credidit

The telescope had been a present from his parents, twenty years ago. It was almost too good to look at the stars with. The magnification was so high and the picture so rich that the telescope almost gave more information about the atmosphere than about the stars beyond it. They fizzed and twinkled with the wind and air, light being battered this way and that by mile-deep currents far above the young Christopher. Perhaps if they'd lived higher up, or further out of the city.... For six months either side of the present he had been more interested in astronomy than anything else, than breathing or having a wash. Then, with the fickle nature of a pre-teen, he abandoned his life's centre and moved onto something else: Meccano, he thought, or maybe that year it had been fishing, taken up just in time for a glorious July. The telescope, with all of its accoutrements and Chris' stack of astronomical literature and charts, was consigned to a drawer set into a huge, towering wardrobe in the spare room. There it developed a proud, antique coat of dust, wearing its neglect like a Victorian ex-army officer might wear his medals.

When Chris' father died, the son took his chance to clear out his life. He threw away what he could bear to get rid of, and transferred the rest from the back of one wardrobe to the back of another, asserting his ownership and then forgetting about it.

He looked at the telescope and memories of his father came flooding back. A childhood holiday. In Italy? he wondered, and then pinned it down to Tuscany. They were driving somewhere near Lucca, or Arezzo, stirring up a streak of dust between two vineyards that drank up the sun. As he stared in his half-doze out of the half-open window of his father's MG, smelling the soil that had drifted into the car, he became hypnotized by the rows and rows of trees going past. The nearest ones flew by, making a swooshing noise as they reflected the din of the engine. The further ones were slower, and at the far end of the field little green dots moved sluggishly, dragged along by their cousins and the laws of perspective. Suddenly, at a certain angle, all of the trees would line up and he could see wide avenues reaching ahead of him. Then the pattern would be fuzzed again, only to reappear shortly afterwards. It was like the planes of a crystal, and every now and again as he turned the field over in his mind like a semi-precious stone he would see a flash of light, bounced between those planes of trees from one side to the other.

Stuck as the Delft building was, in the middle of an intersection, in a modern grid of streets, Chris felt he had finally come to rest at the focal point of one particular crystal, each individual unit a building shining around him. And straight ahead of his window, for a mile or two, ran a wide street so straight he could see the far end. Through his telescope, positioned now by the glass, next to one of the plush chairs, he could see every detail from one pavement to the other. He could see the point where the anonymous financial blocks gave way to the commercial sector. Department store fronts stuck out into the street, and he could see their signs and their styles. And he could easily see at least the pavement outside the restaurant where he had trained his telescope an hour or so ago.

Chris had once said to Jeremy that the view was glorious. A few times he had tried to convince Jeremy to see what it was like, long before the suspicions had begun to ferment and go rank in his mind. But Jeremy was uninterested, or at least unwilling. Without a decent business pretext to summon him up there there was nothing Chris could do. He said to Jeremy, trying to entice him, that he now had a real "bird's eye view of the city."

"Pfff!" Jeremy exhaled smoke, stifling a laugh. "One day, Chris, look out of your office and then look down at the birds. They're flying about five storeys below you. We gerra bird's eye view. You've gorra God's eye view."

There. Coming out of the restaurant.

He'd checked Jeremy's diary and found veiled references to this meeting, to several meetings previously as well. Then one of Jeremy's co-workers had turned up. Superiority only stretched so far: Chris could get away with having been there, but not with staying there to rifle further through Jeremy's belongings. Then, shortly after the time in the diary he'd seen them go in separately. She was in her white and black dress and something held over her fine brown hair, clattering in her heels from a black cab; he hurrying along shortly afterwards, looking nervous and shifty but that was nothing new. He wanted to see the whole thing pan out, see them head off, perhaps a goodbye kiss that would stick in Chris' throat like a splinter off a chicken bone. Now they were coming out: together.

The black and white dress clattered back to a waiting cab, with the crumpled suit following it. He said a few words into the door of the cab, his hair getting wet, and as the driver began to pull away Jeremy looked up, looked guiltily towards the Delft building, raised his head and, through his telescope, Chris could see for the first time that the face had acquired a moustache and glasses since that morning.

It wasn't them. Or at least it wasn't him. As he caught a glimpse of that face Chris suddenly realised how much thinner this man was than Jeremy, how he was probably shorter than the woman even accounting for her heels. The moustachioed man had looked straight at Chris, somehow seeking him out through the mirrored glass of the Delft building, across perhaps half a mile of space. He couldn't have seen him, but for the first time since he'd started reading messages in cigarette smoke he wondered if this wasn't some sort of ironic sign. This was what God's eye view afforded. No distinction, all men equal. Chris could see all but do nothing, figure out nothing; he was impotent, distant and just plain wrong.

He got up from his chair by the window and batted the telescope round on its mount. God's eye view, he thought. What a joke. She wasn't having an affair, and certainly not with Jeremy, although God - real God, sat on his cloud laughing his head off - God knows she had a right to. She should probably find someone who didn't spend his time trying to spy on her, photographs and lenses. As Chris resolved to try and be that person, maybe ring her, send her flowers - his telescope continued to spin slowly round in near-perpetual motion. Stupidly its gaze whipped past people on the streets below, people in restaurants. It tracked across people hailing black cabs and people running to meetings. They were meeting friends and spouses, some having affairs, some just having lunch. The telescope saw all this, and thought nothing at all.