Loving Monsters by James Hamilton-Paterson

Author:James Hamilton-Paterson [James Hamilton-Paterson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571320875
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2014-10-14T04:00:00+00:00

10

Sunset. A familiar strand of coral chips. The sun has just sunk between clouds like torn-off wings, down through parakeet colours into blood. A few fishing boats drawn up beyond the high tide mark. One or two being painted or overhauled are rolled up on palm boles, leaning on an outrigger, keel clear of the ground. Their interiors are heaped with crisped fronds to protect them from the daytime glare. Others, readied for a night’s fishing, are being carried down to where the flaccid water barely lolls against the shore. Several are already out in the bay, low dark splinters with an oar rising and dipping against the crimson lightfall, each bow tipped with the spark of an oil lamp.

A great advantage in being a jobbing writer is the variety offered by having more than one job on hand. This evening Italy, Jayjay and his ongoing Egyptian saga occupy a space unrelated to distance, far away on the yonder side of tonight’s chromatic horizon. The planet rolling over in its sleep will soon disclose this same cinnabar doorstep behind which a new day is even now preparing to yawn open on Tuscan hills and light up a small row of beehives overlooking a broad valley. My bees: checked and given a reluctant farewell dusting of oxytetracycline powder mixed with icing sugar against Foul Brood. They are already in another universe. Jayjay is elsewhere still, frozen on the brink of the Second World War where his narrative has been abruptly snapped off to enable me to fly away and talk to the carefully assembled monsters and heroes of a more modern age. This is contract work; Jayjay’s is still a gentleman’s agreement. So I have abandoned him in 1938 and returned to the world’s other side, to the little village I know best where I greet old friends and acclimatise myself before going to the capital to begin fact-gathering.

And there was my hut in the forest beneath the mango tree, its grass thatch lank, its crafty shoulders hunched. Amazing that it should still have been standing; that the rusted hinges should have creaked and the split-bamboo door opened on an earth floor sadly unswept and marked with the tracks of land crabs. On the sagging basketwork walls I found still pinned, limp with damp: (1) last year’s calendar, given away by a Chinese dry-goods store in town; (2) a crayon-coloured invitation to speak at the Elementary School’s Christmas party and help judge the competitions; (3) another invitation, this one to a godchild’s high-school graduation ceremony; (4) a mildewed matchbox (empty) on a string; (5) the blade of a knife I broke when trying to repair the trigger of a speargun shortly before leaving the last time. How odd it was that in a climate of typhoon and termite and rot this mouldy, wormy structure should still have been here with its freight of habitation and memories! How odd it was that I, too, was here after six months’ absence, still alive

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.