Eternal City

Thompson Mark

Description

From the BESTSELLING author of DustLife can change in a split second, and so it does for twenty-eight-year-old photographer Finn Chambers. One careless decision at the Cimitero Acattolico in the eternal city of Rome, finds him falling head first onto Shelley' s tomb, to his death.He awakes to a beautiful afterlife surrounded by long-dead poets, artists and thinkers, including Shelley, Keats, Gramsci, Sanchez and the delightful Lady Mary von Haas, and these luminaries test Finn' s values and principles in a way they have never been tested before.Uncomfortable truths require honest assessment when the 21st century' s lust for celebrity, drugs, and fifteen minutes of fame, is questioned by others from centuries past but his new life finds much in common with his previous life, with love, art, sex, music, humour and irreverence, all experienced on this different and fascinating plane.For Finn Chambers there is life after death – and it' s a life worth living.

Informations

• Publié par: RedDoor Press
• Date de parution: 08 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781915194305
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

Extrait

ETERNAL CITY
Also by Mark Thompson
Dust
MARK THOMPSON
ETERNAL CITY
Published by RedDoor
www.reddoorpress.co.uk
© 2022 Mark Thompson
The right of Mark Thompson to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the author
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover design: Patrick Knowles
Typesetting: WatchWord Editorial Services
For Liz
… and to the memory of my wonderful mother and father, who I hope live anew
昔のことは水に流せ
むかしのことはみずにながせ
mukashi no koto wa mizu ni nagase
let old things drift away on the water
Japanese proverb
prologue
Let me get something straight. I should not be here. The others should be here. Just not me.
Shelley and Keats and Gramsci and all the others that ended up here. They should be here, but not me. I should be sitting in the rooftop bar at the Knickerbocker in New York City, or having dinner at Quaglino’s in London, or slumped in a deckchair at the mock beach by Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin drinking cocktails with Hannah. I should be glancing with pride at my wedding ring, as we stroll hand in hand. Most definitely of all, I should be anywhere but here.
They say that accidents can happen anywhere, any time, to anyone. It is the mantra of the health-and-safety brigade who make a cosy living in this modern world where fear outweighs delight. I mean, I jumped out of an aeroplane with twenty-five pounds of silk and cord and a gut-wrenching fear, only to be filled with a sense of pure elation ten seconds later, five thousand feet above a daisy meadow, that two grams of cocaine and a lottery win could not possibly match. Play safe long enough and you will still end up dead. There’s this idea that if you live life eating only health foods and abstaining from alcohol, cigarettes, narcotics and dangerous pursuits you will live longer. Maybe you will. Chances are you won’t. Wasted. Bored. Gone.
The combination of things in everyday life, their very order, determines outcomes. Some foreseen and others unforeseen. Looking left instead of right crossing the street in an unfamiliar road system in an unfamiliar country can get you gone. Let’s say you replace a broken wire inside an electric guitar amplifier. You connect it to the negative as you should, plug in your guitar, turn on the amplifier and play a tune. Job done. Let’s say, though, that you connect the new wire to the positive by mistake, through error, carelessness or lack of knowledge. You plug in your guitar, switch on the amplifier – and join me, and Shelley and Keats and Gramsci and the others.
Now, if I had come here with my camera earlier in that fateful day, climbed up the side of the tower taking good account of the loose moss and fractured stone, held on tight until I was balanced securely, then focused down on Shelley’s tombstone, clicked off a series of shots, then gone to meet Hannah at Masto, eaten lunch and drunk those great wines, I would probably be sitting in Madrid or Bogotá or some other capital city right now, reading my brief for a magazine or book cover shot. Instead, I am stuck here, forever, with a bunch of poets, religious maniacs and Romans.
The reason I am here is a combination of things put together in the wrong order. The irony being that I had put things in the wrong order many times, but never had such a bad result. Life, as they say, is what you make it. Then I found, aged twenty-eight, that death has to be what you make it. My advice? Live it while you can.
the flight now boarding
Four words I had never imagined speaking. Four words which, when placed in a particular order, can change a normally unconcerned person’s destiny, priorities, role, status, standing, and just about everything that has gone before. Four words which change lives forever. For better, for worse. For richer, for poorer. In sickness and health.
