Tales and Imaginings by Tim Robinson Read Free Book Online

across a knife-edge between pain and delight; I felt the tendrils of her nerves and mine twisting together, and suddenly all my blood turned into pure amazement. She opened, I entered; at the same time I could hear children splashing in the canal and a dog howling in the factory opposite; then we were shaken one against the other, and my body breathed out years into hers.
    As we began to fall into our separate worlds again a quiet conversation started downstairs; I hadn’t heard anyone come into the house. Nit lay under me with her eyes closed. The warm muddy breath of the canal came and wrapped us together; I kissed her eyelids and touched her lashes with my tongue. She put up her hand to my face without opening her eyes, and then the weight of her sudden sleep pulled me down to lie and watch a knot of sunlight glow in the filaments of her hair, an inch from my eye.
    *
    Great waves shifting slowly on the horizon became small as they approached the shore, and dwindled to rods of glass on the sand. The ripples retreated and swelled, and rolled away to become mountains. The girl in my arms came out of the sea, serious, smiling ; she walked towards me with a gift in her hand, a photograph which I was to see. Behind her the waves were beating at the rim of the sky.
    *
    Slow gongs were pulsing, some streets away. Transparent fingers of sunlight reached across us into the shadows of the room. Nit had turned away from me and was curled up in her sleep; I moulded myself to the curve of her back, with my face in the warm darkness of her hair, and took her two small breasts in my hand. Her voice came sleepily: ‘Were you a virgin, before?’
    After a while I answered, ‘Was I? I’m afraid I don’t remember. Go back to sleep again.’
V
    The streets were being hosed down; burnt stalks of fireworks were swept into the gutters by bright arcs of water that hissed andtwisted among the feet of the crowd hurrying to work. Persimmon was at the airline office even before I was. Through the glass door I saw him, sipping a small black coffee and instructing a naked child in double-entry bookkeeping. He looked up, closed a great ledger and came out to help me watch my suitcase being flung onto the roof of the coach.
    Inside the coach a heap of torn banners, crushed paper lanterns and trodden masks was stirred by the awakening of two late-sleepers, who began to bundle these relics of the festival together and burrow among them for their own clothes. Persimmon’s gaze lent the spectacle a certain weight. The pile of rubbish fumbled its way processionally along the coach and became jammed in the narrow exit. Under the shouts and kicks of its guardians or tormentors it quaked and was convulsed, and spewed itself out in a multicoloured flood of mismatched feet, clocks, stars, grinning pigs and somersaulting fish.
    ‘Tawdry evidences!’ said Persimmon. ‘Let this be what you carry away of yesterday’s high solemnities; something not achieving the dignity of a memory, perhaps, and yet as near to a memory as anyone deserves who was not actually present. I must say there is something elusive about you that makes me wonder if I should have squandered all this effort shaping your experiences.’ He gave me a reproving look, and when the two celebrants of the mystery, dancing with laughter, fell out of the coach onto the heap and began to stamp it into the mud, he moved to interpose his thickness between me and the equivocal sight.
    ‘Well, your great-aunt’s little hoard is dispersed into the general flux, and you return to your textbooks. My further existence I commit to your memory, with some misgivings. Midgley, if you forget him entirely, will not be missed. Dark, as you probably realize , was merely my own more relaxed, weekending, self.’
    ‘I realize no such thing‚’ I began, but Persimmon raised a heavyfinger to indicate a tiny figure appearing at the end of the street: ‘Here comes the measurer of all things! Midgley isthe only man