(Very) Uncertain Fragments...

This is not a story but a few fragments of something bigger that may well never see the light of day. They don’t hang together properly like this so any feedback you can give would be very much appreciated! I’m not a writer of prose at all so please be gentle… this is an experiment for me…

UNCERTAIN FRAGMENTS(!)

Your earliest, greatest (and perhaps only) artistic act was performed on a warm May afternoon soon before you learnt to speak.

Were you nearing two already then? Sitting at Grandpa’s table, your legs swinging freely beneath your chair. The house, cold, even in spring, filled with that faint twinge of gas that always carries you back there. The overcooked, cooling meat succumbing slowly to Grandpa’s knife. You watched the fat, slick black Labrador watching his hand and salivating.  

You yawned, turned your head away to the roses in the garden, didn’t listen to him speaking. Nairobi and Kampala and Mau Mau and Uhuru… the strange words had already become familiar, unlistened to.

It was too soon for you to understand the way one sentence can sometimes contain two truths, the way that stories can do battle with themselves. Too early to know that putting into words can be a means of ordering, of seeking sense in chaos.

You did not comprehend yet the mystery of time: that this man with hairs in his ears and nasal cavities, and the man who was present at the end of empire, in Kenya and in Palestine, were one and the same. Like each of us a stitch that folds time back on itself, creases it- and then leaves it to run smooth again.

No one noticed you slip from the table, not even the dog responded to your tug of its tail, your invitation to play.

Outside the spring day was sunny and fresh. A damp smell of newly cut grass that made you wrinkle your nose a bit and sneeze. You felt your family watching, suddenly aware, as you plodded with heavy, imprecise steps across the patio, past the flowerbed where for a moment you stopped, bent down to prod a fleshy worm glowing pink against the dark, moist soil, crushed it under the heel of your little patent mary janes. For the first time you felt the power of commanding a gaze.

Let us imagine the expression that may have played across that innocent face as you turned your back to the dining room window, which framed your action like a photograph, lowered your pants, squatted in your animal way, farted and then deposited on your Grandpa's mirror-like garden, a not insubstantial turd. The young artist, the juvenile defecator on the English country lawn: finding, in the absence of speech, a more succinct form of self expression.  I like to imagine you smiling.

* * *

In adolescence it was harder, these oft repeated scenes at the family dining table that had now become altercations. You had lost your art. You found your words clattered on your teeth and fell sharply from your mouth, hard as marbles. You were too old to be indulged, or ignored, and were then merely tolerated. That was the beginning of your own odyssey.

Others spoke of finding themselves, but your journeys were a constant dislocation. There were cities and sights that you’d read about in travel guides but it wasn’t the places that held you but the spaces in between. The night train and the border crossing. Moments like the evening in Kigali when the rain fell so heavily that the lights went out and the water was a wall that assured you were, if not lonely, then alone. Even now they cling to your nose and tongue.

Here it began with names. With lists of names. But the bleach bone corpses that littered the country: they are forever unknowable. Unspeakable. For the first time you were speechless. You stepped on that land like an unmarked grave. A catch in your throat for their epitaph.

You didn’t take a camera, because you didn’t know how to take photographs: precisely which moment you should choose to stowaway like that, assuring its place forever marked so vividly against the rest. You were like the character in the biro marked book you carried with you, who ‘could not rid herself of anxiety because one second of her life would remain torn out of the course of time and some stupid coincidence would make it come back to haunt her like the badly buried dead’.

Because of this it seems almost impossible now, looking back: the candlelit memorial ceremony in the national stadium where it started. A solitary, earnest white face, ready to absorb as much as it possibly could. You saw people’s bodies wracked and sinewed with the strain of their own testimonies. Words became weapons. The weight of the stories was actual, and throughout the night you maintained your vigil as the survivors collapsed around you, beneath the burden.

By the time the colour of the sky began to change again- that dirty dishwater shade before the dawn- you were drained. Your tears had been rung from you. You sat in the concrete stand with your knees clutched to you as those few that stayed this long began to drift away, to return, you supposed, to their every day lives. At last you felt nothing.

Just two of you remained. It seemed natural he should take your hand, lead you to the comfort of a motel room, to the faint musky trace of countless foreign bodies. Natural that you shouldn’t share your names. You shared beer instead.

Then: that little leap over death. Gasped like your last breath. With desperate teeth and sweat drew sound from him. And because you were only ever destined to be strangers, how easy it was for you to love him, with all your heart.

* * *

You see your grandfather for the last time soon after. How often you’ve imagined this time when dialogue exists no longer, how often regretted the conversations you’ll never have- long before they became impossible. Questions overwhelmed by your fear of the violence of your desire for his history. The hush became a scab you longed to pick.

And now, approaching him down the chlorine-smelling corridor, seeing his slender silhouette smudged on the autumn sky, you understand he has become as all things that are passed. A Chinese whisper. A shadow on a cave wall.

Still, there’s a new peace in the quiet between you. Now he’s lost control of his tongue and his bladder- words gone, senile defecator- he somehow seems more real, more flesh and blood. You watch the sun set over the hospital garden, see how the light creeping out of everything turns it strange.

His face glows: it is marked with deep lines, certain as maps. You imagine the inside of that liver spotted scalp. The past like the stars at a great distance, set against darkness. Defiant of the human will to string them together, turn them into constellations, to reorient the void.

He takes your hand in his: they are covered in deep purple veins like rivers. The skin is still tanned, and so is yours, you notice, as if the sun had coloured your DNA. But his eyes are clear and he looks at you with the astonishing, momentary perspicacity of the demented:

“What will her name be?”

His hands drop to your stomach, where you’ve just begun to feel it, smaller than an acorn, tinier than a five pence piece. A life. Smaller than an acorn. But, even now, there are translucent, fleshy fingers that someday may grasp a pen, write a name. Even now this wordless, sexless thing, no bigger than an acorn is preparing to write its name.

When your prayers weren’t answered (after your long two minute wait, clutching the test in your office toilet cubicle), strangely the first emotion was one you hadn’t forseen: joy.

Small as nothing, almost. You began to tell it stories. You whispered to it, the miracle of life: that from tiny acorns great oak trees grow. Unfathomable mysteries, like the way the birds hang moveless on summer evenings in the sky, the secrets of the universe that cause you to view science with awe and mistrust in equal measure.

Sometimes you are silent with one another, and your fingers pressed together on your belly form a heart.

There is room for silence.

But you give this little thing a name. With it you conjure planets and empires and histories. With one word the world stops turning and everything finds its place.

‘Tumaini’

A slight furrow in the brow, and then a flicker of recognition, as the word rushes back to him on a bridge of memory: a past language, a past life.

‘Hope’, he says, quietly. He smiles.