Four words can mean everything, or nothing at all, depending on the order they are placed. Order-created meaning. Honour. Your. Guilty. Not. Four words carrying differing weights. Honour. Such a hefty and regal weight. Defined as it is as high respect; great esteem , and the quality of knowing and doing what is morally right . But adding one extra word can change the idea of what is right to something else. From something laudable to something evil. Killing, for example. Honour killing . I ask, where is the esteem, the morality in that? Guilty is a word which really shouts. Or maybe not. Those four words placed in a new and meaningful order can change the course of a person’s life. ‘Not guilty, Your Honour.’ Not a sentence I ever had to say. But adding a single word after guilty can change it to something to relish. Guilty pleasure .
Let your hair down. Do not pass Go. Paint the town red. Throw me a line. Stand by your man. I want you now. Somebody call the cops. You are so beautiful. Tomorrow is another day. And the winner is. Your card was declined. You let me down. Live and let live. Keep off the grass. The flight now boarding.
And there I was, passport and boarding pass in hand, travel and camera bags at my feet, with Hannah embracing me, when, as she kissed me goodbye and leaned back smiling to look into my eyes, four jumbled words formed and jumped into my mind like party fireworks, all cracking and sparking and flashing so bright they lit up the world.
‘Hannah?’
‘Yes?’
Then they formed in sound as I let them fall whispering through the air.
‘Will you marry me?’
last call
Last call for British Airways flight BA one seven three to New York. Would any remaining passengers please make your way to Gate B thirty-five where this flight is about to depart.
I am now running from security to the gate, grinning wildly as Hannah’s reply, ‘Yes, oh yes, yes!’ repeats in my ears. I had uttered those four simple words. I received four words in response. Well, three of them were the same word, but they were words of gold. I am elated, bursting, positively divine. I am man. I am Superman. I am a god. My mind is filled with sun, rainbows, waterfalls, and the sounds of Beethoven and choirs and angels on clouds with harps. Keith Richards just blew kisses to me. I am kneeling to be knighted. I am a Nobel laureate, and the discoverer of a vaccine for every ill. I am an Oscar-winner. I am an astronaut. Everyone surrounding me is mortal. I am the saviour of mankind. I still feel her soft lips on mine, and our lips are honey and silk and gossamer and myrrh. I never felt this good. Not ever. Not when I signed to Lewis & Horwood Agency. A licence to print money. I was signed aged twenty-six, which made me the youngest photographer on their books, anywhere in the world. A fact recorded in blogs, photography magazines, and even a side comment in the New Yorker . I am not even American. A pretty good achievement by anyone’s stamp. And now I am blessed. Now I am immortal.
An oft-employed wry look and strained smile. ‘You just made it.’
‘I just got engaged!’ I say excitedly, showing my passport and boarding pass to the attendant, who hands them straight back after a practised glance.
‘Congratulations!’ she calls, genuinely smiling, as I dash towards the boarding bridge, waving my documentation as I had to Hannah when I’d passed through to security ten minutes earlier.
I apologise to the middle seat passenger as I slide into my seat by the window. The pilot announces that our final passenger, me, is now on board, ‘which completes checks, so we shall shortly be departing for New York.’ The seatbelt sign comes on, and the cabin crew begin a safety demonstration, which is easier to watch on the screens in the seat-backs. I ignore the demonstration. I’ve seen it all before.
My travelling companion, a sour-faced man in his fifties, says a slightly weary, ‘Good for you,’ when I tell him, bursting with pride, that I was late to board as I had just proposed and been accepted. The biggest moment in my life, the gloss of it only momentarily dulled by his additional sour comment. ‘I hope you both know what you’re doing.’ Not a question. A chastisement.
The sound of a doorbell chiming and Cabin crew, seats for take-off announces our departure, then comes the part I love most as we race along the runway, and the painted distance-markers pop up quicker and quicker until they blur into an indefinable on-off like a strobe light, and then a hard bump as we lift into the air and my stomach stays attached to the tarmac below. Then, after what feels like only a couple of seconds, the click of wheels folding up, and a sudden quiet and that initial feeling that the engines have stopped and we are about to be the opening headline on news stations around the world. Of course we are not. I am going to die, just not yet. Unexpectedly, but not yet.
We are still climbing, and I watch London fall away as we bump, bump, bump through changes in air pressure passing up through wisps of cloud. Suddenly we are above the cloud, in brilliant blue, as another doorbell sounds, and the simultaneous click of a pair of seatbelts unlatching heralds a stock announcement that the seatbelt signs are still illuminated and we, the flying cattle, should remain in our seats as the cabin crew whirr into practised motion. I am feeling euphoric and wish I could call Hannah to express my joy, but content myself with looking down on patchworks of farm fields, and the rare sight of a turquoise rectangle, a lone