have been seeing a girl who works with me at the newspaper.  I didn’t think she liked me but apparently, she does.  And surprise, surprise, she speaks German, as well as French, Spanish, and Russian.  I’ll ask her if she would like to come with us.  They won’t know what hit them.”

For the first time, in the wake of what was the worst news, there was a glimmer of a smile.

“I knew there was something.  Perhaps you are right.”

…

©  Charles Heath  2024

…

…

There was very little that interested me at school.

I used to think that all I wanted to be was a scientist, even when I had no idea what that meant, and that school was nearly 12 years of distraction.

As I got older and the various branches of science were brought to my attention, I started to think it was going to be too hard.

Botany, biology, chemistry, physics, and then each again part of something else, or a name that loosely held together a lot of other branches.

I was not interested in trees, animals, or humans.  I didn’t like the idea of exploring elements or minerals.   I wanted something big that few had seriously studied, that might have potential for a groundbreaking discovery.

Then I went to the space exhibition at the Smithsonian, and I was sold.

Like a great many others, I watched all the science fiction television shows like Star Trek or Star Gate, read books, and pondered over the possibility of there being other people out there in an endless universe.

After all, only so much could be conjured up by the writer’s imagination, and I spent a lot of time and effort investigating what was possibly right and what was definitely wrong.

That research managed to disprove a lot of the imaginary parts but left a few that might have the distinct possibility of being true, and in one instance, a large number of writers went back to a single piece of so-called evidence.

A place in a mountain range in Peru where there were caves with drawings that could be detected as actual sciences and their spaceships, and over the years, the number of sightings of UFOs.

According to some, it was a meeting place because most sightings were of multiple sets of lights.  Of course, there were photographs, but the thing with photography was that they could be faked.

I was going to have to see it for myself.

Hiking camping and living in rough terrain was second nature.  I was an outdoors person and a lot of the research required going to remote and sometimes dangerous places.  Aliens, it seemed, didn’t like urban areas.

I was going by myself, but in conversations with a fellow UFO enthusiast, one of the sceptics I often butted heads with, in internet forums, asked if she could come along for the ride.

Her reason was to provide a counterbalanced view.  She didn’t believe in UFOs or aliens.

I thought about it.  The fact I disagreed with her views, and we argued might have made it sticky at times, we had a strange sort of rapport in everything other than aliens.  I did say it was not for the faint-hearted, but she took that to mean not for girls and simply made her more determined.

She was going whether I liked it or not.

I shrugged.  That last video meeting, up till now the only way we’d met. was almost a fight.  I guess when I ended the call, I was going to finally meet her in person.

That was three days later at Lima’s Jorge Chavez International Airport.  I arrived the day before and had arranged accommodation, and then went to the airport to greet her.

I was not sure what to expect.  I’d seen her face over time, but that was about it, and being hopeless with faces was worried I might not recognise her.  It didn’t matter, she recognised me.  As it turned out, she was almost nothing like what I imagined.

“Peter Jacobson, I presume?”

It had to be the same day some football team was arriving back home, the waiting area was packed with fans, and it was going to be impossible to find her.  And, typically, they came out first, and the crowd went wild.  It was inevitable that I would miss her.

“Jennifer?”

“The same.”  She saw me looking at the crowd, now chanting.  “I would have to pick the same plane as the national football team.  It’s nice to meet you in person. You seem less professor-ish.”

I took that as a compliment, though with her I could never be quite sure.  What I could see was she was a hugger, which wasn’t a bad thing.

Given the nature of my studies and work, I didn’t have a lot of time for a relationship, and although I had girls as friends, there had never been one I could call a girlfriend.  Jennifer was the one I’d known off and on the longest.

“Are you sure you want to do this?”  I was practical because the next few days were going to be difficult, and seeing her, she seemed to me to be more accustomed to less vigorous pursuits.

She had labelled me as sexist once or twice for reasons I couldn’t understand, but now I think I could, and realised it the moment she frowned at me.

“Tell you what.  When we get back to the hotel, we’ll square off and see who wins.  I know who I’m betting on.”  Her tone had an edge to it, not the best way to start an expedition.

I shrugged.  This girl was going to change my attitude and a lot more before we were done.  “I’m sorry.  I guess there’s a bit too much of my father in me.  It’s no excuse, though.  I’ll try harder to be less of a moron.”  I held out my hand.

She took it.  “We make a great pair.  I’m overly prickly, taking offence about everything.  Most men think I’m a model, and the rest hit on me. You’re the only one so far who hasn’t.”

I could see even now that she was attracting attention.

“I’m hoping that’s a compliment.”

She smiled.  “It’s going to be fun.”

I thought it was going to be anything but fun.

