Ever since that moment, when Peter lost sight of the face of his first love, he lost his capacity to love complete entities, for loving a whole being, and was left with the capacity to love only the parts, not the sum of those parts. So he loved the image of the wet palm on the cold window. He loved the wet palm, left right, left right, loved its helplessness, not the distorted face close behind in shadow that he had guessed to be mouthing a desperate last message.
Actually, if he had made out Dawn's lips in their exaggerated movements, in their panic to shape her last words that afternoon, he would only have been able to love those lips, nothing more. Love them for their hopeless desperation.
Over the years he had loved the skin on Usha’s elbow, the dark down on her forearm. Beautiful, he just had to touch and kiss it, though these days he could never give her a face.
He loved the little fold of golden brown skin at Alba’s armpit, between arm and chest, exposed when she wore a summer top, and its hint of moisture, perfectly gorgeous, but could never give Alba a voice even though she was Spanish and must have had some kind of accent that made her different from the teeming crowds. Bug Eyed Peter thought himself incapable of ever feeling a greater love for anything than the love he felt for that moist angle of golden brown flesh. He just had to touch and kiss it again and again. His lips had to be there caressing its perfect beauty, his nose delighting in the sweet, delicate body scent of fresh cooling sweat.
Then, of course, he loved the fall of Aurora’s hair over her cool freckled cheek.
Then, of course, then came the moment when Peter felt a love so strong that it pushed way back into the shadows of inaccurate memory, into the darkness, into irrelevance, all the love he had lived previously.
He was at work shadowing people, on a typical working day, waiting. The bus station again. Diesel engines rattled, a thousand voices prattled and shouted. It was cold again and crowded and anonymous and smelt of diesel fuel and the damp of mouldy buildings that have never had the opportunity to dry out.
The crowds had their coat collars turned up to protect their necks from an icy late January wind. In fact, there were so many people that, in the end, you never really saw people at all, but bits and pieces of them and their belongings and surroundings.
A scent of acrid sweat follows and proceeds a grey trilby hat, black where rain had dappled it. A pale pigskin briefcase also rain streaked, deep yellow brown streaks, a hand, black hairs on the back of the fingers, clutching a handle. A priest’s dog collar.
Condensation. Someone’s ghost sits in the bench seat over the rear wheel arch and Peter can see a bit of heavy duty tyre, blue black rubber, a little cream coloured coachwork, a curve of maroon, and condensation and a sad hand desperately trying to clear away the droplets from the glass, left right, left right.
A damp, navy blue coat smells of mothballs and wet wool. Deep pink nail varnish, white knuckles wrapped round the dark, curved wooden handle of a lady’s umbrella, a checked design, dull dark blue and dull dark brown.
A hand clutching a rumpled handkerchief to a red, mean looking blue veined drinker’s nose. The sound of the clearing out of mucus and spitting.
The familiar, sweet smell of soiled underwear. The back of a child’s head, curl of black hair running down the centre of a neck, touching, just, a black blazer collar. The white back of cold knees between short trousers and the tops of long, dark grey winter socks.
Bits of faces, bodies, scenery, smells, sounds caught like bits of other people's conversations, relationships, thoughts and dreams, incomplete, disconnected, meaningless, empty.
Then, at the point of coming to realise this, to understand the emptiness, Peter saw something and knew that life would never be the same again, ever. Nothing he had ever seen before had caused him to feel so vital, so alive, so totally in love, as complete as he felt the moment he glimpsed the colour.
Safire blue, perfect, crystal clear, the eye spoke to him, so to speak, because he heard no words, and it told him that it was scared to death and just didn’t know what it was doing there and that it had nothing to do with her, who never saw a thing and so never understood a thing, that it was a slave to her and that it hurt, hurt really badly.
Peter saw into the eye, so still and blue and unblinking, and the eye reached into his for help and there was a connexion and he was in love with that eye which had no name and was never to be free. He was in love with a look that was the epitome of tragedy and it had no name. It all just hurt too much and he felt the overwhelming desire to softly kiss away the pain, again and again, until the kisses drew out tears and tears brought relief.
He blinked, he hesitated, he simply could not react. The eye vanished, never to be seen again, but he was left with the tragedy and an understanding for tragedy and a tenderness in his heart, and he has never lost his tragic self since.
Now, on cold, clear, clean nights of fresh bracing air, Bug Eyed Peter often spends his sleepless time staring at the moon calculating his ethereal triangulations,* acting in his film of lost love and lost opportunities, hoping that other eyes might be doing just the same,- keeping an eye out for him as he keeps an eye out for them.
Love is like that.
*A sailor’s sextant, warm polished orange brass, a sailor’s brass sextant from the nineteenth century. Triangulation, ethereal triangulation. Once calculated, forever calculated. A red moon. The curved line between lunar day and night gives depth and form to craters and the distance between points of reference has to be rescaled. A crimson cloud cuts between this point here and that distant horizon out there. Gold brass red. The sextant smiles at the beauty in little things.
Part of the private detective Harry Frame’s written thoughts, as published in “Backstage”, in the year 2000.
