Accidents littered our roads every day. Sometimes I wondered when it would be my turn to lie inert on the side of the road, haloed in shattered glass, my crumpled car a warning to others. Your grandmother and I were young and very much in love. We didn’t pay enough attention to the road. Her hand was always on mine, or resting on my leg, and we’d talk and laugh and sing together, far from worry. One day, driving back from the beach together, we passed an accident scene. The road was clogged up, all but one lane closed. Ambulances and police vehicles sat silently observing the scene, their lights flashing. We passed the ruined vehicles and saw a child not more than ten years old lying dead on the road. His body was crushed, his blood thick on the road. He was covered with a blanket as we drove on. There was a profound, devastated silence after that. When we got home, we promised each other never to look at accidents again. When we saw the siren lights spinning blue and red we would not heed their call. We would stare ahead with steely eyes.
It was a few days later. I was driving home after a long day, your mother in the baby seat. The traffic was slow and before long those familiar lights came into view. I remembered my promise and kept my eyes far from the carnage. I drove on and arrived home to an empty house. There was no note on the fridge. I tried your grandmother’s cell phone but it was dead. You mother was screaming in my arms, and there was nothing I could do to calm her. I never heard your grandmother’s voice again. It was she who’d had an accident. A truck driver had changed lanes without seeing her little car. She’d spun, and the car behind her hit her on the driver’s side. The medics say that they could not get her out of the car for twenty minutes. All the while she was calling my name. I wonder if she saw me as I drove past, right before she went away. There isn’t a moment that goes by that I don’t think about her, that I don’t rush to the side of her car, take her hands and whisper in her ear for her to stay.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
The Last Cartographer
When not found shaping wood and tin to fantastic creations, John Walker, his body 81 years old, his mind dwelling somewhere in childhood, could be found poring over the ancient maps in his study. They calmed him. They gave him a sense of timelessness when all around him rushed forward in eager expectation of tomorrow. John was more content to look back, to cast his gaze over his own life and beyond over that of his father, and his father’s father, back to times when the world was flat and maps grew as milk spilling on the floor, horizons stretching and forming under each new sweep of the spyglass from gull-haloed ships. Back then there was adventure in every whiff of the sea breeze, new people to discover, new creatures and plants too vivid and outlandish to be birthed from a mere man’s imagination. And just below the water, lurking on the edge of the tide, waited mermen, toothed creatures, giant squid and ghost crews from ships long sunk. They were all there, waiting for the unwary sailor to slip from his rigging and into the deep.
It was the mapmakers who were the true explorers, great men whose names now engraved maps which many saw as naïve trinkets, blessed with the knowledge of GPS and geography text books. Chronological arrogance appalled John, who saw these men as the last true adventurers the world has seen. They were men born with great names and who lived up to them. He thought back to his own grandfather, a bear of a man with an easy laugh and a story for every empty evening. John would sit transfixed for hours, his grandfather’s voice washing over him like warm water from a jug when his mother cleaned his hair in the tub. Together on these balmy nights on the veranda, they visited the orient in times of sheiks, camels and veiled beauties. They ate dates and rode horses and came to desert fortresses where they rescued girls like desert flowers from scimitar-guarded harems. They sailed frigates over the edges of frayed old maps, tantalisingly close to the maws of monsters and the lascivious smiles of naked mermaids. They monkeyed into countless crow’s nests and called ‘Land ho!’ sighting islands never before seen by blue eyes. They joined the scallywag crews of dubiously honourable pirates to liberate fair maidens abducted by fierce pygmies. They drank from coconuts. They fell parched upon oases. They walked through spice markets as the first white men. They duelled scarred foes. They fell in love. They dusted the desert from their hands. They walked with nomads. They huddled under thin blankets in Himalayan snows. They trod before train tracks in deepest Africa and swam in the Ganges. They bartered for ivory and ran dodging poisoned darts. Adventure seeped deeply into the evenings from the well of his grandfather’s memory, his voice gravel and whiskey and gun powder, flick knives and stubble and leather.