…

Jennifer, I soon discovered was one of those people who was easy to get along with, and in another sense, it was easy to misinterpret the easy-going and almost flirty manner as something else  She was one of those touchy-feely types, and I was, to a certain extent, uncomfortable with.

I didn’t want to be misinterpreted but knew eventually I would because it was inevitable.  I was to a certain extent a standoffish and reserved sort, or so I had been told.  I tried to explain this and became tongue-tied, something that had never happened to me before.

She thought it amusing.

It was when I finally realised she was also very beautiful, and when we went out to dinner, she attracted a lot more attention, something she didn’t seem to notice or perhaps deliberately ignored.

It was just something else that concerned me, but it would not be for very long.  Where we were going, she would be completely wrapped up, and no one would be able to tell who or what she was.

The next day, we were heading for Cusco in the mountains where we would be staying with a friend I’d met on the internet and who had told me about the significance of the area.

He dropped us off at the start of the walking track that would take us 2km up into the mountains, to a place where there was a plateau about the size of 12 football pitches, reputed to be a UFO landing site.  We arranged to meet him back at the drop-off point in 4 days.

It took the better part of that first day to Trek up the side of the mountain and reach the edge of the plateau which when first sighted looked as though it could definitely be a landing site for large craft.

Winter was not far away, it was covered in patchy snow but soon it would be completely covered.  It would also be very cold, and I was thankful the real cold had not yet set in.

We set up our tents in a sheltered area at one end.  I had to admit I was surprised when Jennifer had shouldered her pack for the Trek and then made it to the top.  She had stamina and determination.

We cooked dinner and had hot drinks, then rugged up and went to bed.  It was dark early, and the wind had picked up.  The skies were cloudy, but a clear sky was expected the next day.

A rather strange noise woke me, and instead of pitch-black darkness, there was an odd eerie glow that was bright enough to be seen threw the tent material.

I put on the outer layer of clothing and put my head outside the tent flap.  Above us, quite some distance up in the sky was a bright light.  It was too big to be a star or a planet.

I would have said it was the landing lights of a passing plane, but it was too low, there was no sound, and it was not moving.

“You saw it too?” Jennifer put her head out and was looking upwards.

“I saw a light shining through the tent.”

“What do you think it is, without stating the obvious.”  She gave me one of her sceptical looks.

It suddenly moved sideways, slowly, then did a wide circle to come back to the original position.

It could have been anything.  I wanted it to be a UFO,

“Perhaps some local with a large drone with powerful LEDs making it appear that it’s a UFO.”

She smiled.  “I’ll make a sceptic out of you yet.  I mean, if this place had been cited as one where odd events occur, you have to ask why aliens come here all the time and not other places as well.”

The light suddenly went out, and we were shrouded in darkness.

“Well, that was exciting,” she said.

Fully awake now and needing to stretch, I got out of the tent and stood up.  Jennifer joined me.

“Coffee?”

The cold was seeping through the layers and a hot drink would help.  She nodded, looking up at the sky.  It was clear and now the focal point had gone, there were stars.

I lit the camp stove and put the kettle on.

Suddenly there was a humming sound and instinctively looking up I could see where stars had been a blackness.

Something was blotting out the stars.

Then a few seconds later bright lights came on, not the sort that were a single or several searchlights but hundreds in a very large circle, slowly descending a short distance from us.

At a guess, it was an aircraft about the size of a football field. Now visible side on, it was about eight or ten stories tall, with rows of pale light indicating the levels, and the shape more or less a dome.

I looked sideways at Jennifer, and she seemed awestruck.

“Unless the Peruvian government is secretly experimenting with a new form of aircraft, this has to be a UFO,” I said.

“It’s not possible.”

We watched it come down and then settle on the surface about three or four hundred yards from us.  The main lights went out and a new yellow set around the base replaced them giving the whole area an eerie glow.

“And yet something is over there,”

She came over and took my hand in hers.  “We can’t stay.  Who knows what is in that thing.  How do we know it’s friendly or dangerous.  Do you really want to find out?

It seemed we would not have a choice.  I felt a slight tingling sensation and then lost consciousness.   My last thought was, whoever or whatever it was, they didn’t want any witnesses.

…

When I woke I was standing, still holding Jennifer’s hand, but inside a large room with no furniture, windows or anything.  Just walls and doors.

Seconds later a man suddenly materialised in front of us, a man dressed in a sort of outfit ancient monks used to wear.  A man who looked very much like us, though with less refined features.

He looked like he was trying to speak, or marshall his thoughts.

Perhaps overawed or suffering from the effects of whatever they did to us, I went with “You’re obviously not from this place?”

