CONDENSATION

When the frost finally began to thaw on the Sunday morning, as the atmospheric temperature outside rose from minus fourteen to a far more acceptable eight degrees, so did his hopes. It had been a brutal winter for Ellis and he was still just about only way half through it. Usually, he could always rely on his faux Soviet style machismo in facing up to the grim, cold days and long dark nights of December but it had been a year where he had been cowed by events and he'd lost his stomach for the fight.

Striking a match and watching it ignite the blue flame around the ring of the hob, he placed his stovetop espresso maker on it and went off in search of some music to accompany his morning coffee.

Ellis stood before his trusted old Marantz cassette deck with a look of genuine affection as he firmly depressed the play button and then waited as the timeless and mysterious overture to Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov began to fill the Bohemian cellar-like space where he lived. Closing his eyes as if in prayer he began to feel a warmth slowly returning to rescue his battered spirit and semi-frozen bones. It was amazing what a lifelong ritual combined with an increase in celsius could do for him still. That, along with the comforting waft of coffee which began to perfume his living quarters. There was a lot to be said for familar things and coffee and Russian opera were two things that had been faithfully familar to him all of his seventy plus years on the planet.

But even with this momentary rescuing of morale, he knew he was hanging by a thin thread and that his entire existential ethos was now more fragile than a heavy drop of dew poised to fall from the end of a blade of grass. Trying to keep his thoughts fully focused in the moment and hoping not to let any notion of the future doorstep its way into his mind that might paralyse him indefinitely, he continued to carry out simple, mundane everyday tasks that kept his mind and body distracted from the bleak dread which had been keeping him regular company the past six months.

Pouring his dense, sweetly scented Turkish coffee into his chipped, vintage Italian coffee cup Ellis wondered if this hot black substance was the elixir of life instead of the more often peer reviewed water. Taking his first sip of caffeine, he felt genuinely revived by its instant kick and sat in his designer chair in his small kitchen wondering where he might venture after his self-imposed, icy winter lockdown of the past week. Having been cocooned inside his home day after day for fear of slipping on the ice, he recognised he had finally become fearful of nature and its potential threat to his own personal safety.

An increasing sense of nostalgia for times past when every road and pavement appeared to be gritted had also developed for Ellis lately. Even if these soft hearted reflections on the past weren't wholly accurate, or may have been somewhat rose-tinted, there had definitely been a notable absence of gritters this year. Where were they all, for Christ's sake? Had they gone on strike like everyone else? Ellis had never considered the importance of grit at any point previously in his life but here he was, getting old and assessing the risk factors each time he now stepped out of his stiff front door like a human-sized, 21st century hobbit. Quite the opposite to his twin brother, Rhian, who seemed to have stolen all the potential for joy and adventure from him in the womb they'd once shared together for forty weeks. Perhaps Rhian had siphoned off more nutrients from the placenta than he himself could manage. Ellis often considered it unfortunately symbolic that he came out into life fifteen minutes later than his brother the day they were born. Was it some shadow fear from some past life carried over that held him back from being the first of the twins to launch like a rocket into a new incarnation and into their mother's welcoming arms? Whatever it was, it had set the tone for the rest of his life one way or another and he was now feeling the heaviness from this deep grained pathology of his, each and every minute of the day.

It was, he supposed, a tale of two lives, one lived and one unlived. One twin an extrovert, the other an introvert. Ellis often hate scrolled through his brother's endless social media posts boasting about his boating trips around the islands of Greece where he now lived and enjoyed eating fresh honey and yogurt gifted from his neighbour, Yiannis, as both their Greek wives sang in the same local orthodox choir together. It was all too idyllic and free of suffering somehow and Ellis also felt it was, in a way, passive aggressive to just post endless positivity and throw it in everyone's face, especially his. He could have moved to Greece many moons ago but he decided it was better he stay in the same place he'd always lived. What he now called, through gritted teeth, home.

It was then that he felt a cold drip fall from the ceiling onto his head with the impact of what felt to him like a breaking dam.

Where the hell was it coming from?

If Ellis had just about managed to navigate his depressed brain through most of the morning, it was all quickly undone upon discovering the condensation running down the walls of his first floor living room in streaming rivulets. The great thaw had a great flaw and Ellis was now counting the cost in the damage it had done to his beloved collection of books that were suffering the maximum damage from this unwelcome watery invasion.

Grabbing every dry towel he could find in his bathroom cupboard, Ellis started to frantically try and soak up the endless running streams but to little effect. It was as if a waterfall had suddenly appeared overnight.

"Fuck off!"

He knew it was insane to scream obscenties at condensation but this unexpected irritation just wasn't on his list of things to contend with after a week of near freezing to death from the arctic blast his small rural town had just experienced.  

Having to resort to quickly throwing his soaked library of books across the room in a bid to salvage what he could, he found himself becoming increasingly angry at the indignity and absurdity of the situation he now found himself in.

"Cunt!!!!!"

It was to him as if nature, or the weather, was out to exact some personal vendetta on him, increasingly imposing itself on his sanctuary and making him feel genuinely threatened by each development and uncertain twist in its winter tale.

In the midst of the madness an image of his sun tanned twin flashed in front of his mind's eye; as he could see him cutting through turquoise water and laughing as he steered his speed boat round an island, squinting at the orange juice sun high up above.

