Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

‘Not really,’ he says, whittling at a stick with his sheath knife. ‘Just be careful for the gaboon viper, they are sometimes here, and if they bite you, that is very bad news.’

He is smiling, but I can tell he is serious. I ask him what to do if I do get bitten. He shrugs his shoulders. ‘Wait for me to find you. Do not try and walk, that will just spread the venom around your body more quickly. Stay still, and wait for me to find you.’ He doesn’t say if he means find me alive or just find me.

Voices behind us signal the arrival of the overland group. Moses stands and looks up at them through his binoculars and I go to fill up my water bottle at a tap inside the hut. When I come out Moses still has the binoculars held up to his face. I ask him if he is counting them. ‘No,’ he replies. ‘I am looking for the pretty girls.’ He brings the binoculars down and turns to face me, a broad smile opening over his white teeth, shaking his head. ‘But no luck, there are none in this group today.’

I shoulder my rucksack and set off before the group arrive. As I have said, I want to be alone today. I haven’t brought a tent so I head off looking for a suitable cave in which to set up camp and spend the night. Moses pointed one out to me at the northern end of the flat plain in the middle of the valley. He said it was called the Red Cave, and looking through his binoculars I could just make out its dark fissure in the rock, like a blinded eye looking out from the grey stone beneath a that of grassy hair.

The walk through the valley floor to the cave is an easy one. The heat of the sun is already softening, the tall grass that stretches away on either side of the path is alive with insects and the sky is clear above me. I reach the end of the valley where the ground begins to rise and the grass gives way to rocks again, strewn and tumbled at first, then solid cliff faces, a waterfall gushing from a narrow gap in their granite wall.

The Red Cave has obviously seen recent habitation. There is still dried grass matting the floor, the charred pock-mark of an old fire surrounded by some stones, and even stubs of candles melted onto the rocks against the back wall. But it hasn’t been just people who have been here before me. I notice what look like leopard prints in the dust around the old fire, a concentric pattern of them, closing in on its scorched patch as if its flames have been hunted, not extinguished.

I lay out my sleeping mat, hang up some damp clothes, leave my rucksack in the back of the cave and go out to gather some firewood. By the time I return the light is already draining from the sky. I build a fire over the ashes of the old one and set a match to the dry grass at its centre. The wood takes easily, crackling into flame. Using the fire to cook some noodles, I sit by its heat, watching the sky bleach, then darken to evening, then night. I am sat back from the lip of the cave which is set in a shelf of rock about three metres off the ground. There is an overhang above the mouth and the cliff closes in on it to the right, leaving a jagged portal a few metres across and several metres high through which I watch the view: rocky outcrops against a backdrop of the bare valley wall. Eventually, when the sky is deepening to an indigo blue, a few stars come out, low and bright above the black silhouettes of the hills. There is a steady dripping at the back of the cave, and just once the dark spark of a bat signs itself off through the space of air in front of me. The silence is heavy, thick and black.

I sit there, in the live light of the fire and think of the story Canon Holderness told me, wondering if it is a product of the mirror-man again. Betty Finn, stranded in her house, saw you through your loneliness. Ray Brown, the literature academic, saw you through your poetry, and Canon Holderness, who lives with the love of a woman at the centre of his life, has placed such a love at the centre of yours. All three of them reflecting your story through the prisms of their own experiences. But increasingly, as I sit there at the cave mouth, testing what I know of your life against this new element, it does seem to make sense.

There are several poems which backlit by this love affair gain a new resonance. ‘Eurydice’, based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, is one. In the last verse the myth’s heroine addresses her lover:

Can you ever lose me out of your song?

Can I ever lose you out of my love?

Must we put our passion back to school?

Must we two to lock hands wear the body’s glove?

For my sake turn from this world beneath!

For you I turn from that world above!

Eurydice and Orpheus. The mythic touchstone of parted lovers, turning away from each other because of the presence, not the absence, of love.

♦

Another poem, ‘Found’, also sounds a new note in the light of Holderness’ story. It appears early in the book of poetry you published just before you left for Africa, and now I can’t help but see the characters of you and Ada imbricated in its lines:

Yes, I have found thee, and no longer now

Seems song a mirage, or romance a dream;

And I will sing, altho’ I am not he

Whom thou hast deemed best worthy of thy grace –

Heart of thy heart and all in all to thee.

Thanks be to God that I have seen thy face!

A goal of bliss before my song is set,

Altho’ its consummation comes not yet!

And of course there is your will in the archives:

‘I the Reverend Arthur Shearly Cripps, do hereby give and bequeath to Mrs Ada Neeves of Icklesham. Rye, Sussex’.

There, it would seem is the final proof of the veracity of Holderness’ story. Your last testament.

And already, sitting in the Red Cave, the impulse to explain, to remember in story, is overtaking me. Already I am colonising your life with my imagination, re-casting you as another of the remittance men of Rhodesia: in Africa not because of what didn’t exist for you at home, but because of what did. Is that how this love affair informs your life? When you left Ada and Theresa you were obeying the majority’s moral code, bending to society’s will. And then, in Mashonaland, you lived by the knowledge formed in the crucible of that loss and for the rest of your life you never followed society or the word of authority again. And you never left anyone again. Is that how the story goes? Is that how it all fits in place? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

The truth is that I do not know, cannot know exactly what happened or why. I can have the facts — your letters, photographs, people’s memories, the Last Will and Testament — and from these I can know the punctuation points of your life. But between those punctuation points is everything I do not know, everything that does not last, and it is only that which will ever really tell me what happened between you and Ada Sargent. Why you left her and her daughter. Why she married another man. Why you never returned and why you only wrote her name in your will years later, when you were blind and dying in your hut at Maronda Mashanu. It is these intimate diaries of our lives that tell the true history. The emotions that pass in a moment like light passing over skin, the seams of thought layered deep in our minds at every instant, the impulses, observations, nuances. The daily epiphanies, the tone and timbre of a voice, the fleeting expression of a face, the few breaths alone, head craned back studying the stars in a black sky. But these diaries of our lives are written in dust; they are not what remain. History scatters them and leaves only the stories, the writing, the punctuation points and the narratives imagined by those in our future as they try to understand their past, as they try to fill the gaps left by the dust dairies of our intimate selves.