Today it was this picture which inspired our story
To the curious and creative
My father loved all things Japanese. I knew this about him, although he kept his love hidden from everyone else. A secret just for him. And sometimes for me. When I ran away from my latest scolding, fingers or legs burning, I would run to the warm leather and pipe tobacco filled fug of his study. To the only comfort which seemed real.
He became used to such interruptions from me, benignly allowing me to clamber over him and soothed me gently with huge leather bound books filled with Japanese art and culture. We would pore together over cherry blossom and geishas, tea ceremonies and temples made of gold. I would gaze in wonder at it all, but mostly at him. I never saw such beautiful melancholy in his face, as in those moments.
When my questions became irksome, he would gently lift me from his lap and return the book to its shelf, sighing lightly. In those wistful moments he wasn’t the man everyone else knew and feared. He was my father. The greatest man I ever knew.
The day he died I found myself, aged eighteen, running through our rambling house to his study, desperate for the calm quiet sanctuary I remembered. The study hadn’t been touched for months, the police had taken so much by that point and it was cluttered and untidy. Something he would have detested. They had, however, left the old leather bound books untouched on their mahogany shelves. Stepping gingerly between the boxes and piles of paperwork I moved to his empty desk with my favourite of the books we had shared.
I sat in his huge soft leather chair and opened it gently.
The rain fell slowly against the window and the world still turned. The newspapers howled their fury at my fathers guilt, his avoidance of punishment through his convenient illness and his subsequent death.
I gazed at the cherry blossom and wept for a man who took all his secrets to his grave.
Clever Monty
