Chapter Ten – Shizuku's Vision

The taxi crept through traffic away from the airport and toward the city centre. The traffic drove on the right and this was strange enough. It was growing dark now, the sun had set. The rain had left Milan's streets wet. In the gloom of the storm the streetlamps had come on. Now they bled across the roads, the traffic lights wept. Shizuku, behind the driver, wound down her window and looked out. The fresh smell of recent rain raised her spirit. The strangeness of this new continent was enhanced by the weather, the odd quality of the post-storm light and her exhaustion. She was tired but also eager to see her first Italian city. Trouble is this area of Milan was a poor advertisement for Italy as a whole. Factories went by, warehouses with lorries parked outside, anonymous office buildings. The light industrial quarter of Milan was pretty crappy; as uninspiring as the light industrial quarter of everywhere else in the world.

"Seiji, was this taxi sent by the school? Does it take us all the way to Cremona?"
"No, oh no. We're catching a train. Grandpa arranged the taxi transfer, students have to make their own way to the school. The train ride is about an hour so you can take a nap then."
"Uhnnn, 'Kay. I just wanna be there already."

She turned her attention back out of the window. The car was entering a city centre area now and there were derelict and boarded up factories. It looked like a site earmarked for land clearance and redevelopment. For a reason she did not understand Shizuku suddenly became alert, awake, here was a place with a secret. Her eyes widened and she had a strange feeling that she knew this place. How could that be?

"Hey, did we drive in a circle?"
"What?"
"It feels as though I've been here before. The driver isn't doubling back to make more money or something is he?"
Seiji's voice showed concerned, "I don't think so."
Shizuku was hanging her head out the window now. Seiji spoke to the driver "Signore – uh - sa dov'è la stazione?"
"Si, si."
He turned back to Shizuku, "He says the station is this way."

When the girl spoke again there was something altogether new in her voice, a sound of uncertainty, of fear even,

"There's a canal up here."
"Really?" Seiji wasn't that interested.
"No, I mean I know there's a canal up here, and a stone bridge over it."
"What are you on about? Are you writing a book aloud now?"
"Seiji, this is weird. I know that this street crosses a canal by a stone bridge. There's factories down below. I know. I've been here before."
"Could be, lots of factories round here."
Shizuku spoke to herself, a little afraid, "What's happening to me?" she addressed the driver, "Tassista? Mi scusi, ci sono dei canali qui?"
"Si, si, ce n'è uno vecchio – abbandonato?"
"Did he say old?"
"Here it is, what did I tell you?" She gripped the top of the wound down window with both hands.

The taxi passed a last derelict brick warehouse and drove onto a bridge. It was wide with filthy plate girder side walls painted a dull rusty red. It was dark now. There were streetlights along the edge of the bridge. The car slowed down, in fact the whole world slowed down, time was unravelling. Well, no, time wasn't unravelling, but it's hard for me to describe what was really going on. Shizuku when she speaks to me about this can't say for certain what happens when she has these experiences. She says that in a way time splits, Shizuku-time separates from everyone else's time and that split allows her to see through it. Like a tear in a piece of cloth, her on one side, us on the other. She glimpses through that tear and sees other times. She doesn't understand it any more than I expect you to from that description, all she does is know it happens, because it happened twice in Italy and has happened twice more since then.

The taxi passed out from under a pool of lamp light into an unlit area on the middle of the bridge. Shizuku stared at the side of the bridge, stared beyond it to see what lay below. Her hair blew in the wind but because time for her was stopping, and the world was stopping with it, each strand lifted and waved in slow motion. There came a moment when everything froze and time no longer existed. Suddenly her face, the side of the car and the road it was travelling along were lit by full sunshine. It wasn't like a light switch coming on but the light increased gradually as though a door was slowly opening. The area of light began on her face and spread like an ink-stain encompassing the car, then the road surface, then the side of the bridge. As the road surface and bridge side were illuminated, they changed. It was a hazy light, the kind you get on cloudy summer days, diffuse and gentle. Shizuku was frightened. Oh. Oh, my God… she couldn't speak because time no longer existed and her brain couldn't send electrical signals to her muscles. Her spirit however, was more alive than she'd ever known before.

