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Jonathan ChamberlainHOW THINGS WERE BEFORE YOU ARRIVED At that time we lived in a small flat at the top of a hill on a small island, an hour by ferry from the main island of Hong Kong. It is a very small island. With recent reclamations it is almost exactly one square mile. Two largish headlands of rotten granite joined by a wasp waist of a sand bar. Geographers call this type of island a tombolo. It is perhaps three hundred paces across at the thinnest point. The shape of it is like a dog, if you look at it in a certain way, or maybe a knotted root of ginger. The sandbar has been concreted over and built upon. This is the village where some thirty thousand people live. On the south side of the sandbar, six hundred or so trawlers, fishing junks, shrimpers, sampans, water boats, grain junks, short-haul cargo boats and fibre-glass skips occupy the waters of the harbour area. On the north side is the island's main beach which looks on to the south side of Hong Kong island - a scatter of lights on a clear night - and beyond it the furnace of the blazing city, alive with evening energies. Sometimes, late in the evening we watched it with a kind of awe. But mostly we faced the other way, looking across the inky harbour to the silent dark shapes of the mountains on the neighbouring island of Lantau, slopes that faded away in shades of grey. The flat, one of four in the block, stood just below the peak of one of the two hills of the island, overlooking some vegetable plots. One day, instead of going down to the market, I decided to buy directly from the farmer. "How much do you want?" he asked. We stood facing each other surrounded by the vegetables in the field grappling with this question of quantity. ...if we had known then... "A catty," I suggested tentatively, aware of the stupidity of talking weight when we had nothing to weigh them in. We laughed."OK, two dollars worth." My Cantonese was up to that. The farmer nodded and started laying the white cabbage along his arm. From wrist to elbow one dollar, from elbow to shoulder two dollars. For two dollars I got an arm's length of Chinese greens. Here, above the village, we shared the nights with the croakings of a hundred frogs, rich bellowings like cows' mooings. I loved these frog sounds, each burping like bubbles bursting, that greeted us as we came home in the evening. At night it was sometimes too tiresome to go out into town. We stayed where we were and closed out the world. Our closest friends were insects and trees. Spiders weaved their cobwebs unmolested, skinks darted out from the wardrobe. Blue tailed skinks – lizards that looked as if they had been designed by Bugatti, skittered around the room on electric nerves. Sometimes a tail was missing leaving a glistening red lump. Within a week the tail had grown back. Cicadas grated their legs together in sudden frenzies of sound. In the drains and cracks around the house lived armoured centipedes up to ten inches long. In the grass there were snakes. We were not alone in our solitude. They were happy times, times of deep contentment and a strange, disquieting need to escape. I recognise this only now, looking back, there were deep currents of energy that felt constrained. And as I look back at this companionable, contented time, I guess Bern too was escaping along her own tracks of wood and stone. Dear Stevie, I loved your mother and she loved me. These are truths that I know absolutely. But perhaps there was - in me, in her - at the centre, a hard core that could not be dissolved in the acid of love. And, anyway, love isn't all there is to it. There's more. And did we leak away from each other slowly, a slow steady drip-drip-drip of soul and spirit and heart and being? So very slowly we didn't notice it? So slowly that even if we had seen it we wouldn't have thought it mattered? Is that what happened? It's hard to think of it. But then of course the drip, if there was a drip, was small and the reservoir of feeling was deep. And life, in any case, means friction and people are different, grow differently, react differently. These are simple everyday truths. And then, Stevie, there was you. A seed planted in the very heart-soil of our lives. I knew it before she did. I knew the firming of the breast meant more than temporary hormonal dysfunction. This time was different. The days passed and the subtle ballooning of her breasts continued. I grew more certain. But she was confused. There had been a slight flow of blood at the proper time and again a few weeks later and again and again, each time after we had made love. When it was confirmed she said we'd have to stop for a couple of months. It could be dangerous. How did I feel about it? There I was, excluded from the body I loved for the sake of the usurper. I thought of the burden, the irritations, the complications of it all. But that mood didn't last long. I became affectionate of the little abstraction that daily grew bigger and bigger. You. I felt this nameless fruit of love ripen under the palm of my hand; saw it swell. Her nipples stuck out straight as if at attention. We lay in bed holding hands and contemplating this mysterious child that had chosen to be ours - or had it been chosen for us by some unseen fate? Was it that eons of karma were meeting at this intersection of fate and time? Magical and mysterious being. What were we going to do with you? What were you going to do to us? We understood a truth. The future had arrived. And what we saw as the future would always be your continuous present. And looking back, Stevie, as I sometimes do, I feel a kind of horror rise up in me. If we had known then. If we had suspected. If we had had tests, then we would never have known you. That thought scares me to the depth of my soul. If I had never known you, why then, then, I would never have become the me I am today. This another piece of Jonathan Chamberlain's memoir of his daughter, Wordjazz For Stevie. You can read more from Jonathan here. The photo is by Falk who blogs here. 9:40 PM - 5/2/2007 - post comment
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