Heaven's Edge by Romesh Gunesekera Page A

‘Markee, you see nobodypass here …’ she sang to me instead, weaving the lilt of her childhood into mine.
    Eldon waved a hand dismissively and picked up the telephone. ‘Hello. Yes. Speaking.’ I could see him press the receiver hard against his ear. ‘Can you repeat that, please.’ He shifted the receiver to his other side. Then I saw his whole body shrink until there seemed to be nothing left inside.
    Beyond the French windows a robin hopped around the ivy and opened its beak; the spring in its throat uncoiled in a shrill insistent song. I looked back at my grandfather; he was clutching the back of a chair. ‘Are you sure it was his plane?’ He waited for the crackle in the receiver to cease. Then he put the phone down.
    I ran up to him and grabbed his hand. ‘Why you crying, Granda?’
    I received no answer at the time.
    With fire we live, with fire we die. There is no going back. In the crematorium my grandfather’s coffin, my mother’s and my grandmother’s vanished behind a motorised curtain in a succession of heartbreak, suicide and old age; the flames of my father’s aircraft, falling, flaring behind each of them, again and again.
    The cave – our refuge – slowly filled with the light of a different star. I felt the sun’s rays had burnt ulcers in my dream, but my two companions were still asleep. I carried my shoes in one hand and crept over to the entrance. Outside, the dawn was silent. The silence of aftermath: the emptiness of a spent storm. Climbing around to the other side of the rock, I found myself above a great reservoir with a view that dissolved in the morning’s marrow mist. The airwas moist and chilly. Something in my brain slipped, like a wheel on wet grass. Pictures of my father, and of my grandfather standing against the same landscape, materialised. I imagined the two of them with me, at last finding a place where we might all be close together again, free of discord. ‘Look, can you see what I can?’
    Eldon always said freedom did not come easy. ‘I remember the lyrebird’s call to be free of the past,’ he would complain. ‘But everyone seemed, even in those days, to want to replace one kind of past with another, cabbage with bortsch. I wanted to be an artist of the air not just a Fitzrovian intellectual, you know. An eagle soaring, not a damn peacock strutting.’
    From my vantage point I could just make out the jade rim of the jungle on the other side. The flat, calm water was as still as paint, cleansed by the storm that had melded the lake and the sky into one. Clumps of trees, like steep islands, stood in shallow water; the platinum trunks of those struck by lightning bared, with not even an egret to ruffle the slowly evaporating shrouds. The morning light was turning the sky blue. Into my head flew the remnants of an illustration from Eldon’s boyhood: grebes, sandpipers, red-shanks, green-shanks, golden plovers, scarlet minivets and high above, a cloud of whistling teal watched by fish eagles, marsh-harriers and brahminy kites. He used to tell me a story of a lakeland ghost who carried a dead child whom she offered to any man she encountered. If the man touched the child he would die, but if he refused to take the child the ghost would turn him into a swine. Eldon said that this was the avenging ghost of the original queen of the island spurned by her cross-water lover for a pedigree mate from the mainland. ‘She was our Circe,’ he would say drawing a link, like Uva’s father, to his other world, ‘toooften completely misunderstood, demonised for her natural heart.’ I wondered if she still lurked there.
    Then two gunshots reverberated around the rock.
    I dashed back to the enclosure. Kris was outside with a gun in one hand, and a brace of dead bats in the other. ‘Yakitori.’ He grinned at me and slouched over to a stone slab where he had placed a basin of