THE IMAGINATION THIEF (mini-chapters 1-98)

70 Coldness on the beach

70   Coldness on the beach

"Rik says there's nothing more for us to do for the Big Bang broadcast tonight," says Evelyn. "He was up super-late last night, processing your run to the sun. Then he was up at dawn today, putting the three sessions together."

Twenty minutes later, the three of us are strolling up the Boardwalk in the sun. There are one or two other people around, but the sand is deserted. "Strange there's no one lying on the beach or swimming," I say.

Evelyn laughs. "You'd have been looking at hundreds of them, back in the 'twenties. You can see them in the old photos on the wall in the hotel there. Even just few years ago there'd have been a handful of people sunbathing. I used to see them, growing up. Pippa was one of them. But hardly ever since then."

"Today was when Shigem was going to borrow those opera-glasses, for Kim to look up at her balcony," I say. "Should we call and remind him?"

"No, let's not. Of course he won't forget," says Alaia with a rather cold dismissiveness, as if her understanding of Shigem were as well-honed as Evelyn's is from years of knowing him. This I find annoying. And her cold, hurtful manner certainly belies the "natural" effect that she was cloaking her conversation in this morning: I knew there was something wrong with that, while it was happening. I muse upon the subtle change there seems to have been, between us, since we got here. Maybe there's just been too much happening. It's easy enough while we're actually working together, when it's all about the project at hand; but at other times there has started to be an odd undercurrent from her that I can't quite make sense of.

We duck beneath yellow tape and set off across the sand. I watch Evelyn while she hurls pebbles out to sea, competing with Alaia to throw further ... and a faint music wafts on the breeze, Evelyn. It has the magic of the song in Sound & Vision; but you know it is a lie, because it's mixed with the lies from Alaia's song of death. You hear it as a song of some unreachable perfection—a thing from which this world has fallen short and for which this world yearns from its gutters of disease and dirt. There's lifting-up and flowering and bursts of sunlit glory in this music, with angel choirs piercing and soft (maybe lies?). The music carries ancient things and future evolution, outside time (another lie?). Out above the ocean we half-see mountains in celestial mist and valleys inaccessible, or is this just a cloudscape? I suppose that if you'd not been so behind the scenes with us, so much "behind the curtain", you might have been more taken in by the pair of us.

In your eyes, behind the watermarks of Asbury Park, are flickers of another world you carry inside. As you laugh with Alaia in your pebble-throwing contest, I tune deeper in, to see the flowers in your looking-glass. And there in the palace garden's scented dusk, I see them: flowers, in a more literal sense than I'd expected, mauve petals dripping scented tears onto humus. You've caught a peacock butterfly somewhere in the palace and have cupped your hands around it to bring it out here, where you now toss it up into the night—whereupon a dark bird swoops from the roof, snaps the peacock up, wheels with a rip of feathers flapping through the air, and is gone. You cry out and set off at a run through the grounds—a sweep of yellow silk down a twilit colonnade, where a frieze on the wall shows black human figures flitting delicate and sharp through a pale gold field. Your skirt is like a fluted column, coloured pale celadon beneath the yellow silk sash, running, turning back to me. (Celadon and yellow—a combo that you'd probably once have judged too fresh for Kingsley Street.) "I once collected tears in a glass!" you call. Your laughter ripples out from you, fluid as the image of the moon ahead reflected on the lanes of water running up the fields in our direction through a valley full of dripping mist. Soft weather, lilac-tide: we'd hear a feather float, just assuming that there were a feather, carried on the air where the samphire blooms under trees whose golden autumn leaves tremble on their branches. This cartoon candy-pastoral is undermined, however, by the final thing I see. Through your palace garden gate is the sea, but de-classicised by certain shoreline details: "Evelyn, it's a mushroom bay," I say. And it's true: for the only things growing on the curve of this enchanted shore are mushrooms, some a metre high. As you nod in solemn pride at this, a line of dolphins leap from the water far across the bay, then dive beneath the surface once again, without a ripple. We hear a magic interval between two notes, several times—bewitching, as if an angel lives between them—and I know that I should now leave your mushroom bay. I shan't intrude again here, so never shall I hear again that magic angel interval; but never will it leave me.

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For some nice reviews and interviews about The Imagination Thief, in The Guardian and elsewhere, see http://www.rohanquine.com/press-media/the-imagination-thief-reviews-media/

For a quick synopsis of it, see http://www.rohanquine.com/home-the-imagination-thief-novel/synopsis-and-characters-list-the-imagination-thief/

For the 12 Films in The Imagination Thief, see http://www.rohanquine.com/video-books-films/12-films/

For the Audio-book version and the Video-book version of each of its 120 mini-chapters, see http://www.rohanquine.com/home-the-imagination-thief-novel/audiobook-tumblr-wattpad/

For links to the retailers, see http://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-imagination-thief-novel-ebook/ and http://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-imagination-thief-novel-paperback/

And for its Amazon pages, see http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Imagination-Thief/dp/0992754909 and http://www.amazon.com/The-Imagination-Thief/dp/0992754909

The Imagination Thief is about a web of secrets, triggered by the stealing and copying of people's imaginations and memories. It's about the magic that can be conjured up by images of people, in imagination or on film; the split between beauty and happiness in the world; and the allure of various kinds of power. It celebrates some of the most extreme possibilities of human imagination, personality and language, exploring the darkest and brightest flavours of beauty living in our minds.