Reading by Lightning

Author:Joan Thomas
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: FIC019000
Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
Published: 2008-10-19T21:00:00+00:00

For all Madeleine’s talk about Imogene, George had no experience with girls. This was my impression then and time has borne me out. His only acknowledgement of what had happened was to take me further into the labyrinthine passages of his mind, which in real terms meant allowing me to visit him in the shed. There in the bleak light of a late October afternoon he sat on the stool, inking the lettering onto a diagram of Celtic adze heads, and I examined more of the charts and posters pinned along the wall.

I saw a chart that I took at first for a family tree, expecting to see my own name and those of my cousins on it, but the tiny figure at the top was labelled Homo sapiens, and interestingly, a sloth rather than an ape was man’s most immediate ancestor. Beside it hung a poster of shells, of their designs and patterns. E conchis omni, a large legend read.

It was the motto Erasmus Darwin had painted on the door of his coach, said George.

I looked at him uncertainly. As a general rule I did not dwell on my lack of Latin.

Charles Darwin’s grandfather, he said.

I’ve never heard of him.

I worshipped him for a while, said George. When I was in Fourth Form. I read everything about him and by him. He wrote his science in rhyming verse. In couplets. Organic life beneath the shoreless waves, was born and nursed in ocean’s pearly caves. That sort of thing. People think evolution came from Charles Darwin, but his grandfather was there long before him. He knew that it happened, he just didn’t know how.

George was my cousin, which let me into the shed where the skull grinned on the window ledge, and he was not my cousin, which let me drop my hand carelessly to his shoulder when he sat on a stool at the workbench and run the back of my fingers along his neck. I don’t believe in that sort of thing, I said. In Genesis it says that God created the earth in six days.

You’re a Methodist, he said, ignoring my hand.

No, I said.

Quaker, he said.

I don’t even know what that is.

What then?

We’re just Christians.

Well, you must be low church. Evangelical. You accept the Bible as a scientific text?

I guessed I did. I toyed with the bristly hair at the nape of his neck.

Well, the fossil record presents you with a bit of a problem. There is a theory that God planted fossils in the rocks when he created the world. In 4004 BC. October 22, was it? I’ve seen a Bible with the date in the margin. They figured it out from calculating the genealogies. Back in the sixteenth century.

I said I was glad they’d found a use for the genealogies.

You should read One Hundred and One Obscenities in the Bible, George said. It’s a book a chap at school showed me. Onan spilling his seed and that sort of thing. It was Bernard Lowe’s. He left it in the refectory and it was pinched, otherwise I would borrow it and send it to you.

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