Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Beginnings No.11 Jerry Popovitch 22nd June

Jerry Popovitch had set himself a simple task that day in Autumn. Get on the train in Berwick on Tweed, where his estranged wife Adriana now lived and with whom he had spent a not unpleasant weekend, trying to revive the marriage, and return to London taking his new camera with him and trying an experiment, utilising one of its features that intrigued him.

The idea was simple, as the train now hurtled, sometimes at 125mph through stations, he would take a picture at 1/6000th of a second at each and every station, not actually seeing what he had taken at the time of taking. He would resist the temptation to look at what the camera had seen until he got home to his Chelsea (now bachelor) pad.

He arrived at Kings Cross and still resisting the temptation to peak, he headed home via the Piccadilly Line then the Circle Line and got out at Sloane Square, which was a short walk from his Lower Sloane Street first floor flat. He made a coffee using his beloved Nespresso machine and plugged the SD Card into his PC and imported the pictures using Lightroom 3, adding a shot of Cognac to the coffee as he pressed the button on the Slideshow option then settled into his Eames chair to see what the experiment had come up with.

At the very first image he blinked, the second had him gasping and at the third he fainted! Waking up a few minutes later he looked at all 23 pictures one after another. In each of them, Adriana walked from left to right across to a man, he sort of recognised and in a very relaxed and familiar way finally held his hand and in the final image walked through the turnstile and out of the station which he then noticed was Hatfield with a sign showing the day, date and time which was today! The images of the two ran like a perfect movie, with the background in perfect clarity caught at 6,000th of a second and was at a different station each time and they were all ones they had actually passed only a hour and half ago.

At that moment the phone rang, and a voice that brought a chill down his back, because it connected with that recognised but not remembered man, spoke. Jerry, I say Jerry, don't be alarmed, spoken in a sickeningly Etonian, Blues and Royals sort of voice we know what you have just seen and have called to say .....................

Over to you ...................

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