They met at a birthday party.
‘Bums and losers’ Andrew called most of the people there – janitors with poetic pretentions, housewives with artistic delusions, the long-term unemployed. Red wine and cigarettes.
Gerard fitted right in.
How Deborah had seemed to fit in was a mystery. It is even a mystery as to why she was there – she didn’t even know the person whose birthday it was.
But somehow they ended up dancing and then it was as if twenty-five years of life apart was like a vacuum that sucked them irresistibly together. The Sun was coming up and everybody had gone home when they discovered they had spent the whole evening sitting on the windowsill lost in each other. The great affair had begun.
It was not to be expected – Gerard was a bum and a loser, Deborah was a consultant and a millionaire.
When, months later, he was taken home to meet Mother, he got lost in the family house and spent quite some time wandering in circles before being rescued and guided back to where he was trying to get. Mother took the pair of them for a drive in her carriage. Her carriage!
That birthday party had been not long before Christmas. For Christmas, Gerard gave her a small gourd decorated by some African with pokerwork elephants; Deborah gave him a book – but a book made of porcelain, an objet d’art, a porcelain sparrow alighted on the edge of a porcelain book.
‘… it is
lost as the song
of a violin in an
avalanche –
All I see are
eyes glazed with
thin pain, the
shattered diamond,
shards piercing
the quiet with
brilliant points;
the broken ring.’
It was only years later, when she was wowing high society in New York city and he was – still a bum and a loser in the sticks, that he discovered that the piece was by a famous Japanese monk artist and was worth an arm and the leg.
Perhaps he would hock it off now to some rich collector.
Barnaby McBryde
‘Bums and losers’ Andrew called most of the people there – janitors with poetic pretentions, housewives with artistic delusions, the long-term unemployed. Red wine and cigarettes.
Gerard fitted right in.
How Deborah had seemed to fit in was a mystery. It is even a mystery as to why she was there – she didn’t even know the person whose birthday it was.
But somehow they ended up dancing and then it was as if twenty-five years of life apart was like a vacuum that sucked them irresistibly together. The Sun was coming up and everybody had gone home when they discovered they had spent the whole evening sitting on the windowsill lost in each other. The great affair had begun.
It was not to be expected – Gerard was a bum and a loser, Deborah was a consultant and a millionaire.
When, months later, he was taken home to meet Mother, he got lost in the family house and spent quite some time wandering in circles before being rescued and guided back to where he was trying to get. Mother took the pair of them for a drive in her carriage. Her carriage!
That birthday party had been not long before Christmas. For Christmas, Gerard gave her a small gourd decorated by some African with pokerwork elephants; Deborah gave him a book – but a book made of porcelain, an objet d’art, a porcelain sparrow alighted on the edge of a porcelain book.
‘… it is
lost as the song
of a violin in an
avalanche –
All I see are
eyes glazed with
thin pain, the
shattered diamond,
shards piercing
the quiet with
brilliant points;
the broken ring.’
It was only years later, when she was wowing high society in New York city and he was – still a bum and a loser in the sticks, that he discovered that the piece was by a famous Japanese monk artist and was worth an arm and the leg.
Perhaps he would hock it off now to some rich collector.
Barnaby McBryde
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