THE CASE (PART SIX), ALBA’S LETTER MEANS SOMETHING

Alba’s sweet letter becomes Shakespearean Belladonna, and Alba is naked and offered up to her distant lover as her hand passes between her eyes and the windowpane, to vaguely point out some distant horizon over there, and there is another image beyond the glass and frame of the dirty sash-cord window, a newly revealed pale sepia moon caught in gaps between fast moving grey clouds thinning out in a dark sky.

Alba tears the blue lined writing paper, her letter, into a handful of petals

The richness of red bleeds into this sepia spotlight of a moon and the surrounding heavens. The blue-black sky becomes maroon velvet. The cutting clouds become a drifting mix between crimson and violet. Torn letter petals scatter like stars and she offers up a prayer, more like a curse, to their spreading display.

In the centre of her head there is a sailor’s sextant, warm polished orange brass, a sailor’s brass sextant from the nineteenth century. Alba calculates her triangulation, her ethereal triangulation, once calculated, forever calculated, London suburb to her red moon and from moon to the streets of small town Spain. The curved line between lunar day and night gives depth and form to its craters and the distance between here and there and Spain and back again, has to be rescaled. A crimson cloud cuts between this point here, her hand, and that distant horizon out there.

Gold brass red, the sextant smiles at the terrible beauty in little things, and, for an instant, she is every invincible hero or heroine that ever lived. The paradoxes of the plot! She plays all the roles, the detective, the victim, the perpetrator, the plotter, the lover and the loved. You will never see them, although you can hear all of them, all the characters, all back there sorting through the props, moving the scenery about backstage, but you can see the scenery trembling just so slightly.

For Alba, the daytime strangers can see nothing of any beauty out there, on the horizon. For them this playacting could never ever be worthwhile, the sense of magic gone, banished, washed away and ignored by them all, huddled as they are under the shifting forms between white and winter blue in the morning sky.