A prologue of sorts from Emma Saywell, Londoner ...

Emma has covered most of the wars you have read about in the last decade. Hes second book, THE EYES OF WAR, is selling well. But she's had enough. She takes her camera for a stroll in Kew Gardens...

WATCHING SWIFTS

 

By R.J.Askew

 

Kew Gardens, London, one summer

 

 

I shot him. That’s how summer with my Swift man began, three shots one sunny late-April morn. Three shots I gaze at with a never-before-known wistfulness.

Love, life and death. That was that summer.

Though it’s the drawings he gave me that boss my eyes, like grappling hooks. Up he swarms into me from his pencilled brilliances. Never saw myself as nature girl, but when I gaze at his drawings, spread out on my desk…

I photographed him as I've photographed a thousand faces, men, women, the world over. Most just smile, look embarrassed, the living that is. Being a war photographer…not ideal now, sooo not ideal, especially when one loves the human face. If only one could turn one’s love into… But then I’m no artist, I’m a war photographer, or was. Ten years, click, click.

EMMA SAYWELL, AKA, ‘RICHOCHET’

Some get angry, not many, but some do, get angry, just part of the human continuum, no problem. Just observe, don't judge. I’m detached, too detached, ‘not an artist’, efficient, professional, first with that thousand-word front-page image, ‘Ricochet’ to the paras in forward recon, no fool. Yet my Swift Man drew me in, literally.

‘You photographed me,’ he says, all smiles. ‘That means I can draw you. Sit down please. Luigi! Get my snappy friend an espresso.’

He had me. I am curious, can’t say no, especially with him smiling so. Oh that lucky smile of his…why I shot him in the first place, for his Green Man smile, though I didn’t know that’s what he was when I did. You could say I collected him, though I’m not a huntress of men. No specimen drawer with trophs pinned in it. He seemed to know it. Have you ever met anyone with savant insight, know more about you than you do?

I thought, this guy’s extraordinary, but why? So I sat down with him as he took his break from selling rip-off ice-cream in Kew Gardens and watched in disbelief as he actually got out his pad and pencils, smiling like he knows all your secrets. Then he’s drawing me.

I watched him working and wondered what I'd stumbled into, some street artist? He works at speed. People stop to look over his shoulder in amazement. My gig's taken me from Minsk to Moose Jaw. This was new.

Did my life change the day I met him? Yes, though I didn’t know it then. Before I met him I’d have said I’d seen too much of life, or thought I had, to admit I was ever likely to experience such a radical emotional re-birth. But I did. Did I lose my head? Yes, I stopped looking at life with my head and started looking with my soul. I was a slave to the tyranny of fact based reality, thought too much. A chance encounter with another human being and your life changes radically. I went for a walk in my local London park with ‘Broken’, my battered old Canon. I was going to shoot the lily pads in Kew’s dream of a Lily House. How can that change anything? All a bit humbling, yet oh so wistful, fresh, enlivening.

He got me talking, telling him everything. He missed nothing. I just opened up to him that spring morning. I’m pretty tough. I’ve seen men at their very best and their very, very worst, but this… Told him everything. We’d just sit and talk, talk. Learnt things about myself.

Three pics. Never shot him again. That's all I've got, three shots, and a thousand sticks of memory. Most inspiring summer of my life, three swift months that made sense of all that went before and sowed a field of… Hope was a frailty I'd always scorned. Such was my weary view of how we can be, until I met Leonardo, my Swift Man, real name Tom, greenest of eyes.

I tell stories with my lens, don't get involved, never become the story, objective, detached, follow the rules, stay alive. Get the picture. Get paid. It’s a technical function, even shooting a cairn of bodies after a missile strike in the Swat Valley, especially shooting a cairn of bodies after a missile strike. Seven headless bodies there. Five heads there. Which goes with which? Nothing's forever, nothing matters. That was me, wondering if I’d see 2020, or even wanted to, efficient to a fault, boxes ticked.

I spotted him one Monday morning, before a single swift was back. I'd always taken them for swallows or house martins. Twenty-first century busybusybusy, right? Like, swift from swallow, who needs to know?

