Eye Spy

The Arabica coffee is pungent. I’m struggling to detect the delightful aromatic intensity that was promised on the side of the pack. But it’s hot and helps me greet a bleak, wet Wiltshire morning as I mull unsavoury events of the preceding month. As though on a video loop, I re-live my fortuitous escape from a gang of Eastern European thugs. I’m only assuming their nationalities as we were in each other’s company barely a few hours.

 At the time, I’d been working in the Australian embassy in Paris. Pascal LeFèvre and I had been crudely snatched from a seedy bar in the coastal town of Cherbourg-en-Cotentin and bundled into the back of a nondescript van but what could I disclose? With cable ties cutting into my wrists and a hood over my head, we drove a short distance before halting near a waterfront. Through the fabric of the hood and the black fog of fear, I could smell salt air and hear the gentle slap of water against boats. I’d been frogmarched onto a deck and jostled blindly down narrow stairs. When they unhooded me, I was pushed face-first onto coiled ropes and wooden pallets in the fetid bowels of an anonymous fishing vessel. Despite their brutality towards me, discernibly moreso than to Pascal, I’d offered no meaningful answers to their heavily accented questions. Their soulless demeanours only altered briefly when my bladder released involuntarily and I pissed my pants. Despite vigorously protesting a case of mistaken identity, I visualised myself chained to a concrete block. Would I be pleading? Would I be sobbing uncontrollably before being despatched to the ocean floor?

 Wind-borne rain drives into double-paned windows which I’m propped against in the comfort of the second-storey window-box protruding above Penny-Farthing Lane. Despite cuts and bruising around my mouth and eyes, I greedily slurp my coffee and transfix on the unusual pattern each raindrop makes on the glass as its atmospheric waltz splatters to a halt and slides unceremoniously downwards onto the roadway below. Umbrellas scurry along the footpath beneath me, their owners hunkered from rain and focused on wrestling the wind whilst oblivious to my vantage point in the window-box overhead. I sympathise with them the urgency of their errands yet smugly congratulate myself that it’s not me out there.

 I have Pascal LeFèvre to thank for my deliverance. After several hours of the monotonous thrumma – thrumma – thrum of the fishing vessel’s diesel engine, we had been thrust deep into the English Channel in the blackness of night. When the huge merchant ship had unwittingly sliced through our unlit fishing trawler as we crossed the shipping lanes, it was Pascal who had dragged my semi-conscious, sodden body onto a wooden pallet and released the cable ties binding my wrists. Swimming alongside, Pascal had shepherded the trawler’s pallet to shore on a lonely beach near Ventnor on the Isle of Wight. It was almost dawn. Then he’d disappeared. In retrospect, I guessed he’d also been responsible for alerting the Australian High Commission in London to my whereabouts. They’d organised this safe house for me in Salisbury. But… other than being low-grade clerks and work colleagues at the embassy, I keep asking myself who is Pascal? Is he one of ours, or one of theirs? Or both?

 Across the ridgeline of the shingled roofs on the other side of the lane, forlorn pigeons cling precariously. Feathers are primped for warmth, heads tucked beneath wings; no doubt the miserable weather is foremost in their cooed conversations. Three or four abruptly fly off towards the nearby Salisbury Cathedral possibly seeking sanctuary, but probably just another roof to crap on.

 Clusters of terracotta chimney-pots stand sentry-like on rooftops above Salisbury’s mediaeval houses. Occasionally a curlicue of smoke dances seductively upwards before, inevitably, the wind and rain unceremoniously whips it sideways and downwards along the lane. The swoosh of rubber tyres along wet, cobbled roads is seemingly out of context amongst ancient brick, stone, flint and timber beams of crooked, five centuries old cottages. And in the solitude of my reverie, I visualize horses, carts and hooves below me, and hear the metallic clack of iron rims and horseshoes against flint cobblestones. Since my watery salvation, I’ve been gifted fresh eyes, as well as my life.

 But I’m abruptly transported to reality. A pigeon smacks against the glass beside me; hair-trigger survival reflexes lash out and I accidently kick my coffee. Rescuing it without spill, I release an audible sigh and gulp the last satisfying mouthfuls. My delicious sensory embrace with the elements must cease forthwith while I refocus on the reason I’m reclined in the window box. Flipping open my laptop, I type in the web codes for my handlers. In a world brought to its knees by the vagaries of a microscopic virus, I urge them to scramble for rapidly diminishing airline seats to ensure my return to Australia before its borders close to international travel. Prior to tracking down and grilling the elusive Pascal, then commencing my next European assignment, this ‘low-grade clerk’ intends to relish a few months of kicking back and viewing Sydney’s summer storms through the prism of fresh eyes.