The Dust Diaries by Owen Sheers Read Free Book Online Page B

evening Arthur took a walk along the beach that laced the shore to the north of the harbour. The sand was pale in the dusky light, and the remaining threads of a sunset lay across the horizon. He was relieved to be walking on the beach, out of the quarters where he and the Bishop were billeted for the night at the Universities Mission to Central Africa. They were comfortable, very comfortable compared to his weeks at sea, but he found the place somewhat oppressive. The talk after dinner had been mainly about the war in the south, or of other matters of which he knew little. Unlike the other men there he had not spent his recent years on the African continent and he found the discussion alien and awkward. The Bishop, too, he was finding difficult. He was hard to connect with and Arthur felt he had failed to win his trust, though he couldn’t think why. ‘A peppery fellow, who I hope to be great friends within the future ’ is how he had described him to his mother when he’d retired to his room after dinner to write to her. And he did hope they would grow to be friends. There was the potential, he was sure, somewhere beneath their awkwardness, for a genuine connection.
    Though he knew his mother would want to know every detail of his first impressions, he’d played down the incident on board the ship that morning. He could not, however, disregard it completely in the letter, and had slipped in a few lines about it in the closing paragraph, hoping it wouldn’t register too strongly there. He told her what he knew of the events leading up to what he had witnessed, then brushed over the actual confrontation as a ‘ bit of a set-to on board ’. The platitudes of the phrase jarred in him as he remembered the man with blood in his eyes, and they were, he feared, betrayed anyway by the sentence he wrote immediately afterwards. ‘ I fear , ’ he told his mother ‘ that it may be an all toocharacteristic introduction to this dark continent ’ Perhaps he would try and write the letter again. She knew him well and he knew her. That line would ring back through the letter like a plague bell at dawn, transfiguring every other phrase it met until she would see nothing but danger and death in his writing. And maybe she would be right. The shooting did after all hang heavy on his mind, especially since the Bishop had told him the pathetic chain of events leading up to what he saw.
    The evening was on the cusp of night, but he wanted to remain outside, on the beach. Ahead of him, further up the shore, he had spotted a cluster of men dragging something from the sea. It was hard to tell in the half-light, but they looked like fishermen, and he assumed the weight they were pulling in was a net of fish. But as he got nearer he saw he was wrong. The shooting had lingered not just in his mind alone, but also in that of the sea itself, and now it was remembering, recalling a body onto the shore and delivering it into the hands of these fishermen, who were tugging its dead weight up the sand away from the blink and shovel of her waves. As he neared them he could make out the corpse they carried. There were four of them, one at each limb, and the body was a man, ingested and swollen with sea water. It was one of the Somalis from the Hertzog . The whites of his open eyes were the brightest part of the scene.
    As Arthur got nearer still he watched as the men struggled with the body’s wet skin. The left arm suddenly slipped free from its bearer’s grip, and the body tilted, slipped again in their grasp, then fell onto the sand, face down. The men turned it onto its back, tenderly, and one of them went to the head, passing his hand across the dead man’s face, wiping his eyes shut. Another folded his arms across his chest, dusted now in a fine coating of sand. Then they simply stood and looked down at their strange catch. Arthur looked too, from outside their tight circle. Nobody spoke. Everyone was looking at the same thing. A rose of proud