The new maps, laser-printed and perfect, intelligent thanks to inherited knowledge from atlases grown senile, were things of great concern to John. Their precision had robbed them of all the qualities he felt maps needed to possess; adventure, a tingling in the belly, a taste that treasure was to be found, the worry of dangerous natives and places named for skulls and treachery and monsoon wrecks. There were no more hidden places, no strange animal cries to chill the soul quivering next to a camp fire, no lurking traps. All the blanks had been filled, all the adventure had been used up. Satellites flitted through the sky like whispers from a knowing mouth, sending, receiving, spying, telling. Great mysteries, which once afforded the dreamers nights of fancy, planning trips to dusty places that knew only the hooves of donkeys, were now shaken and lost like the cobwebs they brushed off their Stetsons in forbidden caves. Where once devils and mischievous winds prowled on the edges of maps, now sat oceans bleak and empty. The old explorers, great men now rendered obsolete, turned to drink and told their yellowing tales to anyone who would listen. What had become of myth? Were the times of antiquity to slide beyond consciousness? Were heroic deeds, pursued in order to achieve some kind of immortality, to be murdered and replaced by the exploits of celebrity misdemeanour? John always had to channel his mind away from such dark thoughts, and he could quickly lose himself in the tiny lives waging their war against time in the worn out pages he so minutely examined.
In the still, golden, dust-sweet air of his study, John would fall headfirst through time and disappear completely. He flew amongst the hanging gardens in Babylon, he sailed beneath the Colossus of Rhodes, he heard reading lips moving, the sound of learning, in the library at Alexandria. If he flipped a map sideways mountain ranges leapt above him, biting hot desert sand stung his eyes and arctic winds shivered him. He slashed through jungles with a machete on treasure maps that were treasures in themselves and slapped at giant mosquitoes which whirred about him arrogantly.
He visited the desert in North Africa and cried as he remembered the violence of the tanks he fought in, of the shifting landscape, of the taste of acrid smoke on his tongue, of the naked fear of death, of friends falling inert in the sand. He thought of the sand dunes that could have built up over each dead soldier, a fitting tombstone for those who lost their lives in a place no one would remember or could recognise upon returning. Sand dunes were in fact the only enemies of the exactitude of the modern map, shifting quickly, continental drift in a matter of days, weeks, months, years, the wind a shaping force creative and demented and inexplicable.
John could not be roused from these trips he embarked upon at the scrutiny of every map. He was lost to creaking vessels, to the backs of elephants, to the chatter of Pidgin English. He rode magic carpets behind fakirs, joined the caravans of Arabs and ran his fingers over cave paintings. And it was with this knowledge of bygone eras, of voyages to unknown places, of the scent of oil-polished leather, that he started to draw his own maps of places without fast food restaurants, without the treads of running shoes, without the click and whir of a tourist’s camera. And so John Walker, with a steady hand and a vacuum in his belly, thrust his pen back in time and drew history up again, gave it a sip of water from the highest, purest source and set it scampering about its task of setting young boys’ minds on fire once again, to cobweb televisions and movie theatres, to breathe new life into a world gone stale and cynical.
And his pile of maps grew.
It was the mapmakers who were the true explorers, great men whose names now engraved maps which many saw as naïve trinkets, blessed with the knowledge of GPS and geography text books. Chronological arrogance appalled John, who saw these men as the last true adventurers the world has seen. They were men born with great names and who lived up to them. He thought back to his own grandfather, a bear of a man with an easy laugh and a story for every empty evening. John would sit transfixed for hours, his grandfather’s voice washing over him like warm water from a jug when his mother cleaned his hair in the tub. Together on these balmy nights on the veranda, they visited the orient in times of sheiks, camels and veiled beauties. They ate dates and rode horses and came to desert fortresses where they rescued girls like desert flowers from scimitar-guarded harems. They sailed frigates over the edges of frayed old maps, tantalisingly close to the maws of monsters and the lascivious smiles of naked mermaids. They monkeyed into countless crow’s nests and called ‘Land ho!’ sighting islands never before seen by blue eyes. They joined the scallywag crews of dubiously honourable pirates to liberate fair maidens abducted by fierce pygmies. They drank from coconuts. They fell parched upon oases. They walked through spice markets as the first white men. They duelled scarred foes. They fell in love. They dusted the desert from their hands. They walked with nomads. They huddled under thin blankets in Himalayan snows. They trod before train tracks in deepest Africa and swam in the Ganges. They bartered for ivory and ran dodging poisoned darts. Adventure seeped deeply into the evenings from the well of his grandfather’s memory, his voice gravel and whiskey and gun powder, flick knives and stubble and leather.
