Heaven's Edge by Romesh Gunesekera

Author:Romesh Gunesekera
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2002-08-23T04:00:00+00:00

The next morning the sun was a smoky grey. I made my way on to the main factory floor. The place was gutted. All the machines had been removed, but the interior still smelled of tea. It rose out of the floorboards and off the walls and seemed to stain the air with the odour of old ghosts.

In its heyday who would have been here? Sometimes it is so difficult to remember who belongs where, when. Or why. Whose was the labour, and whose the capital? There would have been blasts of hot air and the noise of dryers and rollers; wheels turning, the smell of burning, roasting tea. Narcotic sweat. There was a time when the sound of machines would have filled the air all around the hills. Factories in full swing. A steam train chugging up to the central hill towns. Eldon loved to recall those scenes, complete with sound effects: the clacking of wheels, the hoot of the engine, the constant gabble of conversations between strangers. It was a land full of talk, he would explain. ‘Everyone always wanted to place everybody else. People would speak to bridge the gulf between them. We had hope, you know, in those days. We all shared the same vision, the same sense of order even if not all our wealth.’

Sanctimonious claptrap, I suppose, but for me that morning there was no sound in the factory, or outside, other than the sound of my own breath misting the air. No words, no birds. Nothing. It seemed as though there was no one else left in the world. Not that I wanted hordes; all I wanted was Uva. A life that was our own.

I tried to picture her journey. Would she have a vehicle? A cart? A bullock? Anything? Survival with no provisions, only a knife for a weapon, I feared would be impossible however close to the earth she might feel. For an instant then I even doubted if she had understood the plan that had seemed so clear to me. But she must have thought as I did: Samandia was our only hope. I remembered the scent of her body as though she had just passed by, leaving a spoor – an urgent pheromonal odour – for me to follow. But is our lake a pool of sorrow now? I see her curled up in a basket of leaves; her head turned in, her neck bared. My arms are empty; they encompass nothing but air, thinning with each passing moment, and yet I can feel the shape of her being from our last embrace: imperfect but strong. The warmth seeping from her leg curled around mine, the curve of her back, and the painlessness of giving in, falling into a new-found deep, dark past. If I could live my life again, I would wish it to be shorter. Let it end with her, quickly, rather than last so long – these interminable hours of her pain; my vigil, remembering, giving breath to our loosening lives.

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