Work in progress

Vitae Lampada: Chapter 1
Page 1 of 6

Ninety minutes before start of play, Jon parked in his usual place. The first thing he noticed, getting out the car, was stillness. And the angst of stillness, as if the world had been guest at some cosmic party, and suddenly realised its talking was louder than anyone else in the room. He used to know a council employee, who told him noise reduction in Nottingham was thirty-two percent by the second day of an average weekend. However they measured it, this was more. It weighed in momentous and pending like the pause before a starting pistol, with a gravity of commemorative silence. There was no traffic. No one walked in the park or along Central Avenue or went in the Co-op. It lasted maybe fifteen seconds.

Jon observed it with his door open and his hand rested on his floppy hat over the frame. Under the nail his right pinkie was bruised and the cuticle ragged. He chewed the skin all the way down Trevor Road, though that part of the journey was easy to drive. The street hadn't changed in eight years. It was when he got to Tudor Square, and the shops had different names, different buildings. Everything stood at new angles, with fronts built from new bricks and windows double glazed. Somehow the pavements had grown curvier. He tore his finger out of his mouth to take the steering wheel in both hands, negotiate a convolution of mini roundabouts that diverted him past the police station. It was then he had his strongest doubts about his plan, and worried that the whole idea was a very, very big mistake. But the meeting had been set. So he, like the silence, was both nervous and resolved. It fit his situation so perfectly he moved his lips to shape the word 'yes'.

A cyclist appeared from the Park Avenue direction and whizzed through the car park. She braked at the bottle banks, wrestled a bag of glass from her pannier and started to smash each piece. Jon put on his hat and sunglasses and went round to open the boot. Inside, his binoculars had escaped the backpack and slid into a corner. He put them back, and checked the bag again for his pen and spare pen, Playfair annual and scorebook. He pulled out his jacket, then looked up at the sky. Chubby clouds with clean white tops, a few of which travelled nose to tail like bumper cars: these the weatherman said would stay all day. It wouldn't rain, but the wind might get up. Trent Bridge was a draughty ground but given that, it was very warm.

"Morning."

Jon dropped his head and found himself face to face with the cyclist.

"Sorry, afternoon! Listen to me, I always get my times mixed up."

For two reasons he didn't answer. Firstly, she was smiling that kind of smile.

"I couldn't help notice how you were looking up to heaven."

Eight years was enough time to formulate a theory of facial expressions. True joy created the beginnings of a laugh, a grin that exposed all top teeth and very often a ridge of bottom ones. Contentment would turn up the mouth at both sides, might or might not open it. Tellingly, the person who was not happy, but needed to convince him or herself that they were, would smile with top teeth well forward of a defensively curled lower lip. And they would open their eyes too wide, as if pleading.

The second reason he kept quiet was that he was sure he knew her.