Jackdaw by Tade Thompson

Author:Tade Thompson [Thompson, Tade]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
Published: 2022-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

‘Want to come in here?’ I asked. ‘With me?’

She touched the water and withdrew her hand. ‘Tade, this water is freezing. Get out of there, now.’

So it was. I hadn’t noticed.

But I successfully avoided the topic of my hallucinatory lunch.

11

Standing up in my study, staring at photos of 7 Reece Mews, of the mess within. It wasn’t a mess, though, was it? It was more of a focus for artistic play, where fragments of ideas could collide with each other and produce the kind of accidental meaning Bacon talked about. Sort of. Bacon couldn’t be trusted on the matter of his intentions or process. There is what he said, and what he did, and what he wanted to be seen. Brand control, innit?

I wasn’t a painter, so there was no point hoarding a bunch of images, but my equivalent was books. I remember that the first book I touched was Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil. I stroked the spine. I loved books, not just the words or pictures within, but the objects themselves. I loved cover art, back copy, the copyright page, the acknowledgements, the backmatter. I loved that smell old yellowed books had, but not so much the faintly chemical smell of newer paper.

I threw the Smil down in the middle of my study.

I stared at it.

I bent, picked it up again.

I tore off the cover. Surprisingly I didn’t feel any frisson of fear, which I would usually feel when I mistakenly damage a book. I tore the preface out, crumpled it and dropped it to the floor. I was learning new things with each page I ripped. God doesn’t strike you down with thunder just because you damage a book.

Growing up, my mother wasn’t a big one for books. Which is an understatement. She taught me how to read and how to write, but after that I was left to my own devices when it came to procuring books.

When I was done with the Smil, I cut The Turn of the Screw by James. It was a Norton edition too. I slashed lengthwise and the paper floated down, mixed with the Smil.

There were three books in my house when I was a kid. The Holy Bible, King James Version, which was my younger brother’s baptismal bible; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Carroll, a hardcover left by tenants who lived there before us; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Twain, also hardcover, also left behind. These are books I read repeatedly because I had no others. My mother’s main interest was pleasing my stepfather and my main interest was avoiding my stepfather’s feet. We never went to bookshops or libraries. At that stage, I’m afraid to say, I was nervous of libraries and bookshops because I only knew them from TV, though attracted to them at the same time because of the books.

Roget’s Thesaurus. The pages were like ribbons, like threadworms. There is a pleasure in destruction and I was getting drunk on it.

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.