The White Door Read Online Free PDF Page B

– said she looked like a portrait of Empress Wu – and her young mother’s heart loved the strange pianist and his chivalry, and chimed briefly like the girl’s it had been before arranged marriage, children because birth control had been unknown to her and her husband, before the years of servitude to her in-laws and the hardships of setting up a struggling business of their own. Her unmortgaged heart seized the pianist, and that silent wilful drinking of him sought to replace her stolen youth, and this was a part still in her as she thundered, and rattled, back to Guangdung.
    Meanwhile, the patient heart was still measuring water levels for the houseboat of his imagination. He was singing softly on the plane, had requisitioned a tripartite service – saké, coffee, then champagne – and the stewardess, by now marvelling at his capacity, and seeming to see for the first time the compacted scar tissue and bruising on his arms, wondered what sort of man, mad or criminal, she now served. ‘There’ll be tattoos on his back next,’ she thought, and she recognised his melody. He also was recognising his melody and was thinking of the New Zealand artist Ralph Hotere and a painting that made ‘melody’ grow into ‘malady’, and how he had always wanted the chain of painted words to grow into ‘my lady’ and then, like each of his drinks, he could fasten the world with definitions to do with song, sickness and sex, and it was all reverie on the edge of self-absorbed drunkenness, but he recognised his own song, saw she recognised the song, so he beckoned her to come and sang it to her, a Tim Hardin song which he sang to prefigure his return after ten years away to New Zealand. ‘Here I am back home again, I’m here to rest, don’t ask me where I’ve been, just know that I’ve been West. I’m the family’s unknown boy, (here, he had forgotten the words but had invented his own) long black locks of raven hair, all the girls with their faces bare see the shine in the black sheep boy. Now if you love me, just let me live in peace, and please understand that the black sheep canwear a golden fleece…’ An unashamed sentimentalist, thought the stewardess, but she wiped the tears his nostalgia, tiredness and guilt had brought to his right eye, kissed the air near his face, and told him gently to sleep. She took away his cups and glasses. He saw a sunrise in the virtual reality of his well-dreamt London river.
Two further reveries of the patient heart
1: Lusaka 1983
    ‘Named for a high-flyer,’ he explained. ‘One who could, with ease, fling himself into space. These twenty-two stories wouldn’t bother him. Not even the top of the Eiffel Tower. I’ve been there, and imagined the cool air on which a man could ride. But perhaps, after all, not here. Not where the atmosphere seems baked, and a man’s blue glide would seem ostentatious. Overseas, you know, they do it all the time. Everybody. They all have the chance to leap the bar. Here, they say No Leaping, as the bars are in short supply. You may leap as soon as the spare parts are imported. But only if you are literate enough to fill in the forms, triplicate, and patient enough to await the reply of the Ministry of Bars. Comrade, you think I am drunk. And making bad puns about the time it takes to get a simple gin and tonic in this place. You think all this talk of dancing on the zephyrs is just hot air, eh? Your silly friend, Dædalus Mumba, highly inflated with his very recent overseas education, restraining himself from bursting into French, but starting to get annoying all the same. Ah, but no, for half a song, a decent song, not the crap they play tonight, I would step out into the night’s embrace, and sail like a man of virtue. Ah yes, virtue. And who else, in this stage-set from yesterday’s megabucks disaster movie, could do that? If fire breaks out, who would carry you on stairs like starry cushions to the ground floor? And what a joke that would be.