Ashley Capes

Vatican blues

At each bottle-necked corridor it's one step forward, two steps back. The tour groups are a mass of wandering cattle, linked by their brightly coloured transistors. They bump into us, rigid, processional, lacking sense of purpose and trampling ghosts of the past. Occasionally an arm steals above the din and at its top, like a star on a Christmas tree, is the unblinking eye of a camera. It makes its theft and retracts in shame.

sweat beads
we stake out
the open window