The View from Mount Dog
Page 25
The foreigner reached into his pocket and produced a five-dankal note.
‘I’m sorry, father,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid I have no change.’
‘Neither have I,’ said the old man from his vampire face.
‘Filthy-lying-old-sod,’ yelled the foreigner inwardly. ‘Has anybody got any change?’ he addressed the onlookers without hope. After a moment he laid the five-dankal note mutely on top of the cart.
As he did so there came an evening breeze from the forest which breathed such incense across the road as momentarily to embalm the group gathered round the cart. Some hidden tropic flower of incredible sweetness had mixed its scent with all kinds of resinous, humidor odours and sent olfactible tendrils out into the dusk. They ensnared the foreigner, rooting him like an ungainly Gulliver to the spot before unravelling away, curling and uncurling invisibly. The boy with the spiked octopus began walking back down to the shore, somehow signalling a general drift from a node of momentary interest. The foreigner in his glimmering shirt found himself, too, following them down to the sea bearing before him his brimming plastic grail with meekly belligerent gratitude.
Why to the sea? As if, having sensitively waited for the last of the locals to disappear into the darkness, he could cast both pitcher and contents into the cleansing wastes? Or was there still more of this dreadful public rite of unmerited penance to perform? Behind him he heard the squeak of the flopping wooden wheels as the old man pushed his cart away along the road amid the swirl of bats and fireflies. The little brassy tinkle followed the voice into the distance: ‘Soup! Delicious! Fresh! Excrement soup!’ Maybe the faintest chuckle?
Awkwardly he stood on the shore in an expectant knot of fisher-folk.
‘Delicious,’ one of them said.
‘Delicious indeed. Do have some.’ Ingeniously he offered the plastic pitcher to the group at large, hoping to strike some vein of hospitality which custom would forbid them to refuse. They smiled charmingly and nodded their negation, leaving him standing helplessly on a beach in fading light holding two litres of unthinkable substance for which he had paid, was paying, would always pay.
‘Thank you,’ said one, ‘but we’ve already eaten. We’re full now.’
‘Yes, full now,’ came the voices with an inclusive, excluding certitude of those whose lives are righteously governed by properly observed rituals. ‘It’s night now.’
And the moon soared up like a bouncing singalong ball preparing to take humanity through one more of its best-loved choruses.
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This ebook edition first published in 2014
by Faber and Faber Ltd
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© James Hamilton-Paterson, 1986
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ISBN 978–0–571–31756–1