The new maps, laser-printed and perfect, intelligent thanks to inherited knowledge from atlases grown senile, were things of great concern to John. Their precision had robbed them of all the qualities he felt maps needed to possess; adventure, a tingling in the belly, a taste that treasure was to be found, the worry of dangerous natives and places named for skulls and treachery and monsoon wrecks. There were no more hidden places, no strange animal cries to chill the soul quivering next to a camp fire, no lurking traps. All the blanks had been filled, all the adventure had been used up. Satellites flitted through the sky like whispers from a knowing mouth, sending, receiving, spying, telling. Great mysteries, which once afforded the dreamers nights of fancy, planning trips to dusty places that knew only the hooves of donkeys, were now shaken and lost like the cobwebs they brushed off their Stetsons in forbidden caves. Where once devils and mischievous winds prowled on the edges of maps, now sat oceans bleak and empty. The old explorers, great men now rendered obsolete, turned to drink and told their yellowing tales to anyone who would listen. What had become of myth? Were the times of antiquity to slide beyond consciousness? Were heroic deeds, pursued in order to achieve some kind of immortality, to be murdered and replaced by the exploits of celebrity misdemeanour? John always had to channel his mind away from such dark thoughts, and he could quickly lose himself in the tiny lives waging their war against time in the worn out pages he so minutely examined.
In the still, golden, dust-sweet air of his study, John would fall headfirst through time and disappear completely. He flew amongst the hanging gardens in Babylon, he sailed beneath the Colossus of Rhodes, he heard reading lips moving, the sound of learning, in the library at Alexandria. If he flipped a map sideways mountain ranges leapt above him, biting hot desert sand stung his eyes and arctic winds shivered him. He slashed through jungles with a machete on treasure maps that were treasures in themselves and slapped at giant mosquitoes which whirred about him arrogantly.
He visited the desert in North Africa and cried as he remembered the violence of the tanks he fought in, of the shifting landscape, of the taste of acrid smoke on his tongue, of the naked fear of death, of friends falling inert in the sand. He thought of the sand dunes that could have built up over each dead soldier, a fitting tombstone for those who lost their lives in a place no one would remember or could recognise upon returning. Sand dunes were in fact the only enemies of the exactitude of the modern map, shifting quickly, continental drift in a matter of days, weeks, months, years, the wind a shaping force creative and demented and inexplicable.
John could not be roused from these trips he embarked upon at the scrutiny of every map. He was lost to creaking vessels, to the backs of elephants, to the chatter of Pidgin English. He rode magic carpets behind fakirs, joined the caravans of Arabs and ran his fingers over cave paintings. And it was with this knowledge of bygone eras, of voyages to unknown places, of the scent of oil-polished leather, that he started to draw his own maps of places without fast food restaurants, without the treads of running shoes, without the click and whir of a tourist’s camera. And so John Walker, with a steady hand and a vacuum in his belly, thrust his pen back in time and drew history up again, gave it a sip of water from the highest, purest source and set it scampering about its task of setting young boys’ minds on fire once again, to cobweb televisions and movie theatres, to breathe new life into a world gone stale and cynical.
And his pile of maps grew.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
The vibe!
Okay, I apologise for not updating and for leaving the story on a cliffhanger - trust me, I really wanna know what's written in those letters! However, this little story has changed from a writing exercise into something bigger I want to work on. So I've been getting my brain-meats sizzling and will continue to let them brown for a little while until the basic structure of the story fleshes out in my head. As soon as I start writing more I'll start posting! Thanks for the support and kind words! In the meantime, I'll put up other little ditties as I write them.
By the way, go check out Polony Mixed Meat Magazine if you like satire, comics, music, meat products, skants, hairy underarms, green juice, mayonnaise, fish curries and/or lowbrow humour.
Stay cool
By the way, go check out Polony Mixed Meat Magazine if you like satire, comics, music, meat products, skants, hairy underarms, green juice, mayonnaise, fish curries and/or lowbrow humour.
Stay cool
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Visual representations
My friend Steve recently used my story as the basis for a series of illustrations. You can see his other work on his flickr account. Here they are in all their splendour!
Monday, September 1, 2008
Happy spring, everyone
I'll update my story soon. In the meantime, here is something I pulled off a dusty shelf. It's how Greta makes me feel. Have a wonderful trip my love, I'll miss you.
