Peter Geoghegan

Numen Adest: A Novella

Lapwing, 2005.

Adjacent to the miniature pond, and in the shade of the willow, sat a very old and rather dilapidated park bench...The previous night an old homeless man well known in the area, had passed the night on that very bench...He had no blanket and used a retracted arm to cushion his head. But spring had arrived, signalling the end of the bitter cold of winter and when the night watchman had moved him on he gave only token resistance. Dawn was breaking on the horizon and as the old man shuffled out onto Baker Street, though weighed down by his baggage, the sweet smell of the morning dew filled his nostrils

Later on a young man arrives to sit on the same bench beside the pond, and starts to feed bread to the ducks.

He stared apologetically at a small brown duck that floated on the water's surface, so serene, so unthinking, just hungry. He felt hungry too, but for what he did not know yet. Like the ducks he had lived his life on the surface, had taken care to thread only the shallower waters without any need for a life beneath the surface...He was probably beginning to understand for the first time that the desire for constancy, for the familiar, a desire that had brought him to Regent's Park to feed the ducks at an hour when he should have been working, could never again be enough