BY JONATHAN PETT
Previously published in May 2023 in Home Lifespan Vol. 7 from Pure SLush Books. Copyright is held by the author.
THE VIEW from this terrace is staggering, it’s major, it’s life-saving. It’s about a 5-by-5 ft square of concrete. But for Jack, it’s a perch on to heaven. From this point on, he feels good. About himself. About his life.
Jack and Bella bought this house because of the view from the terrace. They knew instantly that this house was going to be good for them. They saw children. They saw a place for them to breath and stretch out in. And that view…was going to be their salvation. Their view onto another way of life.
Jack met Bella 15 years earlier, on a train between Paris and Venice. He was twenty three. He was out for a life change. And maybe that’s why it happened. It’s not just meeting the right person. It’s wanting it. It’s being open to changing your life. To allow it all to veer out of control into a completely unexpected direction.
There was no escaping it. She was there. Smiling and smoking, in the middle of a bunch of students partying it up in one of those old fashioned Italian train compartments. If he was a fetishist, he would be a fetishist about those little white shorts of hers. The ones she was wearing when he first met her. They were sort of white jean material, with little pockets at the back and frayed at the ends. If he was a fetishist, he’d include that white and blue striped T-shirt she was wearing in his collection. It was so French, so loose, flapping around her in the summer breeze. He would’ve followed those little white shorts and that blue and white striped T-shirt anywhere. And he did.
He only saw her. She was transcendent. He sat beside her. They shared cigarettes. And talked. And, as the party broke up, they were left alone. And the lights went out. As they do in Italy, even on trains. And they kissed. And morning came, so quickly, and they found themselves leaning out of the train window, watching the Venice lagoon in the early morning mist.
When they stepped out of Venice station, he turned to look at her. She had tears. Her eyes were devouring the picture in front of her and tears were swarming over her. Their life was changing. Something amazing was happening to them. And the fact that it was all happening in this ridiculous, outrageously unreal place called Venice, made it all seem so overwhelming. This place could not be true. What they were feeling could not be real.
They’d always found it difficult to live up to the way they met. To make their life together as romantic, as dream-like, as memorable as that Summer. Until they decided to buy this little house in Castera.
Castera is on a hill. From their terrace, they can see the sun setting over the nearest town walls, in the distance.
All the houses in Castera are connected to the castle. Most of the people who lived within the walls of the village probably worked for the castle. Some still do.
There’s a tree-lined avenue at the front of the village with a cafe and, further down, their arch enemies, the Restaurant La Casteroise, where all the expats go.
On this avenue are the houses with the terraces. And the view. Theirs is the crumbly, chipped, soiled looking one between the cafe and the castle.
When you enter their house, you can’t help notice a giant Miro like fresco on the kitchen wall. The bottom half of the wall, exposed stone, the top, amazing chocolate coloured symbols on a caramel backdrop. The sort of caramel you’d only find in sweet dreams.
You can’t enter their house without going through the kitchen and brushing your shoulders against the stone wall and caramel paint.
They made that caramel out of barrels of salvage paint. They mixed them all together one late night and came up with caramels and sun yellows and chocolate browns. In fact, their whole house glows with salvage.
Bella will scavenge and salvage into the depths of the dumps of the area. In fact, half their house is built on these “finds”.
It’s true that for a couple of years, from the greyness of their little rented furnished South London flat, Bella got heavily addicted to those bright coloured interior decorating programmes.
She feels slightly ashamed about this lust for decorating but, from the perspective of their South East London home, it seemed to promise something better than they had, a more spacious, interestingly coloured life.
Jack could easily get to 100 years old in a matter of weeks here. There’s something about this life here that instantly fulfils you, your past and present. He didn’t know life could be purely . . . good. Living seems so important and dying doesn’t seem so important anymore. He has found something here that he has never found in his life before — apart from on that train. He’s started to like himself, as he’s grown to like his life, and those lives around him. It’s ever changing, this view from the terrace. Fields change colour every season., and alternate colour every year, depending on what is being grown — melon, wheat and sunflowers.
It is what their little house is all about. Suspended there, in a lifetime of smallness and pettiness and disappointment, this view remains massive and constant and surprising. It fulfils something inside Jack. This view from the terrace. He feels good as soon as he steps out on that terrace to have breakfast, eat lunch with friends or just water the plants. His favourite time of the day on that terrace is around midnight on a Summer’s evening. To a background music of crickets and frogs. The street lamps flickering along the tree lined avenue. The castle lit up against the sky. And he wants nothing more. He is happy with that.
***
Jonathan’s work has appeared in several anthologies, magazines and literary journals, both in print and online. He has also written for theatre (Royal National Theatre studio, London Fringe, Edinburgh Festival), TV (BBC, World Productions, Carnival Films) and Film (Scala Productions, Met Films). One of his films is currently in pre-production.