Meet our hero, Nick.
We join him one January night in 1989, walking home from the hospital where his wife and newborn daughter are. The streets he is walking down are paved with gold, whether from the sun setting over the Edinburgh skyline or from the glow in this happy man's heart, no one will know.
Looking up, he sees the sinking sun over the castle. This he wants to capture forever. This moment. This feeling. Luckily he has his camera in his bag. Fantastic.
He starts to line up the shot. Not quite right. Hmm. I'll try over here. No, still not right. Could do with being higher. Oh look, this building has scaffolding. That would be perfect for this photo. Yeah, I could make it up there. Great idea. So, securing his bag around him, he climbs. Two floors up he stops. The view is wonderful. Out comes the camera again, and he settles in to capture the scene.
Meanwhile, a curtain twitcher across the street has been watching a man walk up the street, stopping every so often outside buildings, then pick one, and climb up to a window in darkness. The man disappears in shadow outside the window. The curtain twitcher phones the police.
The station only being round the corner, the two policemen are there in minutes.
"Excuse me" comes the call from the street.
"Yes?" replies the voice from above.
"Would you come down here sir?"
"Hang on a minute, I'm not done". Completely unaware of his new status as a burglar, our hero wants to finish taking his photos. He does so, packs up his camera, and climbs down to the two, increasingly annoyed police officers.
"Hello," he says.
As they begin to grill him on who he is, what he was doing up there, and other pertinent questions, he starts to realise he might be in some sort of trouble here.
"What is in the bag sir?"
Uh oh. He thinks to the woman's clothing in the bottom of the bag, stained and a little bloody from waiting till the very last minute before going to the hospital. Oh dear.
"You probably don't want to look in there. I can explain." As soon as he says it he knows that he's really gone and done it now. There is no easy way back from this.
Before long he is in a police station, feeling a little like he'll never see another sunset ever again. He is also wondering what he is going to say to his wife in his one phonecall about why he might not be there to pick his new family up from the hospital the next day. Luckily it doesn't come to that, as sometime between then and the morning his story is verified. Grudgingly he was let go by the cops who probably had thought they had stumbled onto the case that would have made their careers.
Luck was on his side once again when his wife didn't notice that he was wearing the same clothes as yesterday when he turned up at the hospital. As if nothing had happened, he took them home.
A week later, he comes through to the living room and hands his wife a cup of tea.
"So," he says, "funny story..."
No comments:
Post a Comment