His expression changed, perhaps one of recognition.  “No.  Perhaps not.  Why are you here?”

Odd question.  He or someone else on board had transported us here.  Or did he mean here as in the plateau?

“We were expecting you,” I said. We weren’t but I thought it was a good response.  I could see Jennifer was simply stunned.

“That is not possible.  We had troubles and set down to make fixes.”

“Why here?”

“One of many ports in what you call the universe.”

“You’ve been here before?”

“Many times.  Sorry, the problem is fixed.  We must go.  Perhaps we will meet again.”

He slowly disappeared, we got tingly again, and then nothing.

It was light outside when I woke.  The sun was out, it was quite warm, and there was no sign of the patchy snow.  It was like prewinter had turned into summer.

Jennifer was beside me, slowly waking too.

“What happened?” She asked.  She’d also realised the change from the night before.

Coming up over the ledge was my friend and several others.   When he saw us, he came running.

“Peter, Peter, you’re alive.  We didn’t know what happened to you.”

He hugged me then Jennifer.

“What do you mean.  We were here the whole time.”

‘”No.  You disappeared.  When I came back four days later you were not there.  We came looking for you. Found your camp, and nothing else.  It’s been almost a year.  Where have you been?”

…

©  Charles Heath  2024

…

…

The email I received said:

“Go to Newark airport, go to the United booking desk and give them your name.  Take proof of identity.  Pack for five days, light.”

It was going to be, supposedly, a magical mystery tour.  I read in a travel magazine that a company offered five-day inclusive trips to anywhere.  You do not get the destination, just what to take.  Then, just be prepared for anything.

I paid the money and waited until last evening when the email came.

I was ready.

When I presented my credentials as requested, I found myself going to Venice, Italy, a place I had never been before.

When I looked it up, it said it took about 10 hours to get there with one stop in between.  Enough time to read up on the many places to go and see, though according to the instructions, everything had been arranged in advance.

I could also take the time to brush up on my schoolboy Italian.

When I got off the plane at Marco Polo airport, in Venice, it was mid-morning, but an hour or so was lost going through immigration and customs.  A water taxi was waiting to take me to a hotel where I would receive further instructions.  I was hoping it would be on or overlooking the Grand Canal.

At the airport, I wondered if there was going to be anyone else on this trip or whether I would be doing it alone.  I’d read that sometimes like-minded people were put together for a shared experience.

We had to agree and then fill out an extensive profile so they could appropriately match people.  Sometimes, people join at different times along the way. You just never knew what was going to happen.

That random unpredictability was just what I needed, having just gone through a breakup after a long period of peacefulness and stability, and frankly, I would not have chosen this type of tour if I had not.

It was a pleasant half hour or so winding our way through the canals, having paid the driver extra to take a long route.  I’d not been to Venice before, but I had read about it, and while some of the negative comments were true, it didn’t diminish the place in my eyes.

And the hotel, on its own island overlooking the main canal, was stylish and elegant, and my room was exactly where I’d hoped it would be.  I think I spent the next hour just looking out at the city and the boats going by, like a freeway, a never-ending stream of traffic.

A knock on the door interrupted what might have been described as a dream.

On the other side of the door was a smartly dressed youngish lady in a uniform of sorts, who looked like a summer day.

“Mr Benson, my name is Conchetta, and I will be your guide for tomorrow.  I am delivering a folder with the places we will be going for your perusal.”  It was the most exquisite, accented English I’d ever heard and just wanted to hear more.

She handed me the folder with a smile.  “Until tomorrow.”

And left me wondering what just happened.

…

The next morning I went downstairs to the restaurant where breakfast was served and found a wide variety of different items that could serve any number of different tastes.

Mine ran to cereal, followed by bacon and eggs on last to fruit and coffee.

I brought a newspaper down with me, mostly to practise my very bad Italian, and had set it to one side after finding a table.

A waiter came and filled my cup with coffee, black, no sugar, my preferred type for breakfast.  Then it was simply a matter of watching the other people come and go.

Ten or fifteen minutes passed with the usual arrivals, and being the peak time, there was a wait.  Except some people who thought they were more privileged than others and pushed forward.

I’d seen the particular gentleman the previous evening when he checked in and was making a point about having booked the best room in the house, a statement I last heard in an old Hollywood movie.  Mr J. Dexter Pierpoint.

Now it seemed he was too important to wait in line, virtually shoving a woman ahead of him out of the way.  The staff at the door were trying to deal with him, and the melee had attracted everyone’s attention.

Meanwhile, in what had to be karma, the lady was shown in without having her room checked, a privilege she thanked them for.

It took five minutes to get Mr J. Dexter Pierpoint under control, by which time my attention came back to the lady.  It might not have except she was standing next to my table, looking for somewhere to sit.