On certain days he would arrive breathless at the gates of his grandparent’s house, skin like lava and mud caking his legs where it had splashed up from puddles. He’d scale the gates with ease and head inside to give his grandmother a quick peck on the cheek before raiding the pantry for some ginger biscuits and shooting into the sunlight once more. He’d ease along the cool passageways created by arches strangled by vines and creepers all a flower to sit on the edge of the slate pond that held the goldfish. Sleek and plump and gulping, they’d crowd to the surface when they saw him, gasping at the surface as if drowning, desperate for a crumb of bread from the crusts he kept in his pockets. Mottled orange, speckled white, golden sunset, peach fuzz, lemon cream skies, each fish its own pigmented fingerprint gliding about with the merest mention of movement from a casual tailfin, hanging suspended for seconds or hours as if on invisible hummingbird wings. The fish would scatter to the far corners of the pond as he plunged his hand into the water, rubbing it against the green-slimed walls to chase the tadpoles which swam like little black holes trailing tails of inky darkness.
From the pond he’d sprint over the mossy slate pathways into the dell, to dive through hedges of smouldering azalea and green banks of feathered fern, pausing only to eat the sour-sweet pink petals of the scattered wax begonias which always made his cheeks squirm but left him aching for more. He raced to the orange grove and remembered when his brother used to play orange wars with him before he met that girl and became serious, how they would find fallen, rotten fruit, carroty as a British tourist with a spray-on tan on one side, grey-green with mould on the other. The moss-covered, baby-elephant sized rocks that littered the grove like fallen fruit from a forgotten time provided perfect cover to hunt and dive away and hide.
The grove would shoot him around the edge of the tennis court, cracked like a thirsty drought-blighted land, and his feet would crunch over fallen pecan nuts, a lottery of rotten or tasty nuts easily cracked against each other in his palm. Then to the sun dial, once bronze but now covered in a stubborn green film, something mystic and ancient brought there from an antique land now only charted in dust encrusted history books bound in leather and sitting on shelves belonging to equally shabby explorers whiling away their paling days in the memory of donkey-paths and bare-breasted natives, musket-fire and creatures never before seen by a white man.
All his speed and scuffling would be forgotten as he came upon the workshop, a living, breathing place nestled in its helmet of indecisively pink, white and burgundy bougainvillea. Through the eyes of the twin grimy windows could be seen sparks from monstrous machines, making it seem like his grandfather had captured an angry storm cloud and was bending its energy to fulfil his stern will. Dust would laze heavily in the air outside, escaped through the workshop’s exhalations, the workshop a creature more alive than a thousand vivid stories, echoing more noise than a thousand summer cicadas on a thousand scorching days. He would stand in the open door of the workshop watching his grandfather work oblivious to his presence, the only thing existing to him the warm-sawn wood being shaped by one of a million but unique tools, all lathes and planes and hammers and screwdrivers, each used and useful, each known intimately by callused hands with nimble fingers. He would bend over a bench, adding a fine and minute touch to something, a slight whorl or nick, his machines, many-legged with spiders and centipedes, all gathered around him like Dr Moreau’s creatures straining for a better look. The machines sat steaming and radiating like light green toads in a sudden summer shower, smug from labour and the fine things they helped create. The boy’s eyes would swarm over the racks of odd tools, foreign things he couldn’t fathom until his grandfather would reach for one without looking, and finding it in its right place would somehow use this odd object to perform some miraculously simple yet vital task.
At times like these, his grandfather did not look unlike one of the tools or machines he so warmly knew. Wiry and bent, sweating from the heat of the furnace in the corner, goggled and aproned, odd shapes jutting out his curved back, his knuckles swollen to marbles, his pale shock of hair wisping with every little breeze, like an aging wing obtained from some snow fowl in his travels too long ago wrestling with the air to take flight once more. This tower of a man now shrunken and gnarled, seemingly a poor caricature of the man he once was, until his gaze met yours or he laughed uproariously. Then his back would straighten, his hair darken and his wasted muscles bulge, and he’d once more resemble that proud stranger in the photos that littered the house, the man who wore strapping army uniforms, who cried holding a child in his arms, who held a strange wife the boy could barely recognise as his grandmother high in his arms (a grandmother of such beauty that all of spring would seem dull and drab when she went about the garden).
