Heaven's Edge Read Free Page B

gentle hands constantly tending his garden, slowing the frenzy of the encroaching city and patiently calming my earliest fears. He passed away when I was twelve. That was harder to take than my parents’ desertions. Cleo, my grandmother, was the only one who stayed to see me through. She would make pancakes and bake me banana bread, or ginger cake, every Sunday; once a month re-create Eldon’s special fried pork curry. Delicacies to remind me of my antecedents in the wider world beyond the windswept shale and shingle of our South Downs coast. She was a strong, quiet woman with clear beliefs. ‘You have them with you, inside you, for always, child,’ she would say to console me. ‘Youwill find you have all you need.’ Not long after I left school, she died. I drifted a little, trying to ease the hurt, looking for companionship; someone, or something, to hold close.
    By my early twenties, I decided the life of a recluse would comfort me more; release me from the recurrence of loss, the delusions of communal life. My strength, I believed in those days, lay in my reticence. I sold the old house and moved into a cheap flat, far from any airport, beyond the crowded flight paths I had lived under as a child. It had no garden, not even a window-box. I wanted things to stand still. I didn’t have to do any work and indulged only in secluded, solitary recreations. Like many of my dispirited, isolated neighbours I lived a life of junk, grease and sloth.
    Then, about nine months ago – a lifetime ago it seems now – there was an infestation of mice in my cramped bachelor kitchen. A cold snap must have brought them in. I found a trail of droppings by the bread bin and more around the toaster. I had to get rid of the pests but I didn’t want to use poison; I didn’t want bloated carcasses rotting in some damp corner like those by the bottle-bank outside the municipal library. I decided to drive them away instead, unharmed. I had a go with a broom and brush, clearing out every cupboard in the flat.
    That was when I found my lodestar: an antiquated video cassette with my father’s name printed on the label followed by the year, 1998. It was in a cardboard box in which I had dumped the few remaining mementoes from my grandparents’ house, my childhood props: a bird-watcher’s guidebook, a couple of young ornithologists’ annuals, a collection of cult CDs and dub poetry, geek software. Things I had not been able to look at for years.
    Inside the video case I discovered a note addressed to my mother but written, it seemed, as much for me then as now. Three decades late, in the cold winter light of my scoured London flat, I read the letter, the numbness inside me thawing to its irresistible call. In the days that followed I read it so many times, the neat, precise writing became inscribed in me.
    Darling,
    I am sorry I have to delay my return again, but there is a lot to be done following the attack last month. As usual everyone is galvanised here only after a bomb explodes. It lasts for a couple of weeks, and then everything sinks back into the same old morass it had been before. But by the summer I should be able to leave the island. So do book that gite. It won’t be like here, but it will be good to be all together again, wherever.
    Until then I am glad Marc is happily settled with the Grands, and that you can join your team. As you say, it is only for two weeks this time and then nothing again until the Palermo conference in May. Marc will be fine. He has to learn.
    Guess what I bought last weekend? A video-camera! I thought it was a good chance to make some clips for you to see what it is really like here now.
    I find it so much easier to talk into the camera than to write, but there hasn’t been enough time to use it much. I am sending you this first cassette, as a starter.
    Someday, when this business is all over, I really want to bring Marc here with me. I want to show