"Bastard!"

Then, as if to add extra intensity to the drama, Mussorgsky's 'Boris' downstairs was reaching its noisy Act One climax, further adding to the surreal scene that Ellis found himself embroiled in. It was times like this that Ellis wasn't so certain about how much he genuinely liked Russian opera after all.

"Shut the fuck up down there!"

And hurling the last book in one direction and a towel in the other, Ellis felt truly spent from his physical exertion as if he'd been in his very own private version of 'The Scorcerer's Apprentice'.

After showering off his sweaty stress, Ellis decided to assess the full damage of the fifty or so treasured books that had been substantially water damaged.

Sitting on his late mother's Moroccan leather pouffe, he knew, that like dead soldiers strewn across a battlefield, they were beyond saving now. Feeling like a failed military general who had let his boys die due to his own strategic complacency. He should have anticipated this kind of thing better. But it was weather and it was too late. A lifetime's collection of his most precious books reduced to a pulpy mess.

Picking up his beloved copy of Doestoyevsky's 'The Idiot' published by William Heinemann which now closer resembled a wet flannel than a book, he let out a small gasp. He'd had this edition for nearly fifty years, ever since his Uncle Vernon gifted it him one Christmas, warning him not to read it unless he wanted to have his life changed irrevocably. "Once those Russians get a hold of you, boy, you'll struggle with much else."

An 1872 antique copy of Dickens's 'Great Expectations' that belonged to his grandmother Veronica looked as if it had been viciously hosed to death as pages came apart in his hand like soggy tissue paper, followed by his 1st edition of John Kennedy Toole's 'A Confederacy Of Dunces" that he had read more times than he could count and would now never be read by him again in its irreparable state.

One by one, he went through each of the books that had meant the most to him in his entire life and began to weep. The irony of his tears now falling upon his water-logged books didn't go unnoticed. He might have laughed at the comic tragedy of it all had it not been for the fact that it all seemed like yet another grim reminder that his life was insidiously drawing to a close. These few, precious things represented a part of his life that had been like family to him throughout the years. More loyal in many ways even than his most significant friends and lovers. The entire situation had become one giant metaphor for the state of his ineveitable decline and it made him feel overwhelmed.

One further irony was that the only book which appeared to have been spared a watery demise was his brother's hardcover edition of Kazantkis's 'Zorba The Greek' which was as dry as a bone and almost seemed to taunt him in its unsullied condition. He stared at the illustrated, fat-bellied protagonist on the front cover who seemed to be full of the same incessant joie d'vivre as his brother in photographs paraded on his social media account with his wife.

"But of course!" he snorted.

And then, as if to break his soul completely, he found his bible paper edition of Tolkein's 'The Lord Of The Rings' unrecognisable, its gold leaf cover washed away like melted snow.

"I can't take it! No more, please!" he screamed at some higher power that he didn't even believe in. Or at least thought he didn't.

Ellis then let out an extended primal howl which seemed somehow in keeping with the pealing bells and stirring choir singing the coronation scene from 'Boris Godunov' rising through the floorboards from the stereo system down below.

But for the anguished book lover it was more like a funeral than a coronation and now he just wanted nothing more than to die alone with his ruined library.

Rhian had just returned to shore from his early morning swim in the Ionian sea and was drying himself off with a towel when his wife, Pelagia, waved to him from their house on the cliffs above the beach, appearing to summon him back.

Climbing up the coastal path back to his home, Rhian sensed something was wrong. Twins are famous for having a sort of telepathy of sorts, even when far away geographically and today he'd had a definite pronounced sense of something amiss whilst swimming in the sea, like someone walking across his grave.

Entering the house, more out of breath than usual, he looked to his wife in a state of panic.

"What is it darling? Is it my brother?"

"Yes."

Expecting to hear the worst, Rhian was surprised when his wife handed him a piece of paper with a telephone number scrawled on it.

"He wants you to call him back."

"He does?"

Staring at the digits as if there was some divine message to decode from them, Rhian felt genuinely relieved that it wasn't news of his brother's death which he had long feared might be something that Ellis had seriously been considering.

"Did he say anything else?"

"Yes. He said he'd like to come see us."

Amazed at the simplicity of such a request, Rhian had to take a seat to process this unexpected sea change from his twin, after nearly a decade of barely conversing.

Intuiting that her husband was unusually emotional, Pelagia went to him and embraced him tightly, feeling more like a mother in this moment than his wife somehow.

"I thought we'd never speak again."

And then she felt it; a small droplet fell onto her bare shoulder as it quickly absorbed into her warm mediteranean skin.

It was the only tear she had ever felt or seen from her husband in their forty years of marriage and it was as precious to her as the ring on her finger.

She waited a moment or two before easing into a change of mood.

"We'll get Yannis to bring some extra supplies for when your brother arrives. I have a feeling they'll get on like a house on fire, don't you?"

Wiping the tears from his eyes, Rhian laughed uproariously as if he was a young boy being tickled by invisible hands.

"If I know my brother, he'll absolutely despise him!"

And Pelagia laughed along with her husband as they set about preparing their breakfast of figs, honey and yoghurt together.