A Body in Motion

We're taking a ferry to an island again this week. What can I say? My wife has been booking a trip, and islands are never far from my mind in any case.

This week marks 500 days of my daily stories, if I have done my working out correctly. Have I run out of ideas? Yes, approximately 500 times. See you tomorrow!

This week’s daily stories

Monday

After ten weeks’ journey we came to Skull Island, where we had important business. We found the man we were looking for in a cabin on the hill, the only dwelling in evidence. Our captain took up the matter, pushing through the door without knocking. “You, sir,” he said to the startled cartographer, “will answer for this map.” The chart which bore his mark showed friendly harbours where there were none, and quiet seas where there were monsters, and nobody but the man who drew it had ever heard of “Skull Island”, which our brief survey had revealed was not so skull-shaped as it was shown. “But it would be a tedious occupation,” the cartographer protested, “to draw the world as it really is.”

Tuesday

The crew had been carefully selected: no illnesses, no unstable personalities, no physical deficiencies. Caitlin was the one exception, her expertise being irreplaceable: if her glasses broke in the new universe, one of these perfect uniformed men would have to lead her by the arm. They stepped through on a cold February day, into a strange summer, and waited for their eyes to adjust. But the light was different here: it flowed and bent all wrong, through the air, through their eyes. They blinked and rubbed, but it was like seeing underwater. Caitlin took off her glasses, let her old eyes focus, and saw.

Wednesday

Mr Manscombe told us that the visitors were important. Well, if they so important as all that, why did they all drive such boring cars? Black, black, and black. If I was important I’d get a car in an interesting colour. They asked us all the most stupid questions you can imagine, and they all looked very thoughtful when they were listening to each other ask, but I’m not sure they heard one word of an answer. Get used to it, Mr Manscombe said when we were grousing afterwards. You’ll be seeing a lot more of them. Of course, we never saw them or their boring cars again.

Thursday

He kept the shavings from his woodcuts in an amber glass jar: all the negative space, the places the ink didn’t touch. When he shook it he fancied he could see all the choices he hadn’t made, all the pictures he hadn’t printed. But when he turned it out, it was just dust and mess and things he didn’t need, and a jar that could be put to better use.

Friday

I bent to pick a snowdrop, but the stem didn’t snap. It drew up out of the soil, impossibly long, and as I pulled I felt the earth begin to tremble with the movement. Up came stones and worms and the roots of other plants, up came the winter’s snow and last summer’s sunshine, up came all that lay buried until the whole world was there, suspended from a snowdrop, with me stood upon it. I wondered whether spring would ever come.

Saturday

I lived up in that tree when I was a kid. I carved my initials and felt guilty every time I looked at them. I thought I’d cry when I saw it cut down. I thought I’d ask for a little chunk of it, the branch where I used to sit. But the creak and the crash seemed to blow all that out of me. When they were finished I went and stretched my fingers up to the place where my feet used to dangle. A place that would always be there.

Sunday

At night I looked up at the moon, where my daughter was. On the clearest nights I imagined I could see the strange buildings she lived and worked in, the threads of her days pulled out across the surface. I sang to her and wondered if she heard. But as the moon came and went I began to feel I was smothering her, looking up every night. I began to wish for clouds.

I have been reading...

• The Discarded by Colin Hamilton, a gift from Christmas 2024 (life imitates art). Each chapter is a précis of an imaginary book removed from circulation in a fictional library. I found it a disorientating read at times: imaginary non-fiction had me unsure what was real. That unstable feeling was a little like walking around the parts of a library covering topics you aren't familiar with. I especially enjoyed a few playful self-referential touches, such as when Hamilton implies that his unusual, experimental novel was written just because it's the only way he could get a poem published.
• The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk. I'm not familiar with Pamuk's novels (yet), but I enjoyed this outline of his ideas of the novel a great deal. Pamuk offers them with a confidence and humility that I found very engaging: I get the sense that he would be a very rewarding person to argue with.

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This week’s story: A Body in Motion

Running away could be easy, after all. It was all a matter of inertia. Use up all your resolve to set going one way, and you would have none left to turn around. A train ticket, a barrier, the rumble of the rails. A press of people moving from terminus to dockside. Now, a queue, moving forward like a heartbeat, and soon a ferry and the cold grey sea between him and home.

And yet his palms were itching. The train had been painted all in company colours, like a cereal box: a promise to take you anywhere. The railway stretched down the landscape like a tether, like a thread in the labyrinth. But the ferry was all thick, sturdy paint on rough metal, paint like the heavy jackets the crew wore, there to keep the salt out, not for fashion. And the sea changed the moment you stepped over it, and would never show a way back.

But here he went, shuffling forward another place in the queue, filling the empty space in front of him, like water rushing in. All the pressure at his back, and the space in front opening up. Like he was being drawn into a syringe. He thought of a school science lesson, the teacher pulling up on the capped syringe, the lukewarm water boiling.