Fairy dust

Strange days, empty days they were after the moon ran away. No one talks about it any more. It dropped and lodged in cliche: gone the way of the moon. Everyone had their own problems closed off from everybody else's. That's the way it seemed to me.

When I think back to that time, every thing seemed dusty. The light was always silver like the world was powdered with the scales off a moth's wings. It was as if the world had been packed away in the attic to be discovered again some misty summer day. Memories steeped in sepia, drained of everything but their age and timelessness.

That's the first memory, the second this: a staircase with a closed door at the top. Always this image of my life then, the stairs I climbed to my apartment every day I could bear to leave it and stand to return. In my memory the door never opens. It's just there at the top of a weary climb that never ends. The real stairs, the actual stairs were tacked to the outside of the house, worn smooth by time, by the gentle scuffing of footfalls of thousands of men and women just like me.

Other memories fall in around like a scattered shoe box of old photos. And, like photos, one actor is always missing: me, behind the camera. A camera records what it is pointed at with fidelity. I have no strong sense of myself at the time. Rather, the feeling I am left with is that of an emptiness, an absence. There is something missing from every frame. I flick through those photo memories now and find certain scenes appear time after time as though there was something special I wanted to capture there. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place. Maybe I wasn't looking at all. The other images are fleet, gone the way of the moon.

If I had a routine it was this. Each night a glass of water by my bed, each morning tanlged shadows as late morning sun shot through the water. My life didn't tick like a clock, but it felt as though each tick of the old wind up clock was marking another dusty mile along the road to... not nowhere although that's what it felt like, but here, as far now as the end of this line.

Most of the time, I read and the books piled up against the bare walls till the room, and then the flat, smelled like a second hand bookshop. I read everything and anything, scanning the charity bookstores, never spending more than a pound on any book. I read at home propped up in bed or in the pub beneath my apartment.

It was never busy in the bar which suited me fine. It meant I could take my time to relax into the shuffling silences. It was never dark in the pub either because the windows all down one wall faced south into the wasteground across the street. Warmth accumulated during the day and the shadows were stained a rich mahogany when you looked into them after the sun. The only time it got cold was a few days in autumn before the heating took up the slack from the waning sun.  It was then, in the flickering light, when the clouds rushed across the sky that it felt like the whole world was on the move and leaving me behind.

The regulars in the pub were the regulars in my life but I couldn't say there was a lot in the relationship. I'm not the gregarious kind, but I don't mind listening. Most of the time, conversations would be entirely one way. Sometimes I could even read and hold up my end of the conversation, which shows how much I was putting into things. The way I dressed meant I fit in with the rest, a kind of faded gentility style. The clothes were in the apartment when I arrived, and when I tried them on, they fit me so I wore them. My own suitcase is still there as far as I know, pushed back into the wardrobe where I couldn't see it or reach it without stepping up on a chair.

I could have lived that way forever.

But what happened? I guess if folks thought about it, they'd say I just vanished, upped and walked off the face of the earth: went the way of the moon.

Late sunday afternoon in May. The pub was half empty, or half full depending on your outlook. I couldn't decide. Best to wait until someone arrived or left and called it for one side or the other. I was half way through a novel, half way through a trilogy. You could say that things were hanging in the balance, but they'd been hanging that way for so long it didn't seem like it.

I didn't see him come in. The first thing I knew, he was standing beside the table with a pint in each hand and a paper tucked under his arm.

"Do you mind if I sit here?" he said. I shook my head in a non-commital way. He set the pints down on the table and settled himself comfortably into the chair. He say with his back to the wall watching what little action there was. I went on reading.

At the end of the chapter, I reached out for my pint and found it was almost empty. I sucked down the dregs and laid my book down, splayed open on the table. I made the briefest eye contact with the stranger across the table and as I did he nodded and his eyes flicked down. He pushed the spare pint towards me.

"On me," he said.

