Page 16 - In a different register - Sample

she had always felt put out that these imbeciles were held in such high public regard and seemed to enjoy all the advantages of conforming to a doltish society. Banks fell over themselves to foster the profession’s business. Why even when her losskop sister, her sister Martha arrived late at the airport she was regally escorted across the tarmac to the waiting ‘plane.) After she was discharged from hospital, she said, her mother appeared like a ghost out of the corner of her darkened flat whose curtains had been drawn closed. How had she known? Her mother asked in a voice with death in it whether she was alright. Yes, fine thanks, said Mary. Sometimes there is a gulf that nothing can span. She told J that while with this same love of her life, she had been adamant about not having children. After he left, she often wondered if one of the reasons might not have been her dogmatic and unilateral decision not to have children. He wanted them. She considered it a cruel and thoughtless imposition to bring children into an arbitrary world of God’s broken promises and inequitable dealings. She wasn’t taking that one on. Another possible reason for his leaving may have been her preoccupation with suicide. He hated it. He was a doctor, after all: Supposedly a preserver of life with the sensibility of a poet in his genes. They had met through the arrival of a mutual friend on the old Union Castle Passenger Liner from England. Waiting for the boat to dock, she had seen the void of existence in his eyes - that vast, unknown emptiness of infinity. From that moment she loved him.And then there was sailing to South America with Matt, on Klaraborg: A hundred foot Swedish, gaff- rigged dowager built around the mid-1860ties. The bowsprit was fifteen feet. A net hung under it, slung like a hammock to be cradled and dunked in the South Atlantic to the up-down, up-down swish of the sea.KlaraborgKlaraborg boasted a Jack Russel, a canary in a cage that swung violently above the saloon table but was brought on deck when the wind was sweet and two patchy grey and white kittens. As Table Mountain receded from sight one fell overboard. It was my first lesson in the ways of the sea, Mary said. No one suggested trying to rescue it as the wake of the boat folded it in behind us. The fifteen crew comprised the Swedish Skipper – a lean, blue eyed Viking rake - his equally Swedish svelte, blond sister and her also naked golden boy of five who switched fluently between Swedish, English, Russian and Italian. They say children learn languages easily at that age. As for the rest of us, we were a rough-tumble of mixed nationality, seven men, five women.On board was the first time she tried Ganja and was entranced to see wind-spirits flowing over the deck, then up through the sails out to sea. Perhaps it was because of having being becalmed for days on a flat blue sea which stretched to every horizon of empty blue sky with the claque, claque, claque of listless sails, that we ran out of provisions ten days before sighting the Brazilian coast. The crayfish pots on the anchor at Dassen Island and the Benito slaughtered at St. Helena supplemented the exhausted provisions. Things turned nasty between the male crew and the skipper on account of the Benito for breakfast, Benito for lunch and Benito for supper with only one variation – boiled – sans alcohol or cigarettes to assuage the pangs. But they all knew that only he could pull them through in a storm. While for the most part seemingly absent, he had an uncanny knack of appearing on deck, at any time of the day or night, when the wind changed. A tall, blond, God, he barely spoke at all. True to form, in St Helena he cuckolded a South African on his way to the Mediterranean by stealing his