Aelred's Sin Read Online Free PDF Page A

like loud gonging prayers themselves, waking up the neighbourhood. It is the voice that calls us to prayer, pealing out over fields, the distant town, over the stone enclosure wall and the sheep like stones as the world sleeps. ‘Domine, labia mea aperies et os meum annutiabit laudem tuam… ’:‘Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall announce your praise.’ I hear them in choir.
    Open my lips. I need to tell his story. I owe it to him, owe it to myself.
    The city hums at the edge of the fields, a horizon, an amber hum. There is the silence and my scratching pen, as when I’m up late at night at Malgretoute having to do the accounts. The rain drips in the cocoa. I miss home. I’ve been here longer than I first planned. I think of Krishna looking after the estate. I’m lucky to have such an expert to leave things to. I thought I would come and settle these affairs and return quickly. But it’s taken much longer.
    The affairs of the heart take much longer.
    Keep an open mind, Joe said to me as he drove me down from Bristol. We had got drunk the night before, in the flat with all of J. M.’s things scattered on the floor, all those red notebooks with black spines, photographs of our parents, one of me.
    Joe, out of the blue, had written, ‘I have some things which belong to you.’ I’m surprised how easily I get on with Joe. He’s like any other guy really. Looks like a monk with his crew cut, not the earring though. I don’t know of anything we have in common, except my brother, ofcourse, and his desire to drink rum, a love of the sun and cricket. I go everywhere with my cuatro, so I strummed and sang him an old-time calypso that first night when he and his sister Miriam welcomed me to the flat in Bristol. I taught them the refrain: ‘ Sans humanité. ’ A kind of wake!
    Sing, ‘Rum and Coca-Cola’, Joe said.
    They all want that tune.
    In the clubs, he said, it’s the popular calypso, Arrow’s ‘Hot Hot Hot’, that they enjoy.
     
    Yesterday afternoon, I took the road alongside the farm towards the fields. There I found a path, a forest trail pointed with yellow arrows, painted at intervals on fences and posts. I followed assiduously as if the place would yield something. I wanted it to. But always there is this double thing. I don’t want to know.
    I was circling the enclosure of the abbey, keeping the stock bell tower in view, the rest of the enclosure hidden. The landscaping of the natural woods encloses the cloister. I left the fields, and over a stile, made through some gorse scrub. I learn the words: gorse, scrub. I would say ‘bush’ back home. I learn that from J. M. He’s provided me with a miscellany of English flora and fauna. Still I was being pointed onwards.
    I surveyed this English park the way I do my cocoa estate. Just beyond the gorse bushes, through a little wood of oaks, I came into a clearing. The phrases are becoming almost natural, like ‘Down by the mango tree, take a left for the pasture’.
    If I could only bring him back!
    Then I came upon it. At first, I hadn’t taken in this other noise. I was attuned to the fields, the silence andthe sheep like stones, the abbey getting smaller. But then, more than the silence, the hum drew me to the very brink of the escarpment. It horrified me, as it fell sheer in well excavated layers, like giant steps: a vast quarry of Bath stone, the guest master Father Dominic told me it’s called. In the centre there was a large oval pool of water glinting on its floor like a mirror, or, a mass grave. Just a fancy.
    Long ago, there had been fields here, the monks tell me. Here they had climbed. And even a longer time ago, I learnt, from J. M.’s journal, that dogs hunted their masters’ prey in the nearby fields. I had thought that was a dream, but it was true. I once thought that it was a myth. The terrible trade! We were forced to confront it, my generation, in 1970 with Black Power! What do the dreams tell of that time? To dream a time past -