Remembering Babylon Read Online Free PDF Page B

hold him.
    As for things, nothing he had dealt with had been his own. He had stammered over most of them, b-b-boots, j-j-jug; his hold was buttery. Now they slipped away altogether, they dropped out of his life, and with them, and the words, went whatever thin threads had held them together and made up the fabric of his world.
    Occasionally some object out of his old life would come floating back and bump against him. He would see it clearly enough, feel his hand clasping the handle of the jug or smell the dark-stained leather, but no word was connected to them, and when his mind reached for it, the object too went thin on him. He felt a kind of sadness that was like hunger, but of the heart, not the belly, and could only believe, since these things came to him only in fragments, that they belonged to the life of some other creature whose memory he shared, and which rose up at moments to shake him, then let him go.
    In time his coming among them became another tale they told and he would listen to it with a kind of wonder, as if what they were recounting had happened ages ago, in a time beyond all memory, and to someone else. How, when they found him he had still been half-child, half-seacalf, his hairswarming with spirits in the shape of tiny phosphorescent crabs, his mouth stopped with coral; how, ash-pale and ghostly in his little white shirt, that long ago had rotted like a caul, he had risen up in the firelight and danced, and changed before their eyes from a sea-creature into a skinny human child.
    He would listen, and in one part of himself, the part that belonged to their tribal life, he believed, but in some other part he did not. There was a different story, he thought, which was his alone and secret: which had another shape, and might need, for its telling, the words he had had in his mouth when they first found him, and had lost; though not, he thought, for ever.
    He was accepted by the tribe but guardedly; in the droll, half-apprehensive way that was proper to an in-between creature.
    No woman, for example, would have to do with him, and there were many objects in the camp that he was forbidden to touch. Their life was a cat’s cradle of rights and restrictions; they all had objects, people too, that they must not look upon; but the restrictions on him were his alone, and the separation he felt, his questionable status, kept alive in him what he might otherwise have let go. When he stretched out in his place by the camp fire and his eyes and hands had nothing to engage them, the images that came, even if he could not grasp them, were as real as the fat in his mouth, or the familiar, distinctive odour of those who were stretched beside him.
    ‘Boots’ the darkness whispered – he caught only the breath of the word – and there they were: objects that made no sense here, that he saw propped up in front of a barred grate with flame in every crack of their leather, the tongues loose, the laces trailing, and the voice in the dark, very hoarse but not fierce, was Willett’s, and there he was too, rising up out of them with his eyebrows blazing. Willett!
    The others had their own explanation for these midnight hauntings. He was a tormented spirit. The cries he uttered in his sleep, the terrors that assailed him, were proof that although he had the look of a man, he was not one, not yet. Aday would come when, fully arrived among them, he would let go of the other world.
    His view was different. One day, he thought, I will turn around on some track deep in the scrub and he will be there, making fast towards me, not ghostly, in no way ghostly, and I will wait there for him to catch up, open a place for him to step into, and we will go on. He did not ask himself where.
    In the meantime he was here, though where here was, and why he was in this place rather than another, was a mystery to him.
    He approached this mystery at times, just touched it, and was uneasy. Mostly he let it alone. When the time comes, he told