Outside now, for her, it was full daylight. The bridge the taxi was frozen to was suddenly surfaced with stone cobbles. The balustrade was stone pillars, ornately carved and with a stone handrail. There were no streetlights any more. Below the bridge was a wide clear canal, to the right, running alongside the canal, coming out from underneath the bridge, a dirt roadway. Travelling away from the bridge along the roadway was an old fashioned brown lorry made up of a tractor unit and a flat bed trailer. It jostled down the unmade road raising dust.

To the right of the road was a wire fence and beyond that an overgrown derelict plot. But it was to the left of the canal that Shizuku's attention was really drawn. Factories lined the canal. They were not derelict but alive, working. They were of tin construction and painted pale green. One section had a saw-toothed northlight roof of glass. At the far end a tall old style brick chimney vented dirty smoke into a sky of hazy blue. Along the canal-facing wall of one building was painted a name: PICCOLO SpA. Shizuku's mouth couldn't gape at the vision but her mind did.

Inside the taxi, Seiji leaned forwards to peer out of Shizuku's window. For him the world wasn't standing still, for him the taxi had almost left the bridge already. For him Shizuku had already pulled her head back inside the window. He saw nothing strange outside, just a dirty steel bridge parapet, derelict factories. Down below in the dark he glimpsed an abandoned canal, a muddy ditch full of weeds and shopping trolleys. The roadway beside it was choked with undergrowth. I don't think Seiji even realised it had once been a road. To the right there was a clear concrete space with a modern steel framed single storey warehouse on it. Lines of modern trucks stood there, trailers backed up to loading bays. In the distance to the left all was dereliction, the skeletons of old factories. He tried to articulate his concern,

"What?"

Shizuku didn't hear him because for her he hadn't spoken yet. It would be another ten seconds in her future before he moved and another five after that when he would speak. She continued to look down from the bridge in daylight. A motor barge came out from under it, its old engine made a low and slow erratic chugging. She could just glimpse the bow come into view. The barge had tarpaulin covered hatches. By now the brown lorry had reached the factory. Dust hung in the air along the unmade road.

She thought the sun was setting, but no, it was fading, the light was fading. She could still hear the barge's motor but the day it existed in was leaving, the sound became drawn out and thin, weak and flavourless, like tea made with too much water. The light faded, first from the bridge then the roadway then the side of the car until finally only Shizuku's face was warmed by the summer sun of sixty years ago. Her spirit cried, No, don't go. But the light was gone. The harsh light of a streetlamp lit her face casting deep shadow under her brows, nose and chin. The breeze of a rainy Milan evening blew her hair. The taxi passed off the bridge and the scene was cut off by a building. Shizuku cried out in shock, the way you'd sometimes shiver. Someone passed over my grave is the phrase she used to describe it.

"What?" asked Seiji, and this time (although in reality it was the first and only time he'd said it) she heard him.

He looked at her with concern. She was still looking back behind the taxi. She'd let go of the car door and turned to look out the rear window. It was dark back there, only streetlamps. She turned round and looked down, she clasped her hands tightly in her lap. A breeze came in the open window and ruffled her hair. There was wetness at her lower eyelids.

"What was it?"
"I… I'm not sure. It was daytime, a long time ago. There was a boat on the canal, men working in the factories."

She turned to him,

"Can jet lag cause hallucinations Seiji?"
"Not that I know of," she looked terrible, his heart went out to her, "Come here, you must be exhausted."

He reached out for her and she crumpled into his arms, lifting her clasped hands to her chest in a worried knot. She rested her forehead on his shoulder.

Outside it was just another summer evening in Milan.