I was a hundred meters off, scoping my long lens on a little al fresco cafe. And there it was, this flashing smile, right in my lens. And the people he was serving were laughing at whatever it was he was saying. And he kept looking up at the sky. Why? What was he looking for, some eye-in-the-sky drone dude? He'd pull an ice-cream, check out the sky. I look up. At what? The sky is empty.

I was instinctively drawn to him. What was he looking for? And what kept him smiling? What was it about him? I was getting mad, can you believe? Idiot man! What was it? Yet he kept drawing me on.

Have you noticed how the men you want are not the men who want you back? He broke all the rules, Mr. Shabby-Chic did.

I’m sitting at his cafe now in my mind's eye. It's at a crossroads in the heart of London’s botanical garden soul. Five or six paths meet in front of a yellow brick Georgian building that’s like some small but elegant country villa, The Old Specimen House. You can't miss it, there's an enormous monkey puzzle tree right next to it with dense dark green branches of shiny razor-sharp leaves that sweep down to the ground like wings. You can’t see any twigs or the trunk of the tree as every inch is covered in those deadly stiff little dagger leaves. Nature can be so utterly malevolent when she puts her mind to it. It’s like I’m a character in some dreamy allegorical novella, blissfully unreal, yet all the better for being so.

His ice-cream stall’s cheek by jowl with Luigi’s creperie. They share about a dozen little tables with orange tops and blue parasols. The table furthest from the tourists’ trail was the one we usually sat at. RESERVED. It was also the furthest from the monkey puzzle, which he seemed to take exception to.

Yes, I got to know him. I used to sit there when he was working sometimes. Yes, I spent many hours sitting at 'our' table, sometimes reading, sometimes just watching the world do its thang, thinking, waiting for him to join me. Yes, I've done a lot of reading and thinking this summer, the most relaxed I've ever been, ever…thirty-one. No more, no mores. The feeling’s still with me, even now. Even the Java I’m sipping now tastes the sharper. But it was talking to him, listening to him… That was the heart of it.

It was watching him watching the swifts that did it, those magical sonnets of flight. And the way my tracks kept drawing me back to his cafe, to him, even when I told myself to stay away and focus on my book, especially when I told myself to stay away and get back to Afghanistan for a post-war retro. A busy time for war snappers. And the things he said, things that happened, strange things I wouldn’t have believed if I hadn’t witnessed half of them. Nothing shattering, little things, moral and spiritual things… Mind’s eye green.

I’d stay away for a week or two. Sometimes felt a bit odd about it all. But then I’d go for a jog and be back sitting there with him during his breaks, though I’d often sit there when he was serving, too, just watching the swifts until I was almost as obsessively into their flight as he was.

But it was the things he said that won me.

He breathes verse, speaks like he’s in a state of perpetual enlightenment, animated, yet thoughtful, like some instinctively intelligent and articulate joy force, a wild burst of spring. Nothing freaky or geeky. Tanned like he’s been fixing roofs all his life, crumpled linen, mid-thirties, lost to the male grooming sector, totally unsalvageable. White shirts. Dark voice, 70% cocoa, breather of poems. Like this:

DREAMALITY

Inside light we travel... O... O…

Not fast enough! we go beyond

The eye of light observes us pass

Recedes in awe at human thought

The speed of which... Can you conceive?

These multi-verses in our souls

Are vaster than the one without

We are, it seems, astonishing

Complexities compounding deep

Inspiral dreams intrinsicate

Love’s primal nature beauty born

To be, to think, to see, to blink

.

As you receive this peerless truth

Perceive creation’s yearless youth

.

Gentleness. That’s the word that best fits him, though his life’s been anything but. Yet he’s survived it all with this incredible, well, the word is gentleness.

There was something else about him. As I was sitting there trying to read him, it was clear he was reading deeper, delving into me with uninhibited curiosity. I felt like I’d met a modern-day Hamlet in a manic upswing.

I made some notes and taped some of what he said. Force of habit.

I mean, watching swifts? Excuse me. Hasn’t a grown woman got her to-do lists to work through?

I did, was just about to get my second collection of photos published. So I should have been on a high. Though for some reason I was feeling, well, off the pace, for no obvious reason, that was the worst part, the randomness of my languor. My doctor said I was stressed and told me to go home and listen to some baroque music. Baroque block. Being drawn to The Pillars of Creation by Nature’s best in the form of a walking-around man with a mane of wavy raven hair proved, well… Girls! Wash your minds out.

