Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

Already I am making connections. You wrote and I write. You were a runner, not just a competitive one, but an instinctive one. You ran for the running, for the essence and escape of it. I think I know how that feels. I have always run too: through the lanes, up the hills of the Black Mountains. For the primitive feel of its simple exhaustion.

But there are pieces missing. Triggers and gaps in the story, and you are strangely absent. This is you the history, not you the man, and for some reason I am left wanting more. Steere has done his job though, he has brought us together. His prose is dry and functional, but without it I would not have pursued you down the years; I would not have tried to get under your skin. I would never have met Leonard, Jeremy, Betty Finn, Ray Brown, Canon Holderness. I would not have camped in the Red Cave. I would not have danced on your grave last night. And, of course, there would have been no you and me. There would just have been you. Then me. Two people separated by a hundred years of forgotten memories, by a hundred years of dust, settling between us with every year past, covering your tracks and obscuring mine.

Arthur has been running across the veld for over four hours. His feet are bleeding in his boots and his lungs feel the colour of the ground beneath him: red, coarse a nd grained. Drained of fluid, they hang within his ribs like drying tobacco leaves, rubbing against the bone. With each breath a loose covering of dust seems to rise in him, silting in his throat and burning in his chest. He finished the last steel-tasting drops of water from his billy-can ten miles ago. His mouth is parched and his tongue sticks to the skin behind his teeth. He can feel his lips drying out, cracking like waking pupae. His breath clicks in his windpipe.

The veld at his feet is as dry as him, deprived of water these last few months when it should have been raining. And not just any rain, but the downpours of the wet season, so powerful they felt solid: curtains of rain drawn across the end of each day. Italic rain. But no such rain has come, so he runs across hard and broken ground, dotted with scrubland bushes, their leafless twigs branching from the ground like burnt-out capillaries. The shattered shells of damba fruit scatter the path, the debris of hungry baboons. The hills are grey and purple in the distance.

♦

He had left Enkeldoorn that afternoon following the service in the Dutch Reformed Church, giving himself at least five hours to run the thirty-seven miles to Umvuma before darkness. The congregation was small but familiar, the usual gathering of administration men and farmers’ families. Wide-necked, sun-tanned men dwarfing their smaller wives, each wearing a frilling of young children.

Slipping away into the corrugated iron vestry he had packed his cassock and the dark botdes of medicine into a brown leather satchel before removing the stiff clerical collar, unclipping it at the back of his neck and folding it into a side pocket, so he could breathe. These were his rituals of preparation before a long run. Walking outside, he filled his dented steel billy-can from a standpipe by the supplies shop, listening to the deep gurgle rising in pitch as the valve strained to pull the water up through the layers of rock and dry earth. Then he bent to tighten the laces of his boots, and noticed tht split between the upper and the sole had widened again. Standing up again, his thighs aching from another long trek a few days earlier, he secured his satchel across his chest, pulling it tight to reduce the rubbing that he knew would eventually leave him with a raw shoulder strap of red skin.

These preparations were important to him, and for more than just their practical reasons. They helped him to focus, to take a mental deep breath, like a diver filling his lungs before he tips off the cliff into the sea. In this way he would expel the thoughts that had occupied him for the last few hours — the stolen candlesticks from the church, the late mail from England, the worries and agitations of the farmers — and fill his mind instead with the space it required for the long run over the dustland of the veld. Or was it an emptying of the mind? To inhabit instead that place of no thought needed for the wide horizons that are never reached, for the distance between him and his endpoint and for the simple hugeness of the brooding sky above him. He needed this space, this mental clear sky so he could enter the landscape as part of it, and not as an irritation panting over its dry surface. It was only as a part of it that he could face such long runs at the speed he did.

♦

It was growing dark. Not getting dark, but growing, the dark expanding, filling out, a living, corporal darkness. Veld darkness. The clouds that had been burning on their undersides were now bruising into night, and the evening light of long shadows had fallen through to grey. The sky was deepening, disclosing its first stars, and a cool evening breeze was discovering itself in the thick air.

He was worried he would be too late. Three children had already died in the village, and several others had been struck down by the fever when he was there a couple of days ago. It was then that he had promised to return with medicine, European medicine. He knew this would be unpopular with the local n’anga , but the people of the village were willing to accept his help, they had seen the children waste away and die, and each feared for their own family. But now it was a race against the darkness. Soon it would be no use carrying on, he would get lost, and would have to camp out for the night. But worrying wouldn’t help. Thoughts of where he was going would only hinder him. ‘Travel with nowhere to go’ is what a Shona elder had told him last year, and it was good advice. Travel for the movement only, not the conclusion, that way you will be part of your journey, and not a victim of it.

So he concentrated instead on the minutiae of his sensations: on the wind that cooled the triangle of skin exposed beneath his neck by his open shirt, on the rhythm of his legs, on the tight beads of sweat that formed and evaporated on his forehead, leaving their residue of salt. He watched the orange and gold shimmer of the trees, their water-starved leaves flicking in this new wind, and he drew deeply on the lightness of his skin, which felt transparent, stretched to opaqueness by his fatigue. Listening to his blood tapping at his temple, he felt alive, painfully so, on the edge of existence. And above that there was the sound of his own breath, ticking in his throat in time with his steps. His metronome, keeping him in time with the sound of the veld, enormous, unapproachable, all around him; full with its own music of the ground shifting with unseen life, waiting for the rains. Full with its own song, a song he was still learning to follow, adjusting, fitting his life to the country. Slowly, he felt he was succeeding, absorbing the country and absorbing into it. On some of the shorter treks he had even gone barefoot when the heat made his boots unbearable. He had once arrived in Enkeldoorn like this, barefooted, skin caked in a fine covering of dust through which his sweat traced veins of dampness. A visiting dignitary had been there, a Bishop from England, and there had been words.

♦

He was too late. He knew this before he even reached Umvuma, when he was still picking his way down the slope of the kopje before the village. Although it was nearly dark, the old light of the sun just a sliver of grey across the back of the land, he could still make out a cluster of bodies around one of the rondavels, shuffling and moving like an ungainly animal, unsteady on its feet. As he got nearer, he heard the wailing of the women. Long cries of grief from inside the thatched hut, three or four voices in a harmony of distress, weaving a song for the dead. The men remained outside, stern and serious. One of them leant on what looked like a hunting spear, the others held farming tools. They were waiting for the women to cry their grief dry, to empty their wells of sadness, so they could get on with the business of starting over again.