If he could take his eyes off the wonder of watching his grandfather create with such affection, he would gaze at the banks of toys that lined every flat surface. Companies of tin men, moustached and stern, glittered in proud uniforms red as a sunset fox, boots polished to the sheen of a drongo’s wing. Pirouetting ladies in delicate lavender skirts sat demurely wearing cheeks dimpled in bashfulness, their joints smooth and graceful and bellowing laughter and dance despite their static condition. Steam engines sat sleek and quick upon short iron tracks, bellies filled with fire and coal dust stinging the eyes. All these and more sat in droves, each the product of such attention and affection they must all have been known and named and whispered to in gentle ways when no one else was listening.
His grandfather turned and saw him, smiled with a wrinkle of two ancient eyes, and without a word beckoned him over. In his hands was a tin steamboat, with a gleaming red hull, black chimney and bright blue cabins. It was still warm, and the boy held it as his grandfather applied the last brushstroke of paint to brown the deck wooden. He blew on it gently before taking it and setting in down on a stand for it to dry overnight.
‘Let’s see about some tea, my boy.’ He wiped his hands on his apron and ruffled his grandson’s hair before ushering him towards the door. Just before he swung the door closed, he pressed an innocuous little button, and somewhere in the workshop a little timer started counting the seconds, minutes, hours in patient little clicks.
The workshop sat quietly in the twilight. The furnace was snugly warm, enjoying its rest after a long day inhaling wood and exhaling heat and smoke fine as wisps of cloud. The smell of sawdust and fresh, hot tin was heavy on the air, and drying glue pooled like honey sucked of colour on heavy countertops. Tins of paint crowded together like a stunted rainbow, spilling some of their secrets in impossibly slow rivulets along the floor; emerald green whispered softly of forests where no man ventured, populated by fairies and unicorns and splendid magic; crimson and orange hinted that somewhere a phoenix might rise again from sombre ashes; cornflower yellow reminded the gloom that summer hair was joyous and beautiful and smelled of fresh lemons. The silence was pregnant and expectant, like the pause between a lightning strike and its resonant thunder when the air is torn like a grey sheet. A little pile of dust suddenly gusted to the air. There was a scurrying without any real audible or visible proof, just the knowledge that with each passing second, not everything was exactly where it had been a moment before. There was a slight shifting. Mouse-breaths stirred the air and a single ash rebelled briefly against gravity before landing on a desert table, shattering in a slow, crumbling motion, like a cluster of cells suddenly intent upon mitosis. There shuffled hidden feet just on the edge of hearing, a small army walking silently on gentle soles and arches with a deep knowledge of all that is quiet; the quiet of a gust of wind dusting dandelion heads of their sugar-white burden; the quiet of a graveyard respecting years of grief; the quiet of wings in flight, so high as to not exist. Soon, the maybe-sounds became audible and brushed against straining eardrums that quivered with the pleasure of fulfilment. Cupboards scratched as if boiling with weevils and drawers rattled like teeth in a skeletal jaw. Hushed whispers called out to each other in a timid gusting too shy to disturb the pyramids of dust in the corners of the room. Little tracks appeared where none had been before, like hieroglyphics carved in sandstone and prone to be changed and channelled and gouged even with the gentlest ministrations of a breeze. It was as if the air had grown hands fond of shaping and pinched the fine carpet of sawdust, prodding it to the shape of little feet and strange paws. Whatever tread so timorously did so like a somnambulant shadow, dreams manifested in a silent wandering.
