Mothertime by Gillian White

Author:Gillian White [White, Gillian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781480402157
Published: 2013-02-13T22:23:00+00:00

Twenty

WALL-EYED WITH WONDER, LOT Dance catches a snowflake on the finger of his glove and, using the utmost delicacy, deposits the tiny flake in his mouth. He closes his eyes the better to taste it. In order to see more clearly and to react more quickly, he has ceased to take his daily medication and this is why he can enjoy the snowflake so.

A hurrying stranger, passing on the other side, notices him, thinks he’s a tramp and looks away. But the stranger carries the image of the man with the classical, tragic face and wonders, deeply moved, what dreadful things he has endured in his loneliness. He imagines him laughed at, jeered at, spat at, lying sick and untended beneath some ungodly arch. Or sitting in a stiff chair, too small for him, down in a charitable crypt. How many days does he spend like this, trudging the dismal streets? Perhaps it’s all the same to him where he is.

Lot would tell the stranger not to be so ridiculous.

Who is Lot? What is he all about? Well, Lot is not a tramp. He has a home and a family and his mother, embarrassingly, still tries to hold his hand in the street, but the stranger isn’t so wrong. There is Lot’s life and there is Life—the monstrous power which charges over the earth, carrying out its plan which has no use for individuals, needs no individuals to exist. In its slathering jaws it got hold of beautiful Ruby, used her, then tried to toss her on the scrap-heap. Lot is tougher; it hasn’t done that with him yet, bloody hell, not quite—Lot keeps his eyes open. But it’s the enemy, that’s the point. Everyone’s enemy. Everyone’s in the same fix. Sleepwalkers and the groping blind wrestling with a monstrous antagonist. Everything it does is an attack. Everything that happens is a trap. Everything that Life, that growling monster, gives, every experience, every pleasure as well as every disappointment, is a plot to foil, is a move against, against arousal from the dream. Life is an evil scientist mixing stimulants and sedatives in exactly the right proportion to keep human beings in the proper state of stupor for its own purpose.

So Lot must keep on his toes.

Sometimes, when he’s upset like this, every day feels the same. There is no tomorrow. There’s just a day and a night, a circle wheeling from light to dark, from dark to light—just alternating light and dark.

Oh yes, the world according to Lot Dance is a strange one, full of misunderstandings and false messages. He does not see things like you or I do, and his needs and his loves are relatively simple. But he is not harmless. Thoughts of retribution, when they come, capture his soul completely. That hateful Caroline Townsend had better bloody well watch her step.

So here he is now, outside in the darkening afternoon where the sky is a bruised blue-yellow, furtive yet with an air of mission about him.

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