Page 22 - In a different register - Sample

hand, seemed to be unlucky in love and ascribed to her sister the status of ‘femme fatale’, which Mary thought was hardly the case, but we all have our projections, n’est pas?The era of Tim was the time of lecturing at ‘Varsity and parties and hot-pants. She was persuaded by Sally her flat mate to accompany her in mid-summer madness to the Fish River Canyon in her Renault 4 – you remember the toy box-like ones with a u-shape gear stick protruding from the middle of the dashboard. Those Renaults were ideal for desert conditions. It was nicknamed Amigo Fiel – faithful friend - in Colombia. After that trip, said Mary, my first car was a Renault 4, what else? I have a photo of the two of us lying toe to toe on a dusty road from nowhere to nowhere across an even more barren landscape.The heat rose off the desert like a barbeque. The silence was palpable with the sound of the wind arriving and passing into the emptiness. The same emptiness she once saw in Matt’s eyes. Nothing moved. At night they lay under the stars. Only in Africa can one see the stars as they must be seen. One time she and Matt went to the Okavango swamps. As they lay close in the sleeping bag listening to the night sounds they heard an animal sniffing its way around the bushes near by: Now all the fingers of this tree (darling) have hands, and all the hands have people; and more each particular person is (my love) alive than every world can understand now you are and i am now and we’re a mystery which will never happen again, a miracle which has never happened before – and shining this our now must come to then ...3 The next morning, the lion spoor let them know who it had been. Herds of at least three hundred elephant would come down to the river. Mud baths were the order of the day. Africa was in her blood and nothing would eradicate it, ever.She fell silent. Silence.She could have continued forever. He listened, such listening as his enveloped them in such a silence that at last she was able to hear her own selfEventually J said: “Tell me in a word or a phrase, what it was that you were valuing in each of these experiences? For example, when your doll broke, what did that signify for you?Unfair discriminationAnd the dolphins in the South Atlantic?Radiant alivenessWhat about Okavango?Oh, that was the eternal soul of Africa - ‘origins’ Smokey’s death?Gone foreverMajolo’s bedroom?3e e cummings.