THE MOONLIGHT MARKET

It must be an illusion, he thought. Sometimes things appear to us just because we want them to – or so his father had always said. But there was nothing wrong with his eyes, or with the lens of his camera, through which the arch of Old London Bridge appeared like the prow of a lighted ship pushing through the shadows. With the moonrise, something was happening. Something that emerged from the night like a developing photograph. Two more figures joined the first. Then two more; then another two; all of them passing through the arch onto the bridge, which seemed now to shine with a silvery light, like a flickering black-and-white movie projected against the buildings. Now Tom could hear voices, too – the cries of market traders – and see the shapes of market stalls rising against the bronze-dark sky.

Have you ever felt as if you were not quite a part of this world? As if the reality you knew were only a shadow of something else, waiting to reveal itself, like a photographic negative? Have you ever been in love – a love beyond doubt, beyond question? A love that feels impossibly old, though her face is that of a stranger?