From a novel in progress...

I didn’t want a buffer and tried to tell her that. When shown the deep end all I wanted to do was jump. I felt as though I had been well and truly buffed-up enough. Thank you. I had been so polished it seemed to me that I was ready to be displayed. A reliable ornament. An expected sight. I was both heirloom and heir apparent. I was certainly meant to be, Espirit in waiting, and the doubters, from some of the Homes for Peace senior management, expressed concern over my father’s automatic sense that I, as his son, should take over what was now a large and multinational corporation. They were of the new school that didn’t believe in inherited wealth or privilege, that too many blue chips were willy nilly passed on to chips off the old block and soon you would have a successful age old business becoming a growing concern.

But anyway, but everyway, I stopped over in the city because I had to; there was no possibility of a flight direct and so I found myself in the bustling metropolis with one eye on where I was and many thoughts on where I was going. Seating myself in a busy café on the ground floor level of a fifty storey building that pushed aggressively full of gleam and steel into the low cloud and disappeared I ordered from a multilingual menu with an array of fused cuisines, I asked for only coffee and allowed myself the moment Etiane knew I needed. And both by her skill in negotiating with NGOs to get me visas and nearly official access and by her ability to have scoured my soul of the death craving impulses that had led me to lie down in snow, I found myself in a place, a space of incredible noise and fumes absorbed in the impact that was made when I woke up from being dead.