Skylights

Alex Drummond was born on April 18th 1960, and three days later his parents took him home to a very small but charming loft apartment in Archway, London. There his crib, and a year or so later his bed, lay at the foot of theirs directly beneath a large skylight. He had never lived anywhere without a skylight since; if it didn’t have a skylight, he couldn’t conceive of living there. It was a persuasion that bordered on the maniacal but he was, for the most part, able to keep it from most people given that it wasn’t the sort of thing that came up in conversation very often.

Every morning he would study the sky from where he lay, dead still, almost scared of disturbing it from the perfect natural state in which it presented itself to him. He soaked up all the details, took in every nuance; the rich palette of colours, the shape of the clouds, the way the light filtered down from the top of the world through the different layers of the atmosphere. All of it was noted, every little component, every attribute, every characteristic, no matter how temporary or unassuming, as if each morning might be his last.

To Alex the consistent passage of day and night was of great interest and comfort. He loved knowing that the Earth would have turned on its axis at a rate of one-thousand and thirty-eight miles per hour, at the equator, and at an angle of between twenty-two point two and twenty-four point five degrees, depending on the Earth’s current position in its forty-one thousand year cycle. He was infinitely grateful that the twenty-four hour cycle was something that the human race had come not only to understand but also to abide by. Nature had decreed at some indeterminable point in the past that human beings must sleep during the night and stir in the morning. And Alex believed, although he was a little reticent to say so in public for fear of drawing too much attention to himself, that every morning offered a new start, with new opportunities and experiences. He had decided at an early age that dawn was always the most beautiful time of day. It was so blissful and quiet, he thought; so new and untouched. Those in spring were fresh to the skin and draped with mist; those in summer alive with rustling, unseen wildlife. Autumn mornings were made of damp gold yet subject to violent mood swings, pointing the way to winter, when the heart of the day could be as dark as the dead of night or as clear as a July afternoon. All seasons were temperamental, of course; you would be a fool to trust the tale any morning had to tell at any time of the year, Alex thought, but then that was what he loved about them.

It seemed to Alex that the weather in London could be just that capricious, if not more so. It could promise a clear day when you awoke and then turn evil before you were even halfway around Regents Park. You would be as well to pack an umbrella as you would sunscreen; entire families would run for cover in mid-summer, strafed by slugs of fist-sized rain. Conversely, you could lay awake throughout the night, kept alert by the thin shrill of the wind, watching as grey sheets of leaden pellets battered the thin glass of the windows, only to open your eyes to a clear sky, glowing icy-blue in its vibrant freshness. And that was the way that Alex grew up, not unlike millions of other people, at the mercy and whim of London’s unpredictable weather system.

More clearly than any other morning, Alex could remember the first time he woke up next to Juliet. She made him wait four years and fourteen days for that morning. Four years and fourteen days from the day he turned his old, red, rusted Mini Cooper into the car park at London Metropolitan University and knocked her clean off her bicycle. Juliet - like almost all humans - was not accustomed to flying unaided, and so ten feet later she landed unceremoniously against a collection of dustbins. Alex had a great deal of explaining to do, not just to Juliet when she finally woke up, but also to the nurse at Accident and Emergency, and then to Juliet’s parents when they arrived at the hospital to see their daughter. Given the circumstances, Alex was pleasantly surprised that he had ever woken up next to Juliet at all, so he considered himself rather lucky that the wait was only four years and fourteen days.

Alex awoke first that day and studied the morning. It was October 10th 1982, and summer was beginning to fall deeply into the shadow of an approaching autumn. Looking up through his skylight in a tiny, cramped loft conversion in Battersea, he could see that the sky was bruised purple, flecked with silver and gold. The last vestiges of moonlight were mixing with the advancing rays of the sun, curving around the surface of the planet and racing into the darkness of his sleepy London studio flat. The clouds were high and sparse, lacerated by the chopsticks of an aeroplane’s contrails. Yet Alex found that he was not as transfixed with the sky as usual, and he realised why this was when he turned to see Juliet sleeping beside him.

The gentle rise and fall of her perfect chest, the flutter of the draped lock of deep brown hair that danced in front of her nose with every exhale, the flickering of her eyelids as she passed through invisible dreams; these were the things that would stay sharp and resolute in Alex’s memory. When he could no longer bear to be without the sound of her voice, he took his fingertips and stroked them along the contours of her back, barely touching her, her warm skin white like milk. Juliet opened her eyes; shockingly blue, almost turquoise like a shallow tropical sea and piercing even amid the growing brightness of the room. Next, she smiled, and bought from him his love forever. It was the most beautiful morning Alex had ever experienced.