Page 15 - In a different register - Sample

and therefore punishable but a heinous offence to some morally preoccupied God. The most vociferous proponent of which being, of course, the very white male who covertly desired black women and secretly indulged their fantasies.News images of violent confrontation between the State and an un-enfranchised black majority (forced to carry, even to the toilet, the humiliating ‘dom pas’ without which jail was immediate) flashed across the world.Mary told me that she could not remember him telling her anything about himself. He may have said he was married, had a child. He suggested they go to his office. A mess of papers everywhere and books piled anywhere on ceiling high bookshelves. Dirty cups littered the small table and the waste bin was full to overflowing. An architect’s slanted work board occupied one corner. A white board above it with blue and black diagrams and equations looked serious. A standard desk stood between the expansive, full length windows, admitting welcome pale sunlight. They overlooked a car park shrubbed along the walls overhung by Willow and beyond large Ash, Birch and Elder stretching into the recesses of the city. Until the Norman Conquest, a squirrel could cross England from the Severn to the Wash without putting foot to the ground. Much of the population lived in clearings, surrounded by the menacing forest, a place of wild beasts and wilder men. The trees themselves sighed or whispered together, roared mightily during the autumn gales or stood silent in the snow. The mockery their longevity made of the life-span of mere man, was lost on modernity.Coffee? I looked at the cups dubiously. J moved over to a basin in the corner to wash two, leaving the rest as they were.He leaned back in a swivel chair at the architects desk: Where shall we begin? You asked about my work in BMR, she said. Tell me about the company. Large multinational, long history, struggling with culture change in the light of computers being a new product. Mary said J turned the conversation from BMR to her personally explaining that his current work was looking at a mathematical model for how people construe their reality. Shall we try it? She accepted with alacrity. Tell me about experiences in your life which have been significant to you, he said.She told him of the night sailing to South America when the dolphin sent streams of fluorescent green through the water and showers of luminous drops flying as they leapt in arcs around the boat. She told him of the time in Brazil when a tropical storm burst over the forested cliff face to which her small hut clung and suddenly the heavens opened to engulf her in a numinous presence letting her know that all is well with the world and is held in the embrace of a benevolent God. That was indeed a revelation as up to that time her God was a malevolent puppeteer who cunningly engineered pleasure only to dash one to the ground in despair at the hopelessness of it all.She told him of the time she had attempted suicide by swimming out into the vast rollers of the Atlantic off Llandudno in the Cape, only to be washed back up onto huge granite boulders like a grounded porpoise gasping for air, too weak to attempt any such further madness. Then there was the time she attempted suicide after Matt had left her a note saying that he was off to Canada for good: ‘our then shall be some darkness during which fingers are without hands; and i have no you and all trees are (any more than each leafless) its silent in forevering snow’.2 She had ended up in Groote Schuur Hospital with a gashed head and a missing tooth because they had forgotten to strap her down properly when using the stomach pump. She had fallen against the metal cabinet at the side of the stretcher. Without asking her permission, the psychiatrist had interviewed her not only with students present but they were colleagues of Matt. Once you are out of here we must arrange psychiatric help for you, he said. Furious at the necessity of returning to life and the indignity of being a ‘case’ for gawping medical students she let him have it: I think you should know that psychiatrists in particular and the medical profession in general are a useless bunch and when I leave this hospital I will not be having anything further to do with any of you. (In fact her sister, her sister Martha, was a doctor and2e.e. cummings