EMMA SAYWELL, 31, WAR PHOTOGRAPHER

And so I’m sitting there being drawn by a lovely lunk who can’t stop smiling, or talking, though he actually turned out to be a black-belt listener. He had to be, the way I was, all warred out. But this is not about me, the messenger.

I’d just finished with Josh after a stormy three-year off-off affair and I was having a fling with DC, cul-de-sac man. Josh was my action man, save that the action wasn’t always with me, or just with other women. And all cardigan-man DC wanted was someone just like his jealous mother. So my walks in Kew were rare moments of escape from all that. Cue serendipity. You spend all your life trying then just as you are about to…

So this is what my Swift Man said, his words.

My first thought was why am I listening to this egoid loser? I seriously though he was insane, a perv even. You know what London parks can be like for a lone woman. I’m a war photographer. I’ve smelt the death, full-mental survival instincts. I of all women should not be listening to this man. London can be just as dangerous as any conflict zone, different danger, more surprising. You know where you are in a war zone.

But listen I did. Perhaps it was the way he was drawing, always drawing. His interest in me was different to that of any other man I’ve ever met, which made him, interesting, curiosity begetting itself in like measure.

And so I found myself listening. Some of the things he confessed to me, dark things, moving things…

 

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Author's Note

If you have enjoyed what you have read please click on the link and load the rest onto your Kindle, iPhone or iPad There is an active link at the end of the chapter. Or you can copy this one ... THANK YOU :)))

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Reviews

[TL Boehm]

amazing write. Simply amazing. I have always been a fan of your poetic side but you are an accomplished storyteller.

[Mark]

Ron, I won't echo what "indimeco" and "aarontastic" wrote, but they have helped me understand some things, which previously I could not put a finger on. It's that, in brief, your writing is SO ethereal, each sentence is SUCH a piece of art, that I cannot believe they are part of a paragraph, let alone a story. They flow more like poetry in their purity. You simply cannot believe that each sentence, or each paragraph, could be bettered...AND THEN IT IS! It's a very pleasant sort of emotional overload, I must say! TO no-one's surprise, another fine job, mate. Let me know when it comes out in hardcover, as I simply CANNOT read an entire novel online.

[emmajoy]

Had to read this considering the name of the woman!

You thread words in an almost balletic style: specific, flowing, twirling then poised as if showing how. I have a distinct picture of the woman and long to see more of the man; in spite of a brief description, he seems to stand in her shadow a little but then, that adds to the mystery. My feeling is, for now, that he or she might come and go like those glorious swifts .. but shhhhh don't tell me.. i need to read and keep reading .. and will.

Your style of writing is most unusual, details wrapped in stylish words and phrases but never too dramatic, thank goodness. I get the impression that you've read your own writing and honed it to the nth degree .. perfection is the goal and .. success, for sure.

[EMMIE]

I'm not going to write you a novel like some of these people have done lol. But I will tell you that this is very, very well written and unique. Creativity.

[Ken Simm.]

You have to be quick to watch Swifts. You know I would be intrigued by the title of this one and I must say it lived up to and beyond its promise. Listening to barouque music as an anti stress cure. Now that is good.

[Donald Meikle]

y'tell a luvverly tale 'lando and considrubly better than I. It's a plesure t've found you again. The business cards was priceless .Hell I might even download and read the book Although I've sworn off reading since I started writing.

[Trusting]

Lord,sorry,I don't read proluges... >.> But I gotta say I may enjoy the rest!

[Muse]

This is like a trailer tease for a blockbuster movie I'd love to go see. It was this sentence alone that summed it up best:

A chance encounter with another human being and your life changes radically.

And to tell this from a female perspective...very risky...but you do it rather convincingly.

This story is not so much erotic..but rather a long mooshy thought. The minds eye is always curious.....I suppose this is why we take so many chances? Does curiosity ever kill the cat? I hope so...otherwise what fun would it be to take another dare...another risk.

[Tina Kline]

Very entertaining, this stream of consciousness. I figure she needs to sit down and get to know this guy so their romance can began. I'm thinking that this is where the story goes. And once it does it can only get more entertaining. Your style really is unique and different. Great job!