by Jean McNeil
Also by the author
From the Library of Graham Greene
The Rough Guide to Costa Rica
Hunting Down Home
Nights in a Foreign Country
Private View
The Interpreter of Silences
The Ice Lovers
Night Orders: poems from Antarctica and the Arctic
Ice Diaries: an Antarctic memoir
We hope you enjoyed The Dhow House, Jean McNeil’s first novel with Legend Press.
The next novel from Jean, Fire on the Mountain, sees NGO worker Nick parachute unexpectedly into the lives of Pieter and Sara Lisson. With the Lissons, Nick witnesses a fascinating swirl of splendour and acclaim, but senses there’s a murky secret at its heart. This is a story that questions the relationship between truth and narration, families and strangers, father and son, past and present.
Here’s a sample of Fire on the Mountain:
PROLOGUE
I know I will remember that city as a film – a backdrop, somewhere I witnessed rather than lived. The first image, just as the opening credits fade, will be the hot tarmac of its streets smoking after rain, an entire city burning from the ground up. But then there are those things you cannot see: the vegetable smell of kelp mashed on the serrated shore of Ocean Point. How when you lick your lips the salt is there. The light – bleached, peering, as if the sun were scrutinising you, trying to determine what use it might have for you. For the full first week I am blinded by it. The summer gales, the blistering light. The sea is buoyant, cold.
As in a film we don’t know the ending yet. Because the city gave me the first period of repose in my life, it is not a place of futures, or even progressions of frames. My life there was a series of stills. To understand their meaning I am trying to animate them into a lurching, false sequence. That city is the only place in my life I have ever experienced a nostalgia for it when I was still there, as if the days and weeks I lived there were destined to be revealed as not real after all; rather they belonged to a separate uncategorised dimension, not past, present or future, and were being pulled out from under me even as I lived them.
In the film, after the rain-smoked streets, we see Pieter. He is walking toward us across the grass. There is a prowling quality to Pieter’s walk which Riaan inherited, along with his narrow, delicate feet. I am next to Sara, her uncle and her cousin. We are all sitting at a stone table underneath a sculpted shrub that overhangs in an unnatural oblong. Flies harass the wedges of cheese, the expert courgette and pepper antipasto Sara has prepared.
Only a few nights ago we nearly lost all this – the pool, the sculpted tree, the date palm, the house itself, with its architectural heritage, its hefty price tag. I remember how darkness filled the kitchen that night as Pieter and I talked, like liquid poured into a glass, both of us so absorbed in the narrowness of our escape we dared not interrupt the moment to light the candles that were our only illumination. How we stepped outside to where the night flowers were still blooming, despite the heat they’d been exposed to, their banana scent travelling on the breeze: Amaryllis, jasmine, bougainvillea. How after five unanticipated months in the city these reversed skies were becoming my skies. I could read the upside down constellations as if I’d never lived all my life in another hemisphere.
Now it is a hot day, a goodbye lunch, and Pieter comes walking barefoot across the grass, past the swimming pool. Patches of sweat soak his sky blue shirt, which has small white stitches in it. He has several buttons open from the neck.
‘You’re half way to taking your shirt off,’ Sara says.
‘Well I would, but I don’t want to scare away the ladies,’ he replies.
‘Or we’ll fall on you and attack you!’ Sara’s cousin grins.
‘Don’t do it,’ I say, ‘it’s not worth the risk.’
Earlier I had watched as Sara’s cousin said to Pieter, ‘Here, give me a kiss hello,’ and he’d said, ‘Why?’, playing his self-appointed role as the prickly, difficult husband. In kitchen, Pieter had looked at the tray of rolled meats and took one between his fingers, twisting it around. Keeping a straight face he’d said, perfectly seriously, ‘I prefer them rolled this way,’ He stood back, waiting for outrage.
The vague air of seduction, of something withheld – do all writers have this? I knew him; I didn’t know him. Perhaps that is all I will be able to say about Pieter, in the future. The writer who was tired of writing; who was always on the brink of giving up; who had been left behind by history; who hadn’t come into history at the right moment; whose books were considered evasive parables in a time of national crisis; whose works had never found popular acceptance, despite or because of their deadly seriousness. I can see him calculating how long it would be before he could indulge his addiction to contemplation again, how long he would have to serve lemonade to relatives on a heat-staggered day.
But today he is Pieter, slim and winningly arrogant, my friend, the father I never had.
I look up and see he is going to leave us. I know this from the deliberate way he approaches the table. He comes up behind Sara’s elderly uncle and hovers. ‘I have to go to a meeting at the national library. I’m going to have to love you and leave you.’ The uncle with the hearing aid takes no notice of him. I stare at Pieter, giving him what I know it is a plaintive look. This may be the last time I ever see him. My flight leaves in four hours’ time.
‘Cheers,’ Pieter says. His voice is distant, even acrid. He has been this way with me all day. I don’t know what I have done; it’s as if he has only today discovered or realised something not to his liking.
After he has disappeared into the house and I hear the car pull away I can’t hear what anyone is saying. A draining feeling pours through me, tugs all the energy out. Suddenly the heat is oppressive. It ripples through the burnt garden and the charred mountain – the tangle of vegetation that used to run rampant without the twice-weekly chop from Lewis the gardener – a kiln heat, a dead mid-afternoon moment, the swimming pool glistening in the late summer light.
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