Hold My Hand I'm Dying by John Gordon Davis

Author:John Gordon Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: House of Stratus

Chapter Thirty-Three

The night before my ship docked in Durban, South Africa, was Christmas Eve. The ship was very gay. I had been knocking off this Johannesburg bird called Dina, amidst the lifeboats, since our second day out of Perth. You know how it is with birds at sea, and I think Johannesburg birds are more so. They grow up very young in Johannesburg, with all that gold underground. Dina was very good. She was tall and poised and slick, except for the scab on the twentieth vertebra of her back. Every night she rubbed the same spot against the deck or against the lifeboat davit, every morning there was a new little scab, and then every night it was rubbed off again. I think she will always have a little scar there on her twentieth vertebra, about the middle of her back. Some Dina. She said she was coming to visit me in America. She said she would buy me a shack up in the mountains where I could write all day long, or a cottage down on the beach on some Caribbean island, and we would have a boat and we could go fishing for weeks at a time, and the boat would have a special cabin fitted for me with a desk and a tape recorder and a typewriter, and all the books I’ve always wanted, and I could write. And every year we would fly over to Europe for skiing in the winter, and to Africa to hunt. Dina was something, svelte, soft and full and blonde and silky to touch, and very on the ball, all the answers, Dina. She had been looking for her soulmate, she said. I sat with Dina on a sundeck in my swimsuit drinking good booze and looking at her long blonde gold body with the tiny soft hairs glinting gold on her arms and legs and I thought: she is beautiful, Mahoney, and she has a soul and she wants you and she is rich and she could give you everything you want, you need never work again, you could spend the rest of your life writing and thinking and becoming wise, like George Bernard Shaw was mollycoddled by his millionairess and, actually, you could love her, indeed you could be absolutely smitten if you would let yourself, if you stopped playing it cool and hard-arsed, and let yourself go. If you forgot about Suzie. You wouldn’t even have to forget about Suzie, you’d only have to surrender to the fact that Suzie is gone, that she left you a year ago, and admit that you have gotten over her, admit it to yourself, that’s all, accept that Suzie and you are no good for each other, otherwise you would never have let her go. Often I thought: you should not see Suzie in Durban to re-open all the old scars, it is not fair to her either, she has garnered a new life about her too now, she has

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