Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

♦

From where he is crouched with his goats under the red and gold leaves of a seringa tree Patrick watches the sleek black car jerk forward and begin its charge towards the swarm. As if they share a symbiotic relationship with the machine, the bees move at exactly the same moment, contracting their mass into a darker, tighter ball, before dropping to the level of the car and streaming towards it. The swarm and the car meet with the sound of pepper shot fired through iron, the bees enveloping the bonnet in their darkness, driving through the shiny steel grille of the radiator, flowing up into its undercarriage. The car continues accelerating, but then slows again, faltering against the onward avalanche of the swarm. The engine chokes and coughs, vibrating with the bees in its system, clamming its pistons, drowning in its oil, until suddenly the vehicle comes to an abrupt, jolting halt.

The car does not move, as if stung into stillness, beached on the dusty road like a boat on a sandbank. Its engine, though, is still running, battling for its life, shaking under the chassis as the bees swarm into it through the silver grille until Patrick is sure he can see the hinged black bonnet move and shake with the pressure of them, clouding under its steel. Then with one last grinding, metallic screech the engine dies. Seconds later, as if they had known the exact mass with which to clog its workings, the last of the bees flies into the body of the car.

And suddenly there are none left. Where moments before a multitude had hung in the air, buzzing, droning, there is nothing, just the sudden silence of their disappearance. The day is still again. Almost.

Shuffling forward until he is crouched at the edge of the road Patrick can hear the tick, tap and drone of the few insects still alive under the bonnet of the car. He can see the faces of its passengers too: one white, one black, ghosted and faint behind the dun-dusted windscreen. He stares at the car, waiting for the bees to re-emerge, but they do not. Behind him, his goats carry on grazing, unperturbed, tearing at the grass with rhythmic efficiency, tinkling the bells at their necks. Patrick, meanwhile, who still cannot believe his eyes, puts his hands over his mouth and laughs into his fingers at the wonder of what he has seen.

♦

The Reverend Smith did not reach Maronda Mashanu that day, and he did not get the opportunity to try again. When Bishop Paget heard about his activities in the area he immediately dismissed him from his post and travelled down to Maronda Mashanu to apologise to Cripps himself. In a symbolic gesture which he knew would not be lost on the priest or his African parishioners he offered to accompany Cripps on a preaching tour of the burnt mission stations. Cripps accepted and for the next week Paget and Cripps visited the charred remains left in the wake of Reverend Smith’s passing, the Bishop standing by as Cripps preached from the blackened altar stones, his old boots dusted grey with the ash of burnt thatch and wood. The African congregations gathered around the old priest, intent on his sermons and singing out the Shona hymns with an energy that Paget had never witnessed in his own services in Salisbury. He watched Cripps preach and could not help but feel that these shattered mission stations, open to the veld, were perhaps the most suitable churches of all for this maverick priest. Here, there was no partition between the church and the land, no entrances, no windows, the birds flew above them and the wind moved through them. And, Paget noticed more than once, the crucified Christs behind the altars, having passed through Smith’s flames, were coloured a deep, charred black.

Noel has left him. He made his farewells and Arthur listened to the whirr of his bicycle’s wheels through the grass and his cheery ‘ Masikatf over his shoulder. It wasn’t addressed to him, he had already said goodbye to him, but to someone else. Fortune perhaps. And then he was gone, taking the words of the poets with him.

And then Fortune’s hands, gently pressing through the threadbare cotton of his jacket. He is so thin now he feels her fingers cupping the ball joints of his shoulders, as if she were holding the bone itself. She is talking to him, easing him up and moving him back under the shade of the rondavel’s roof.

The day is already older. He can feel the changing quality of the light in his eyes. He cannot see it, but he can feel it, a warm darkness cooling in the crucibles of his sockets. The sunglasses are heavy on the bridge of his nose. He hears the single cry of a bird, a young hawk perhaps, trying its wings for the first time.

And now Noel has left him. But then, they all leave eventually. Like the neglected thatch that falls from the hut’s pole, like his flesh fallen from the bone. This is how they have left him. His mother, his sisters Edith and Emily, William, Frank Weston, John White, Edgar Lloyd, falling away like sheaves of grass, leaving him like the lonely pole, dry and trickling with ants. The letters would slow, ebb and then finally stop. For a fortnight or so he could pretend the mail had got stuck somewhere, a broken Scotch cart wheel, a forgetful boy, but then notice would reach him. Another letter, written in a strange hand: a sister, a wife, a colleague or a nurse. But more often now, the direct speech of the telegram: ‘PASSED AWAY STOP’.

He would write in reply, he always did, making carbon copies in blue ink on skin-thin paper and sending them out — his elegies and tributes, a final wreath of words following them to their graves. It had happened like this so many times, why should it ever stop? The leaving, the word so suitably cutting both ways: those that leave us and that which they leave us.

Legacies, memories, a resonance of their selves living on in the thoughts of those they have loved.

♦

He had once left himself. In both senses, in 1926, but it had not worked out. He remembered steaming away from the African shore and thinking it would be the last time he would ever look on her trees, her purple hills, her towering skies. But of course it was not. In Africa he had missed the countryside of Essex, the England of his youth, but once there, back in his Ford End living, he had missed Africa even more. Missed her with the violence of another loved one died. He was the in-between man again and within four years he was back. England had moved on in a way that he did not understand, and in a way that meant she no longer understood him. There had been unease and then mild outrage in the town when he gave over his vicarage as a shelter for the vagrants and moved into a one-room lodging for himself. And the skies, the heavy skies seemed to weigh down on him with their low, dense clouds. Cars were everywhere.

And of course, there was Ada and Theresa. They were there too. Again, he did not go and see them, for the whole four years. He wrote to them both, but he did not visit. He suspected that they too would have moved on and so he lived instead with just his memories of Ada and the one memory he had of Theresa. She was four years old when he last saw her, the only time he saw her. Blonde hair and blue eyes like her mother, peering up at him from behind the folds of Ada’s skirt as he stood there, saying goodbye to them without words.

And what of Ada? Had she left him yet? No, he didn’t think so. She was younger than him and he cannot even imagine her old, let alone dying. And anyway, he feels sure that she could not leave without him knowing. Not by way of a letter or a telegram but by another kind of communication. She could not pass away without the current of her going somehow touching him. He was sure of that.

It was like the baobab tree. The ancient two-thousand-year-old baobab with its massive gnarled trunk, its branches like roots and its flower, so transient, so delicate that it opens just once in the evening and is dead by nightfall the following day. But however brief the flower’s passing, the animals still know it is there, the bats and the bush babies all drawn to the scent it releases in the one day and night of its existence.