The brushstroke concussions grew braver and the whisperings surrounded the room. Stifled giggles gave way to rowdy laughter and pitter-patterings from tiny feet fell like metallic rain. The clicking noise in the background suddenly stopped, giving way to the lifting and scratching of a gramophone. Speakers popped and cleared their throats. A new noise jostled the dust for space in the dry, warm air, and the giggling and excited whispers increased. Something beautiful was happening. Violins appeared and poured out their hearts like golden syrup thick on young taste buds. Hesitant cellos found their tongues and provided a sonorous background for the sawing violins to rest upon. A piano gently percussed to the rhythm of falling rain, now fast, now slow, now bold, now shy. A kettle drum thought of clouds colliding as a snare dropped a proud collection of marbles scattering to a wooden floor. The scratching and rustling of the cupboards gave birth to creakings and slidings, and little heads poked out and looked around. Long shadows cast simple maps to toes that edged around corners and became fluent in motion. Wooden limbs clattered onto and over tables and benches, and metal appendages thudded dully behind them. Wooden men with forever smiles stiffly knelt in front of shapely women, with equally eternal expressions of mock shyness. The painted grins were no less real for their inability to express anything else; delight was heavy on the air. Red uniforms glowed with pride as loving creations paired off and entered into an embrace of motion and swirling and laughter. Those not yet finished, without eyes or a limb, were guided by loving hands and snickered nervously at the marvels unseen but felt, or a clumsy step tutted with a smile by a partner. Dust was kicked up into the air to drift like a pale snow, and the footprints were of a running and dashing and moving and swaying. Inflexible hips moved just the same, as legs clutched soaring notes and allowed themselves to be led as the music so dictated, as if guided by invisible strings. There was not a sad face amongst them, not a frown or a grimace, and minor chords were coy as a young girl holding her skirts, ripe with beauty, declaring feelings long hidden to a restless boy. The music swelled and burst glittering with each fresh quaver. The incomplete toys that stumbled and laughed, foretold a future of firecrackers and puppies owned by naughty boys, though for now they were works in progress, art not signed. The dancing in the workshop was without burden, without explanation and without fear. It was freedom given motion, joy given an outlet, life given limbs of wood and joints of steel. They danced in perfect rhythm, though each experimented with foxtrots and waltzes, rumba and salsa, tango and bop.
How the xylophone tinged and pinged! How the laughter leapt on the air and rode it like a current! Each couple clung like sticky centrifuges and lips no balm could soften brushed each other, led unbidden to meet by the music as it roved around the room like thermals drifting and falling. The scattered steam trains blew jets of smoke and shrieked their whistles raucously in an aural elbowing as their tin soldier friends spun their partners like dervishes. Two ladies watching the dancing from a distance curtseyed before the steam ship, introducing themselves with a giggle before scattering behind a paint tin, like schoolgirls teasing each other about the new boy in class.
As suddenly as it had started, the music reached a crescendo and fell silent. Breathless bodies bowed stiffly and kissed proffered hands, and two by two the toys retired to cupboards, draws, shadowed grottos where for the eternity of daylight they could hold each other in a touch only couples long in love can understand. There they would wait once more for the music.
There was always sawdust in the air.
//////// End
On certain days he would arrive breathless at the gates of his grandparent’s house, skin like lava and mud caking his legs where it had splashed up from puddles. He’d scale the gates with ease and head inside to give his grandmother a quick peck on the cheek before raiding the pantry for some ginger biscuits and shooting into the sunlight once more. He’d ease along the cool passageways created by arches strangled by vines and creepers all a flower to sit on the edge of the slate pond that held the goldfish. Sleek and plump and gulping, they’d crowd to the surface when they saw him, gasping at the surface as if drowning, desperate for a crumb of bread from the crusts he kept in his pockets. Mottled orange, speckled white, golden sunset, peach fuzz, lemon cream skies, each fish its own pigmented fingerprint gliding about with the merest mention of movement from a casual tailfin, hanging suspended for seconds or hours as if on invisible hummingbird wings. The fish would scatter to the far corners of the pond as he plunged his hand into the water, rubbing it against the green-slimed walls to chase the tadpoles which swam like little black holes trailing tails of inky darkness.
From the pond he’d sprint over the mossy slate pathways into the dell, to dive through hedges of smouldering azalea and green banks of feathered fern, pausing only to eat the sour-sweet pink petals of the scattered wax begonias which always made his cheeks squirm but left him aching for more. He raced to the orange grove and remembered when his brother used to play orange wars with him before he met that girl and became serious, how they would find fallen, rotten fruit, carroty as a British tourist with a spray-on tan on one side, grey-green with mould on the other. The moss-covered, baby-elephant sized rocks that littered the grove like fallen fruit from a forgotten time provided perfect cover to hunt and dive away and hide.
The grove would shoot him around the edge of the tennis court, cracked like a thirsty drought-blighted land, and his feet would crunch over fallen pecan nuts, a lottery of rotten or tasty nuts easily cracked against each other in his palm. Then to the sun dial, once bronze but now covered in a stubborn green film, something mystic and ancient brought there from an antique land now only charted in dust encrusted history books bound in leather and sitting on shelves belonging to equally shabby explorers whiling away their paling days in the memory of donkey-paths and bare-breasted natives, musket-fire and creatures never before seen by a white man.
