leave tomorrow.
It's evening
now, and everybody's scribbling away, telling people the news, or as much of
the news as we're allowed to tell them. I look up and down the dormitory and
there's hardly a sound except for pages being turned, and here and there a pen
scratching. It's like this every evening. And not just letters either. Diaries. Poems. At least two
would-be poets in this hut alone.
Why? you have to ask yourself. I think it's a way of claiming
immunity. First-person narrators can't die, so as long as we keep telling the
story of our own lives we're safe. Ha bloody fucking Ha.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Rivers turned to
watch the sun swelling and reddening as it sank, a brutal, bloody disc, scored
by steeples and factory chimneys, obscured by a haze of drifting brown and
yellow smoke.
He'd come out to
walk on Hampstead Heath because he was feeling ill, and needed to clear his
head before settling down to an evening's work, but it wasn't helping. With
every step he felt worse, muscles aching, throat sore, eyes stinging, skin
clammy. By the time he got back to his lodgings, he'd decided to miss dinner
and go straight to bed. He knocked on the door of Mrs Irving's private
apartments, told her he wasn't feeling well and wouldn't be in to dinner, and
glimpsed through the open door the portrait of her dead son that hung above the
mantelpiece, with flowers beneath it and candlesticks on either side.
Going slowly
upstairs, pausing frequently to lean on the banister, Rivers thought about what
he'd just seen: the portrait, the flowers. A shrine. Not fundamentally different from the skull houses of Pa Na Gundu where he'd
gone with Njiru. The same human impulse at work. Difficult to know what to make of these flashes of cross-cultural
recognition. From a strictly professional point of view, they were
almost meaningless, but then one didn't have such experiences as a disembodied
anthropological intelligence, but as a man, and as a man one had to make some
kind of sense of them.
Once in bed he
started to shiver. The sheets felt cold against his hot legs. He slept and
dreamt of the croquet lawn at Knowles Bank, his mother in a long white dress
coming out to call the children in, the sun setting over the wood casting very
long, fine shadows across the lawn. The shadows of the hoops were particularly
long and fearful. He'd been awake for several minutes before he realized he was
trying to remember the rules of mathematical croquet, as devised by Dodgson,
and actually feeling distressed because he couldn't remember them. Then he realized
that although he was now fully awake he could still see the lawn, which meant
his temperature was very high. Always, in a high fever, his visual memory
returned, giving him a secret, obscurely shameful pleasure in being ill. He
wouldn't sleep again—he was far too hot—so he simply lay and let his newly
opened mind's eye roam .
On the Southern Cross, on the voyage
to Eddystone, he'd stood on deck, watching the pale green wake furrow the dark
sea, reluctant to exchange the slight breeze for the stuffy heat below deck.
At one of the
stops a group of natives got on, the men wearing cast-off European suits, the
women floral-print dresses. A few of the women had naked breasts, but most were
obviously missionized. A pathetic little remnant they looked, squatting there,
part of the small army of uprooted natives who drifted from one island to the
next, one mission station to the next, and belonged nowhere. At first sight all
mission stations seemed to be surrounded by converts, and the uninitiated
always assumed these were converts from that island. Only
later did one become aware of this uprooted population, travelling from one
station to the next, most of them from islands where the impact of western
culture had been particularly devastating.
He squatted down
beside them, and, as he expected, found enough knowledge of pidgin to make
conversation possible. He'd devised a questionnaire that he used on
It's evening
now, and everybody's scribbling away, telling people the news, or as much of
the news as we're allowed to tell them. I look up and down the dormitory and
there's hardly a sound except for pages being turned, and here and there a pen
scratching. It's like this every evening. And not just letters either. Diaries. Poems. At least two
would-be poets in this hut alone.
Why? you have to ask yourself. I think it's a way of claiming
immunity. First-person narrators can't die, so as long as we keep telling the
story of our own lives we're safe. Ha bloody fucking Ha.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Rivers turned to
watch the sun swelling and reddening as it sank, a brutal, bloody disc, scored
by steeples and factory chimneys, obscured by a haze of drifting brown and
yellow smoke.
He'd come out to
walk on Hampstead Heath because he was feeling ill, and needed to clear his
head before settling down to an evening's work, but it wasn't helping. With
every step he felt worse, muscles aching, throat sore, eyes stinging, skin
clammy. By the time he got back to his lodgings, he'd decided to miss dinner
and go straight to bed. He knocked on the door of Mrs Irving's private
apartments, told her he wasn't feeling well and wouldn't be in to dinner, and
glimpsed through the open door the portrait of her dead son that hung above the
mantelpiece, with flowers beneath it and candlesticks on either side.
Going slowly
upstairs, pausing frequently to lean on the banister, Rivers thought about what
he'd just seen: the portrait, the flowers. A shrine. Not fundamentally different from the skull houses of Pa Na Gundu where he'd
gone with Njiru. The same human impulse at work. Difficult to know what to make of these flashes of cross-cultural
recognition. From a strictly professional point of view, they were
almost meaningless, but then one didn't have such experiences as a disembodied
anthropological intelligence, but as a man, and as a man one had to make some
kind of sense of them.
Once in bed he
started to shiver. The sheets felt cold against his hot legs. He slept and
dreamt of the croquet lawn at Knowles Bank, his mother in a long white dress
coming out to call the children in, the sun setting over the wood casting very
long, fine shadows across the lawn. The shadows of the hoops were particularly
long and fearful. He'd been awake for several minutes before he realized he was
trying to remember the rules of mathematical croquet, as devised by Dodgson,
and actually feeling distressed because he couldn't remember them. Then he realized
that although he was now fully awake he could still see the lawn, which meant
his temperature was very high. Always, in a high fever, his visual memory
returned, giving him a secret, obscurely shameful pleasure in being ill. He
wouldn't sleep again—he was far too hot—so he simply lay and let his newly
opened mind's eye roam .
On the Southern Cross, on the voyage
to Eddystone, he'd stood on deck, watching the pale green wake furrow the dark
sea, reluctant to exchange the slight breeze for the stuffy heat below deck.
At one of the
stops a group of natives got on, the men wearing cast-off European suits, the
women floral-print dresses. A few of the women had naked breasts, but most were
obviously missionized. A pathetic little remnant they looked, squatting there,
part of the small army of uprooted natives who drifted from one island to the
next, one mission station to the next, and belonged nowhere. At first sight all
mission stations seemed to be surrounded by converts, and the uninitiated
always assumed these were converts from that island. Only
later did one become aware of this uprooted population, travelling from one
station to the next, most of them from islands where the impact of western
culture had been particularly devastating.
He squatted down
beside them, and, as he expected, found enough knowledge of pidgin to make
conversation possible. He'd devised a questionnaire that he used on
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