“If you can put up with a much less boisterous American, you may want to sit here.  I do not take up much room.”

She turned slightly to see who was addressing her and then smiled.

“I have nothing against Americans, well, perhaps just one.”  She inclined her head lightly to give me a second look over, perhaps trying to decide whether to accept the offer.  “Thank you.”

She sat.  Her breakfast was healthy.  Muesli, I think, and multigrain bread.  She had the appearance of someone who looked after themselves, a few years younger than me, but at a guess, recently retired, either a schoolteacher or librarian.

Of course, she could equally be a top MI6 agent because all I knew about her was that she had a British accent.

“I apologise for my fellow citizens’ brashness.  It seems an element of our people seem to think the world owes them a favour.  I do not.”

“You don’t need to.  It just seems like the world has gone crazy.  I hope it’s not in the water.”

She had a look on her face, one that made it impossible to tell if she was serious or not.

“Do you talk over breakfast, or should I sit in companionable silence?” Best to find out if she’s a talker or a quiet one so that I could not be construed as ruining it one way or the other.

“You mean you want to interrogate me?”

“I rather think it might be the other way around.”

“What would you do if I were not here?”

The waiter came with coffee, but she was a tea drinker.  There was no surprise there.

“Go back to studying the room and its inhabitants, hazarding guesses about who and what they are.”

“For what reason?”

“So that people think I have a purpose being here.”

“Do you?”

Another waiter delivered a pot of tea.  I could see the tag sticking out of the top.  English Breakfast.

“Not really.  It’s the first morning of a tour, Venice is the first stop.”

“But that is a reason is it not?  You’re on holiday, or as the Americans call it, vacation.”

“I have another name for it, but that’s a long story you don’t want to hear.  My name, by the way, is Jay, named after Jay Gatsby of the F Scott Fitzgerald novel.  My mother was an avid reader.”

It elicited a smile.  “I gather you get that comparison a lot.”

“Yes.  It’s better to get it out of the way and move on.”

“I am Millie, short for Millicent to which I refuse to answer if you use it.  There is no relation to any character in any book that I know of.  My mother didn’t read books, just magazines.”

She poured some tea out of the pot into her cup and stirred it for about a minute, then took a sip.  It looked quite dark, which meant strong.  I preferred tea weaker.

She looked around at the hustle and bustle, taking a moment to look at each person, and then came back to me.

“What category did you put me into?”

I looked at her, having switched from bemused to something else.  Was it a challenge, and if I didn’t get it right, she’d lob a breakfast roll in my direction.

“Is that the same category of question; do I have a death wish?”

There was, all of a sudden, a hint of laughter in those blue eyes.  I suspect once upon a time she was a very beautiful blonde.  Still was very attractive, though I told myself I was not here to pass judgment.

“Death wish it is.  Retired schoolteacher or librarian.  Or just for something different, a top spy for MI6.”  There, it was said.

She laughed outright.  “I’ll own up to the librarian.  As for the rest, possibly a dream I had once.  Now, about you?  Let me guess, a retired executive of a multinational company.”

I guess I had the look.  I was not in a suit this morning, I had dressed down to a tie, vest, and jacket.

“Close.  My family has owned a shipping company for a century or so, starting with one ship, and now, it’s so successful that they don’t need me.  Someone suggested I take a world tour.”

“By yourself?”

“My wife died about five years back, and I thought I found someone else, but it didn’t work out.  I think I still hadn’t got over Ellen.”

“It’s hard.  My William passed two years back.  I miss him but I have to move on, so I’m told.”

She looked up, and I could see a young girl, late teens perhaps, searching the room and then stopping at Millie.

“Oh, dear.  She found me.”

“Your granddaughter, I presume?”

“My son didn’t like the idea of me visiting Italy alone.  Had this strange idea I might be taken by a fancy young Italian boy.  She’s here as his spy.  Apparently, she speaks fluent Italian.”

“And perfectly capable of fending off the would-be Italian Romeo’s.”

“That too.” She stood.  “Thanks for offering me a seat.  We may or may not run into each other again, but it was interesting.”

Another smile, and she was gone.

The first day, and I’d already said more to a stranger than I had in years.  I hadn’t realised that my life had got so boring or that I had so irrevocably wrapped myself up in my job that I’d missed everything else going on around me.

Perhaps that was why my last relationship failed.

Perhaps that’s why my children had practically forced me into getting away from everything, what Harry, my eldest son had said, “Take the time to wake up and smell the roses.”

I saw Conchetta, the guide appear in the doorway, and realised it was my cue.  The first day, quite literally, of the rest of my life.

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©  Charles Heath  2024

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