Galgut

Then they’re standing there with not much to add, and the big scene is over. His arrival merely a minor sensation in the end, the prodigal returning, a drama everybody has seen before. Boredom sets in quickly. You come back after long vanishment and the surface closes as if you were never gone. Family quicksand.

Her husband gives her a hug, he’s pretty sure that’s the required gesture at this point. Astrid looks pale and weak, so he decides that a cup of tea with sugar might be the correct next step, and shuffles off to the kitchen in his long johns to make it, failing to see that his wife finds herself in the middle of a storm.

Yes, at this moment, Astrid is being carried by a high, horrible wind, all force with no form, which has plucked her loose from solid objects. How she clutches and cries out as she flies! Till she finds herself blown against a door, at the end of a passage, and knocks on it as hard as she can, though she has no power.

After a minute she gives up. Sits there for a little while, then tries again. She knows by now there will be no response, but she’s after something else. She hears the tinny beep against her ear and it almost physically conjures for her the empty rooms and passages down which it carries. That corner. That ornament. That sill. She closes her eyes, listening. A commotion of longing and revulsion inside. How did it become so complicated? Home used to mean only one Thing, not a blizzard of things at war.

How ordinary and how strange human life is. And how delicately poised. Your own end might lie just in front of you, under your feet. This plane breaking up into a million flaming pieces, one moment from now.

And then he’s got to the house to discover that his father has been using his room for storage, every available surface piled with junk. At this moment he’s holding in his hands a cardboard box filled with paraphernalia from the reptile park, books and pictures and flyers and an old stuffed lizard with glass eyes. He gestures to it with his chin.

Trying to clear out my bedroom, he says.

Hard not to assume it’s deliberate, there’s lots of other space, after all, but Pa wanted to bury me. Piece by piece, Anton has been uncovering himself, carrying each box/object down to the garage and dumping it there. The familiar furniture emerging gradually, bed and desk and chair, the topography of childhood. Long way to go still.

Shame, go and bury the poor thing, Astrid urges her husband. She wants it removed from her sight. Dean goes out dutifully and lifts the bird up gingerly by one wingtip. He casts about for a suitable burial site and finds a spot in a disused flower bed under a thorn tree. Digs a hole with his hands and tips the creature in. Covers it up again. Stands there for a minute, dwelling on the death of his father, way back when he was still a young boy. The bird took him there. One thing conjures up another. All events joined somehow, at least in memory.

It is necessary to renew their markings, using bodily juices, to lay down the border. Beyond here is us. Written in piss and shit, inscribed from the core.

Lying in the warm water, while the light in the room changes, she can often forget herself for a while. Or become herself so completely that everything else ceases, including the hard, long day behind her. But she’s unsettled this evening, something jangled at the heart of it all.

She emerges from the confessional in a state of unease, far worse than when she went in. No penance to ease the burden! She knows she must end the affair but doesn’t think she can, a common human dilemma, not only related to romance. Shouldn’t have gone to the priest, not before she was ready. Who knows what she wanted when she went in there, but certainly not this outcome. Now she’s having a crisis.

Moti changed his name and there are days when she’d like to change hers too. A different name can make you feel different inside.

He’s had an awful tragedy to deal with this week, but even this event he can only view through his usual prism of narcissistic injury, i.e. his failed marriage.

Truth is, for him marriage has been like two people coming together to make a third, a mischievous extra presence working against them both, cooking up trouble, subverting his good intentions. But all that is too complicated, when right now he’s angry about something simple.

Odd that, how certain blindnesses are revealing. But you can tell from the level of anxiety it provokes how her imminent arrival has disturbed him.

It’s only in Part Two, titled Winter, that things go badly wrong for Aaron. He kills somebody, a woman, in a tragic shooting accident and then runs away to escape, not from the law but from himself. He hides away in a nameless jungle, could be in central Africa, somewhere humid and lush and corrosive, where morals and metals decay. All of this is told fast and fiercely, in a handful of pages. But it’s at this point, when the life of our mysterious hero should take on more weight and power, that the book falters, becoming hesitant and unsure. He does terrible things and terrible things are done to him. He’s a young man on the lip of his adult life, but all his promise gets used up in the wretched struggle to survive. Trouble is, as Aaron’s life breaks down, the narrative does too, names and details changing from one paragraph to another, febrile scratchings-out and rewritings in Anton’s unmistakable old-young hand, could be a child’s or a geriatric’s.

Amor in her bra on the roof. Middle-aged Amor in her bra on the roof. There she sits, at the centre of her story, not the same people she used to be, nor the ones she might yet become. Not old yet, but not young any more either. Midway somewhere. The body past its best, starting to creak and fail.