I thanked him. He was an old man with the look of someone who had lived and worked his whole life with other people's hopes and fears. They had worn him almost smooth. His hair was a delicate silver spray, tinged with a honey colour by the afternoon sun. His face was lined, not with laughter or with anger, but with the understanding of things. There is joy it said, and tears, but most of all a coming to terms. Each day is sufficient to itself, the seasons their own measure. He was dressed like me, which struck me strange.

We sat in comfortable silence for a while and sipped our drinks. The bar had tilted to half empty and now the moments of quiet could be felt between the thrum of conversation. I could hear the sounds of pints being put down on tables, chairs dragging across the bare wooden boards.

"Seems like neither one of us is much for talking." observed the old man. The way he said it told me it was fine by him. The words fit into the silence either side of them. He might have been speaking to himself. I looked down at my book, but I had no urge to pick it up.

"Is it any good?" said the old man.

"I've read worse and I've read better." I said.

"Then why keep reading?" I let the question roll around in my head. It picked up answers, dropped them again.

"It's what I do," I said finally.

We sipped in silence. The sun slanted in through the window at that angle which makes each moment last forever.

"Most people these days don't have the patience for that," he said, "Their time is too precious." He paused, but what he said didn't dovetail so neatly into the silence as before. I waited. His skin was a creamy silver in the sun, like drift wood. His chin stuck out further than is usual, his forehead was high and between the two, his face was long. "It's always been that way, but now so many things compete for that same small capital of attention." I nodded agreement. "What's the book about?"

I thought.

"The same as every other," I said, "the distance between what people want and what they are given." It was the old man's turn to nod. He smiled ever so gently. As the sun slid down to the horizon, it revealed more of his face. It seemed broader, waxing to the round.

"I'm an old man," he said and for the first time, I really saw how old he might be. He wasn't frail, but his eyes had been washed clear as water by all the things he had seen. "I'm tired too, so I'll make this short." He sat forward in his chair and for the first time looked me full in the face. I held his gaze for what felt like an age.

"I came down here to find you," he said, "and I've been looking a long time. Yours was the last name on the list." He pulled out a sheet of paper that was folded over again and again. If it was what he said it was then there were a lot of names on the list. Each one scribed out in neat copperplate handwriting, There was a neat line through every one, but the last.

"Why were you looking for me?"

"A job offer of sorts."

"Doing what?"

"No more than you are doing now. Taking each story as it comes, bearing witness without judgement. That's all." It sounded like something I could do. I inclined my head so he would continue. "You would be my successor. The job's for life..." He paused, squinting into the setting sun which shone in through the door at the far end of the bar, "...life and then some."

"How old are you?" The old man looked off into some imagined distance. He seemd to be counting off for the longest time.

"I'm seven hundred and fifty years old," he said, "or thereabouts. These things don't seem so important any more. Everyone keeps count in their own way. My way, simply, was to forget. How old are you?" I thought about it for a while. The last time I really thought about it I was eighteen, the year the moon disappeared.

"Eighteen and then some," I said. "How long have you been searching?" The old man smiled the gentle smile again.

"Seven years."

"Twenty-five seems to me about the right time to find a place in life," I said. We shook hands. It was a done deal.

"You'll know what to do," the old man said. His face was half in shadow now. He stood up and tucked the newspaper back under his arm. "Be seeing you." Then he turned and he was gone.

I finished the pint off and took the empties to the bar.

"Evening Joe," I said, "I'll be off now."

"Be good," he said.

"Can't promise anything," I said, playing along, "you might even see me on the news."

It wasn't far to go. Telescopes just make small things look big. It started with a dusty staircase, silver in the starlight. By the time I reached the door at the top, the risers shone. The door was open.

I started on a high. The moon was back and brought a little wonder to the world. Each night I sat and watched, a thousand, thousand, thousand lives. The moon looks down on each one just the same. Neither recording nor judging, a simple witnessing of things unseen, unheard, of the distances between.