Now I Know by Aidan Chambers

Author:Aidan Chambers [Aidan Chambers]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: RHCP
Published: 1995-08-03T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four THOR’S DAY

When we finally went to bed I lay awake, mind frying fat after our talk.

Whenever Julie turned over I felt the shifting shape of her against me, but muffled through two layers of cloth, an echo of a body.

Mind frying fat, body hungry.

I sweated.

My bare arm outside to cool me, my hand on bare ground. Soil like flesh. Stones beneath my fingers like bones. Naked earth.

Remembering Sweden. The huge magnificent elk, the lake, the boat, myself starkers in the sky, in the water, knowing as never before never since how everything is part of the same beyond-everything life. Remembering the timelessness of it, how I seemed to see into the heart of things and understand the mystery of the universe. Remembering the randy longing to be absorbed into it, to come into it, to lose myself in it.

All that feeling swept over me again as I lay there, and is so impossible to put into words. The words contradict each other:

a joy that hurts with sadness

a sadness that is pleasurable

a pleasure full of terror

a terror that excites

an excitement that calms

a calmness that frightens.

And I feel I am just about to make sense of it when it fades away and is gone, leaving behind a longing for it to come again, to feel the power of it, the awe.

Now in the tent my nakedness was wrapped in an imprisoning envelope, like the body of a maggot imprisoned in its cocoon while it is changed into a butterfly. Was I being changed like a maggot? And if so, into what? Does the maggot know what it will be when the time comes to break out? And who is performing the trick? Or am I my own magician and don’t know it?

The fat sizzled, burning thoughts to a frazzle.

And then the birds burst into their dawn chorus and blazed away, obliterating my thoughts and making me feel so exhausted at the sound of such wide-awake energy that I fell asleep at last.

But not for long.

Julie’s morning cold hand woke me, searching out my face hidden in the warm depths of my cocoon. She was dressed, her stuff cleared away, all ready for off.

We’ll stop, she said, somewhere along the road to wash and eat. Have this to get you going.

She stuck a slice of apple in my mouth.

Eve! I tried to say through her juicy gag.

If you’re playing that game, she said laughing, just remember that the nasty little serpent who caused the trouble by lying to

Eve about the apple was a he.

Pax, I said, holding up crossed fingers, pax!

How about unpaxing yourself so we can get moving?

Groan groan.

Best I can do this early, she said, and left me to slough my cocoon.

Selah.

Forget the damp morning, the grey clouds, the soggy grass, the geriatric car coughing and wheezing before it would start. Forget the shivery trip down the road to the nearest caff. Forget the caff’s tired washroom and the pongy loo. Forget the half-asleep waitress and the spongy toast.

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