Belomor by Nicolas Rothwell

Author:Nicolas Rothwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary fiction
ISBN: 9781921961953
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2013-01-30T05:00:00+00:00

IV

MINGKURLPA

IT WAS NEAR THE year’s end; the build-up heat was pressing down. It was dark; there was a young moon in the sky. We were on the beach, at the waveline, I with a torch in my hand, my friend Jared with a shotgun in his. We advanced. The spray hung in the air; lightning from far-off storms flashed.

‘You really feel you’re at the edge of things, don’t you,’ said he, ‘down here on this shore? You feel the nothing close at hand.’

I listened. What I felt was that trapped sense that comes in the Australian tropics—the immediacy—everything depends on the next breath; life to that point has been nothing; hope, memory, they mean nothing: the only choice is to endure. How wonderful it would be to have some passage out, some way of breaking free, some tale to while away the heat of the night; what was the point of living if not to live through tales, and then retell them, and be consoled by their words as they flowed through time: words that give us the surest sense of knowing who and where we are.

‘What are those lights?’ I asked him, ‘Out so late?’

‘Patrol boats, maybe. Or tankers, and supply vessels, headed for the rigs in the Arafura Sea. Have you ever been out that far, or made a flight over them? What structures: they rise up like cathedrals, towers looming from the waves—and they’re all blazing with light by darkness too. Still, they’re just specks in the seascape—I can’t set eyes on them without thinking how fragile everything human is on Earth.’

‘You? A soldier like you?’

‘I was more of a strategic operative, actually: the point was never to go to war.’

‘You mean the threat of war guarantees peace? That kind of thing? Like now, when your presence guarantees we won’t see a single crocodile all night?’

I flicked the light beam over the swell: it frothed, and tossed, and seethed with menace.

‘Haven’t you grasped the basics yet?’ he said: ‘Quests are fulfilled by the act of questing, not the goal. These islands are the wrong place for you if you’re looking for something solid and real.’

‘We aren’t on a real survey?’

‘We’ll come back out later,’ he said, in a long-suffering voice: ‘It’s real enough. We’ll make another transect, maybe, when the moon’s gone down. We’ll stop for a spell, there, at the Dingo Camp—just ahead. After too long keeping a lookout in this humidity, just staring at the torch beam picking out the waves in their rhythm, I find you start seeing things.’

‘Imagining things?’

‘And the languor this weather breeds: the hopelessness, the sense of being at the end of your tether, being half-dead, so close that dying wouldn’t even be a change of state, and there’d be nothing interesting about it at all.’

I made no reply.

‘I thought you’d appreciate that last one, at least,’ said Jared. ‘I give you my best, always, in my reflections on the trap of consciousness.’

‘I did appreciate it,’ I said: ‘It was remarkable. I know exactly what you’re talking about.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.