She and I had lost each other long ago in those confusions and silences. But now, beside this infant, we were within an intimacy, as when sweat covered her face after a seizure and I would hug her to me. When being wordless had been best.
What had our relationship been? A betrayal of those around us, or the desire of another life?
Quite early on I had discovered the overlooked space open to those of us with a silent life. I didn’t argue with the policeman who said I couldn’t cycle over a certain bridge or through a specific gate in the fort – I just stood there, still, until I was invisible, and then I went through. Like a cricket. Like a hidden cup of water.
There were nights when Cullis would lie beside her, barely touching her with the tip of his finger. He would move down the bed, kissing her brown hip, her hair, to the cave within her. When they were apart he wrote how he loved the sound of her breath in those moments, the intake and release of it, paced and constant, as if preparing, as if knowing there was to be long distance ahead. His hands on her thighs, his face wet with the taste of her, her open palm on the back of his neck.
The youth felt this was his first conversation in years.
Bridge depends on character. Your character and the character of your opponents. You must consider the character of your enemy. This is true of bomb disposal. It is two-handed bridge. You have one enemy. You have no partner. Sometimes for my exam I make them play bridge. People think a bomb is a mechanical object, a mechanical enemy. But you have to consider that somebody made it.
Everyone has their own marriages, she thinks.
During our evenings in borrowed buildings, she would wake suddenly from a deep sleep, see me watching her, and release a guilty and delicious smile. I suppose that was the moment I felt I belonged most to her.
But there was a discipline, it was just that we didn’t understand. We thought he was formless, but I think now he was tormented by order, what was outside it. He tore apart the plot – see his music was immediately on top of his own life. Echoing. As if, when he was playing he was lost and hunting for the right accidental notes.
Wherever Hana is now, in the future, she is aware of the line of movement Kip’s body followed out of her life. Her mind repeats it. The path he slammed through among them. When he turned into a stone of silence in their midst. She recalls everything of that August day – what the sky was like, the objects on the table in front of her going dark under the thunder.
The sloshing of their hooves in the paddy field that I heard thirty yards away, my car door open for the breeze, the haunting sound I was caught within as if creatures of magnificence were undressing and removing their wings.
We are all the people we have ever known. We carry them for the rest of our lives, across every border we cross.
Whenever her father was alone with a dog in a house he would lean over and smell the skin at the base of its paw. This, he would say, as if coming away from a brandy snifter, is the greatest smell in the world! A bouquet! Great rumours of travel!
Who realizes how contented feral children are? The grasp of the family fell away as soon as I was out the door.
He spends hours with the Englishman, who reminds him of a fir tree he saw in England, its one sick branch, too weighted down with age, held up by a crutch made out of another tree. It stood in Lord Suffolk’s garden on the edge of the cliff, overlooking the Bristol Channel like a sentinel. In spite of such infirmity he sensed the creature within it was noble, with a memory whose power rainbowed beyond ailment.
He rides the boat of morphine. It races in him, imploding time and geography the way maps compress the world onto a two-dimensional sheet of paper.
She could not forget the depth of her sleep, the lightness of her plummet.
There was something about him she wanted to learn, grow into, and hide in, where she could turn away from being an adult. There was some little waltz in the way he spoke to her and the way he thought.
It is a strange time, the end of a war.” “Yes. A period of adjustment.
I once traveled with a guide who was taking me to Faya. He didn’t speak for nine hours. At the end of it he pointed to the horizon and said, ‘Faya!’ That was a good day.