All his speed and scuffling would be forgotten as he came upon the workshop, a living, breathing place nestled in its helmet of indecisively pink, white and burgundy bougainvillea. Through the eyes of the twin grimy windows could be seen sparks from monstrous machines, making it seem like his grandfather had captured an angry storm cloud and was bending its energy to fulfil his stern will. Dust would laze heavily in the air outside, escaped through the workshop’s exhalations, the workshop a creature more alive than a thousand vivid stories, echoing more noise than a thousand summer cicadas on a thousand scorching days. He would stand in the open door of the workshop watching his grandfather work oblivious to his presence, the only thing existing to him the warm-sawn wood being shaped by one of a million but unique tools, all lathes and planes and hammers and screwdrivers, each used and useful, each known intimately by callused hands with nimble fingers. He would bend over a bench, adding a fine and minute touch to something, a slight whorl or nick, his machines, many-legged with spiders and centipedes, all gathered around him like Dr Moreau’s creatures straining for a better look. The machines sat steaming and radiating like light green toads in a sudden summer shower, smug from labour and the fine things they helped create. The boy’s eyes would swarm over the racks of odd tools, foreign things he couldn’t fathom until his grandfather would reach for one without looking, and finding it in its right place would somehow use this odd object to perform some miraculously simple yet vital task.
At times like these, his grandfather did not look unlike one of the tools or machines he so warmly knew. Wiry and bent, sweating from the heat of the furnace in the corner, goggled and aproned, odd shapes jutting out his curved back, his knuckles swollen to marbles, his pale shock of hair wisping with every little breeze, like an aging wing obtained from some snow fowl in his travels too long ago wrestling with the air to take flight once more. This tower of a man now shrunken and gnarled, seemingly a poor caricature of the man he once was, until his gaze met yours or he laughed uproariously. Then his back would straighten, his hair darken and his wasted muscles bulge, and he’d once more resemble that proud stranger in the photos that littered the house, the man who wore strapping army uniforms, who cried holding a child in his arms, who held a strange wife the boy could barely recognise as his grandmother high in his arms (a grandmother of such beauty that all of spring would seem dull and drab when she went about the garden).
If he could take his eyes off the wonder of watching his grandfather create with such affection, he would gaze at the banks of toys that lined every flat surface. Companies of tin men, moustached and stern, glittered in proud uniforms red as a sunset fox, boots polished to the sheen of a drongo’s wing. Pirouetting ladies in delicate lavender skirts sat demurely wearing cheeks dimpled in bashfulness, their joints smooth and graceful and bellowing laughter and dance despite their static condition. Steam engines sat sleek and quick upon short iron tracks, bellies filled with fire and coal dust stinging the eyes. All these and more sat in droves, each the product of such attention and affection they must all have been known and named and whispered to in gentle ways when no one else was listening.
His grandfather turned and saw him, smiled with a wrinkle of two ancient eyes, and without a word beckoned him over. In his hands was a tin steamboat, with a gleaming red hull, black chimney and bright blue cabins. It was still warm, and the boy held it as his grandfather applied the last brushstroke of paint to brown the deck wooden. He blew on it gently before taking it and setting in down on a stand for it to dry overnight.
‘Let’s see about some tea, my boy.’ He wiped his hands on his apron and ruffled his grandson’s hair before ushering him towards the door. Just before he swung the door closed, he pressed an innocuous little button, and somewhere in the workshop a little timer started counting the seconds, minutes, hours in patient little clicks.
