Essay by Ian C. Smith
“We have art in order not to die from the truth.”—Nietzsche
When they shared a Cotswold attic she rose at dawn to ride through her childhood storybook dreams, paid a pittance to exercise hunters while he huddled near their portable gas heater chronicling events since fleeing from their families’ disapproval. Under a high steep roof that in retrospect would become his traveller’s cathedral he also found refuge researching genealogy’s bare bones. When she arrived back after bounding up and around flights of stairs, blue eyes bright with life, she described cheering a lucky fox’s hedgerow escape from the hunt she scorned. While she warmed tinned soup he read his morning’s words to her. Her own lively admired letters home to Australia reflected his take on all this, the horn and hounds’ cries’ urgency, sounds, even the smells, drawing closer then, to be portrayed by him as a treasured distant memory, holy.
Another time, another country, city noise shielded by shaggy scrub beyond a ruined building where they meet, this woman he yearns for spreads her rug near a pond patrolled by dragonflies in the dreaming air. With enough good years left for death to only be a distant glitch, he wants to preserve these moments when this present spot might be a developed housing estate, life’s surge blaring in the future, bush tamed into gardens, dragonflies eloped inland. When photos shall be the only evidence of her adored hippy hair he knows he will always be shoving back against the door closing on memory.
Speeding from another tryst back to responsibility in separate cars, late, she followed at first, perhaps inventing a new excuse. A truck suddenly changed lanes. He steered into the drastic skid. Then a pounding almost silence. His sports car facing the wrong way, tyre smoke as if on fire. Pulled up in the reek of this scorched rubber, face in her hands, dark brown eyes peering through her fingers seeing it again as if in slow motion, guts churning, she rejected his knee-jerk joking braggadocio. It was as if he was knowingly compiling a dossier of danger. She was so sick of risk, of wrong love.
Language-poor, humourless, the driver keeps yammering on about a shack, his hideaway in the backwoods. He badly wants them there instead of where he had agreed to take them. Traffic would be scarce if they turn off the highway down trails attended by a perspective of conifers like mute sentinels. He senses her concern amplifying his, this shadow darkening their life expectancy. She would text Emergency while he cajoles shack man but mobile phones are not quite invented, like her children waiting to be born. Only stuntmen stage escapes hurling themselves from moving vehicles, and what about their packs, his detailed notebooks, money, passports, stuffed in the back? They crane further forward, reasoning with diplomacy and goodwill, always respectfully, gratitude for those who stop paramount. The driver’s clumsy insistence is maddening. They are still a massive distance from The Yukon. As she tries a woman’s angle plea he pictures graves in a valley carpeted with snow. Wind swirls snowflakes into shrouds seen only by coyotes and crows, footprints almost obliterated as night falls. Nobody knows where to search and it is his fault, utterly. They would be swallowed in a vortex of anguish, especially theirs, never reaching The Rockies and Alaska. And she could be safely enjoying a Women’s Weekly coach tour of Europe with her mother.
Generous in her support, his partner told those she invited to his launch, ‘People always think it’s me on the page,’ protesting like a lawyer addressing a jury. ‘There would have to be several of me to have done so much.’ Then, familiar small permanent lines around her eyes crinkling in jest, ‘Although I do admit some of it.’ In an exaggerated bored tone she referred to two instances in print, human frailties they might all own. Laughter rippled her friends’ wine as they glanced at the author for the ghost of a giveaway expression.
They both read widely and share delight in narrative nuggets exposed when lives interlock. Often tuned out at home, he recently learned she is vexed by what she labels his catwalk of her life. Signing copies, responding to questions awkwardly, he claims he wouldn’t like being the partner of an obsessive like himself. Life threatening a tsunami of sadness at times, he wonders if anything from days of ragged breath and quickened hands and fits of weeping in the night remains unused, halcyon light-rinsed hours innocently modelled, characters enacting those otherwise vanishing adventures. Each sifted grain cherished material, he juggles words with lived moments from the lost past.
Photo credit: Eugenio Mazzone
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