For a while, before climbing the steps that led to the ridge path, Cai watched the paragliders jump from Sasso Fermo’s sheer cliff edge, into the void where the currents carried them out over the valley. The view across the lake aroused him… or perhaps it was Dani’s kiss… and he felt more alive than he had in months.

At bedtime on the night that Tudor died, he kissed my scarred face to ‘make it better’ one last time.

High up on the ridge, Cai paused to catch his breath, drink some water and marvel at the view.

Fridolin’s Dance

Fridolin’s Dance

Having no children of his own, Elgan took great pleasure from being a godfather. Just being asked had always surprised him. Each time, he’d quizzed the parents about their motives… and their expectations. He knew himself well enough not to promise to remember birthdays, and he certainly wasn’t going to do the religious and moral teaching! None of his university friends would palm off that responsibility onto him, despite the fact that he’d trained for the priesthood. Usually they’d respond to his probing by saying that they thought he’d be a good role model, to which he’d pretend to be sniffy and make some quip about being a gay seminarian, a gay priest or a de-frocked gay priest – depending on the period within that decade when all six of his godchildren, three boys and three girls, had been born.

Fridolin, the youngest, was ‘the German godchild’, fondly referred to as mein Patenkind, the second son of Jochen, Elgan’s seminary roommate. Jochen had settled with his family in Potsdam after the Wall came down; they’d made their home in a crumbling lakeside villa purported to have been leased for a while to Marlene Dietrich when she made The Blue Angel at the nearby Babelsberg film studios. From their terrace the Glienicke Bridge looked grey and austere. Sometimes, when Elgan visited, he’d sit on that terrace and wonder about the spy swaps the bridge had witnessed during the Cold War.