The workshop sat quietly in the twilight. The furnace was snugly warm, enjoying its rest after a long day inhaling wood and exhaling heat and smoke fine as wisps of cloud. The smell of sawdust and fresh, hot tin was heavy on the air, and drying glue pooled like honey sucked of colour on heavy countertops. Tins of paint crowded together like a stunted rainbow, spilling some of their secrets in impossibly slow rivulets along the floor; emerald green whispered softly of forests where no man ventured, populated by fairies and unicorns and splendid magic; crimson and orange hinted that somewhere a phoenix might rise again from sombre ashes; cornflower yellow reminded the gloom that summer hair was joyous and beautiful and smelled of fresh lemons. The silence was pregnant and expectant, like the pause between a lightning strike and its resonant thunder when the air is torn like a grey sheet. A little pile of dust suddenly gusted to the air. There was a scurrying without any real audible or visible proof, just the knowledge that with each passing second, not everything was exactly where it had been a moment before. There was a slight shifting. Mouse-breaths stirred the air and a single ash rebelled briefly against gravity before landing on a desert table, shattering in a slow, crumbling motion, like a cluster of cells suddenly intent upon mitosis. There shuffled hidden feet just on the edge of hearing, a small army walking silently on gentle soles and arches with a deep knowledge of all that is quiet; the quiet of a gust of wind dusting dandelion heads of their sugar-white burden; the quiet of a graveyard respecting years of grief; the quiet of wings in flight, so high as to not exist. Soon, the maybe-sounds became audible and brushed against straining eardrums that quivered with the pleasure of fulfilment. Cupboards scratched as if boiling with weevils and drawers rattled like teeth in a skeletal jaw. Hushed whispers called out to each other in a timid gusting too shy to disturb the pyramids of dust in the corners of the room. Little tracks appeared where none had been before, like hieroglyphics carved in sandstone and prone to be changed and channelled and gouged even with the gentlest ministrations of a breeze. It was as if the air had grown hands fond of shaping and pinched the fine carpet of sawdust, prodding it to the shape of little feet and strange paws. Whatever tread so timorously did so like a somnambulant shadow, dreams manifested in a silent wandering.
The brushstroke concussions grew braver and the whisperings surrounded the room. Stifled giggles gave way to rowdy laughter and pitter-patterings from tiny feet fell like metallic rain. The clicking noise in the background suddenly stopped, giving way to the lifting and scratching of a gramophone. Speakers popped and cleared their throats. A new noise jostled the dust for space in the dry, warm air, and the giggling and excited whispers increased. Something beautiful was happening. Violins appeared and poured out their hearts like golden syrup thick on young taste buds. Hesitant cellos found their tongues and provided a sonorous background for the sawing violins to rest upon. A piano gently percussed to the rhythm of falling rain, now fast, now slow, now bold, now shy. A kettle drum thought of clouds colliding as a snare dropped a proud collection of marbles scattering to a wooden floor. The scratching and rustling of the cupboards gave birth to creakings and slidings, and little heads poked out and looked around. Long shadows cast simple maps to toes that edged around corners and became fluent in motion. Wooden limbs clattered onto and over tables and benches, and metal appendages thudded dully behind them. Wooden men with forever smiles stiffly knelt in front of shapely women, with equally eternal expressions of mock shyness. The painted grins were no less real for their inability to express anything else; delight was heavy on the air. Red uniforms glowed with pride as loving creations paired off and entered into an embrace of motion and swirling and laughter. Those not yet finished, without eyes or a limb, were guided by loving hands and snickered nervously at the marvels unseen but felt, or a clumsy step tutted with a smile by a partner. Dust was kicked up into the air to drift like a pale snow, and the footprints were of a running and dashing and moving and swaying. Inflexible hips moved just the same, as legs clutched soaring notes and allowed themselves to be led as the music so dictated, as if guided by invisible strings. There was not a sad face amongst them, not a frown or a grimace, and minor chords were coy as a young girl holding her skirts, ripe with beauty, declaring feelings long hidden to a restless boy. The music swelled and burst glittering with each fresh quaver. The incomplete toys that stumbled and laughed, foretold a future of firecrackers and puppies owned by naughty boys, though for now they were works in progress, art not signed. The dancing in the workshop was without burden, without explanation and without fear. It was freedom given motion, joy given an outlet, life given limbs of wood and joints of steel. They danced in perfect rhythm, though each experimented with foxtrots and waltzes, rumba and salsa, tango and bop.
How the xylophone tinged and pinged! How the laughter leapt on the air and rode it like a current! Each couple clung like sticky centrifuges and lips no balm could soften brushed each other, led unbidden to meet by the music as it roved around the room like thermals drifting and falling. The scattered steam trains blew jets of smoke and shrieked their whistles raucously in an aural elbowing as their tin soldier friends spun their partners like dervishes. Two ladies watching the dancing from a distance curtseyed before the steam ship, introducing themselves with a giggle before scattering behind a paint tin, like schoolgirls teasing each other about the new boy in class.
As suddenly as it had started, the music reached a crescendo and fell silent. Breathless bodies bowed stiffly and kissed proffered hands, and two by two the toys retired to cupboards, draws, shadowed grottos where for the eternity of daylight they could hold each other in a touch only couples long in love can understand. There they would wait once more for the music.
There was always sawdust in the air.
//////// End
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