Page 5 - In a different register - Sample

I knew him before I met him, said Mary. Meeting was a mere formality.In illo tempore, he was just a name on a schedule of presenters. Having too many preordained seminars to attend I chose to follow up on him after the conference. A maths forum was convened to discuss some of his research toward the end of the first University term. On my arrival in a fairly large classroom I noticed him sitting alone, to the side at the front, a man who then in 1979 appeared indefinable. Young, but how old? The room started filling up. That must be him, I thought. I can’t even remember what he was wearing. Clearly at home, leaning back in his chair surveying the academics from time to time but at other times appearing elsewhere. He differed from the others in seeming contained. A noisy camaraderie was hushed when someone stood up, explained why we were here and then, ‘over to you’. J stayed sitting and conducted the conversation from there. The casual way he commanded the situation from his humble chair to the side was compelling. I never understood a word of it. I gleaned a quote for my data bank of impressive phrases: ‘fuzzy logic’. Afterwards I inevitably fulfilled my mission of making contact regardless by telling J of BMR’s need for his work and wondering if he could help. Possibly. Why not meet in the New Year for lunch to discuss it.It all begins with a conversationSpeaking of ‘in illo tempore’, Mary said, it was the autumn of 1977 when I undertook a form of self- imposed exile. In 1976 the repressive regime in South Africa had reached new heights. Looking out of a third floor window I watched the school children laughing and jostling each other as they paraded down Adderley Street as if setting off on a school picnic. The high wail of sirens and a mass arrival of police vans and military Hippos carved their way into the suddenly alarmed phalanx which splintered. Children running everywhere. Some picked up rocks assaulting the armoured machinery with bare hands. Others bolted into the shops. Black baton wielding Police after them. Shopkeepers began to slam down iron grilles to protect their windows and the crowd from surging into the only escape hatches. Tear gas, screams, glass shattering, the smack of gunshot, here, below my office from which I could see Table Mountain and when the North-Wester blows the cloud table cloth billowing down over it in never ending preparation for a banquet.That was when I decided to leave. It had been coming for some time. From the frying pan into the fire I headed for South America. I went to Rio de Janeiro partly for reasons unknown to me. It may have been that I had been there before and in many ways, other than the language difficulty, it was like South Africa: a repetition compulsion. Canada was worse: from the fire into bland nirvana: a perversion of desire. I arrived in destitute state in London and spent the next fourteen months acquiring the necessities of domicile – papers, work, dingy, one roomed place to stay behind Marylebone Station. The first job took me around the country from Sunday afternoon to Saturday morning when there was just enough time to do the laundry, buy some groceries, wash my hair, find a patch of sun – or shelter from the cold gloom, the eternal cold gloom - in which to watch the world go by or read The Times, clean the uncleanable grime of cooker and cracked ceramic bath, pack standard issue and then set off again. A matter of keeping body and soul together.Then a lucky break. A position of Training and Development Manager for BMR, a large multinational. By 1979 I was on the conference circuit. This time to Newbury in the south where unbeknown to me the trajectory of my life was about to shift tangentially.On the wheel of existence one must start somewhere, with something that happened ‘in illo tempore’, said Mary. It all begins with a conversation. Letters, photographs, books, she waved around the room. The record of a life, Albert, evidence to give an account of it, witness to its singularity. Your life story begins at the moment when you discover you are in the wrong family.I think that by the time of these photos I had already moved from Innocent to Orphan. Seabold wrote that old photographs always seem to have an appeal written into them, that you should tell the story about them. See the patterns, the reflections in the water, she said.