Griefwork Read Online Free PDF Page A

in this House, anyway. In fact I know I’m not. Now and then one hears things said in sleep, confessions, laments and suchlike. It’s probably the common lot, again with notable exceptions. The palms, of course, are above all that sort of thing, being too busy fancying themselves as the philosopher kings of the plant world. Don’t raise your expectations too high, is my advice. I’ve never heard any of them express a single worthwhile thought. The lotuses are a quite different case. I’d wager there’s not a plant in the House who hasn’t at some point or another been kept awake by their carryings-on. You never heard such screaming and bitching. That being said, one has to admit their outrageous remarks are often very funny.There’s something inherently comic about their situation, too. Talk about a divided community. Half of them are trying to be religious and the other half sordid, and we can all hear which half has the more success.
    ‘Oh! It’s so beautiful when the gardener blows the candles out. When the last light is extinguished a sigh goes through as a billion cells relax at once. I talk too much. I know it; and I only do so because I lack the freedom and courage to whisper to my little hemlock those few words I want to say, and then for all I care the roof can fall in and we perish in the snow which tonight is stealthily patting the panes.’

Two
    Picture a boy beside a grey northern sea, a distant figure whose neutral tones blend easily into the landscape. His faded dungarees, stuck with dried and curling fish scales, are the silvery blue-green of the sea holly scattered in clumps among the dunes. His hair is the melancholy yellow of rock samphire shaken by wind in cups and hollows. The landscape in which he moves is pared down to three elements: land, sea, sky. Each of these has a superficial scurrying quality beneath which it is as static as a grim metal poured long ago and set. To one horizon stretches rumpled water raising an infinity of failed castles. To the other, a terrain of low tufted dunes and saltings trembling stiffly in a flat wind and reaching inland past the invisible estuary. No trees, no vertical objects break the tyranny of the horizontal save only three wind pumps, vastly distant from each other and appearing bigger and closer than they really are, like oil drums in a desert. Although these are the late 1920s the sky remains as innocent of the aeroplane as it was when it frowned upon Europe’s last retreating ice sheets.
    The boy smells strongly of fish oil, and is quite unaware of it. From before dawn he was helping his uncle empty the smokers and pack the boxes: bloaters sweating amber droplets, the twisted batons of eels. They were still nailing the lids whenthe lorry called, though in this land its arrival could hardly be said to have caught them by surprise. Its insect crawl had been visible for ten minutes, its rattle over sluices and the bridges made of loose railway sleepers audible even above the sea’s beating pulse. He had helped with the loading, drunk a pint of milky coffee, walked off along the shore to a point where the house he had left, with its line of huts, looked no more than the cluttered superstructure of a wrecked ship stranded far away on tidal flats. Now in the distance beyond it are Flinn’s palish gleams: roofs greasy beneath stray sunlight, the steely flare of greenhouses. Most prominent of all is the menacing white stump of a lighthouse which dominates the town and at night intermittently blanches his bedroom curtains with its beam.
    Ten years earlier the lighthouse had set the course of his life, and so cardinally that it was only of late he had managed to make a story from what had been an inarticulate wound. A space had at last opened up in that ever-receding landscape to accommodate a remembered figure and the images which clustered around her like birds about a distant statue, immobile in sunlight. Immobile, for there is no movement in memory; there