Sun at Midnight

There was a stone jetty with boats moored along its length, a converted boathouse calling itself the Coffee Plantation and sunlight winking on the water.

They walked on, through the tunnel of trees. When she lifted her head, Alice saw jigsaw pieces of blue sky between the leaves.

She felt as if the tendrils of familiarity were reaching out and wrapping round her ankles and calves, like vines, growing and thickening and anchoring her in this place that had once been hers and no longer was. Trapping her.

This is what time and age do, she thought. Passion and pain are both dulled, then they fade away altogether and leave acceptance in their place. Habit and familiarity knot round each other like the dry balled roots of an ancient tree.

Time weighed heavily on him and the future stretched away like a parabola that finally dipped out of sight beyond an uninviting horizon.

There was a whole separate future within the baby, like a long message written in tiny handwriting and hidden inside a nutshell.

He knew that what he had witnessed was as timeless and elemental as the slow glaciers, the mercurial shifts of the weather and the ice itself.

Rooker needed every particle of concentration for flying and navigation by instruments alone. It was like being airborne in a bowl of milk.

She was entirely swaddled except for her small, composed face. For what seemed a very long time, suspended between awe and amazement, Alice studied her stipple of black eyelashes and the scoop of flesh that formed her nose and the precise bud of her mouth.

In the endless hours their histories and hopes and confessions seemed to flow through their joined palms.