treasure: when we lived in a movie once, with movie-quality lighting

It was getting to that point in the afternoon where the light hit us all like we were part of a film.

Me, I sat in a pergola halfway to our holiday house from the bay. There were two wrought-iron seats and a table, painted white and matching the structure itself. The pergola merited a stop-off on the inclinator: I wondered at the laziness of the person who wouldn't take the steps and then fancied (guiltily) it might be some older powder-wearing lady who sat each afternoon at this very time to take her tea in this very spot.

I was writing: the sort of writing you do before getting down to the business of saying what you want to say.

The light was making the water seem clearer and more beautiful than it had seemed even an hour earlier, when I'd set myself up as a solitary creative type, away from the main house.

There was a white boat house with a blue roof that was ours for the week: a jetty of our own with a small tin boat powered by a tiny engine of a low enough horsepower than any old person could drive it, sans-licence even. I had no desire for any such motor-based activity.

There were sailboats and house boats. Masts were dotted all over the bay, moored slightly away from shore. I wasn't there for the boats, but they did make a pretty picture and an excellent backdrop to the scene.

I had escaped a people-filled house to the pergola with a beer and a book to start on, but with the light the way it was, the book sat untouched. I could hear the people-filled house muttering and chatting and laughing: some people had disappeared to nap and some others had been reading and baking. I'd found myself unwilling to settle to a couch where an interruption might present itself at any moment.

There were all sorts of interruptions on the water, though; filtering up were the noisy motorboats going by like motorbikes might; my stepsister yelling down the slope from the wide-open window of the living area.

My dad pretended to push my stepsister out the window and the danish visitor who'd been wildly annoying me all week for no real or tangible reason laughed her loud, stupid laugh in response. A piece of theatre I did not wish to witness or tolerate.

In the act I'd created, tiny people driven to flirt with my father weren't there to be tolerated.

End scene.