Read Online Debatable Land by Candia McWilliam - Free Book Online
Authors: Candia McWilliam
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away to make space for what was to come. Rinse and swill and spit, to make way for colossal bridgework, up-to-date false teeth.
It is hard for humans, thought Alec in Moorea, to reside within an artificial smile without recourse to something stronger than marital sex or the word of God.
On the streets at home there are people living like snails without shells, slowly, featurelessly, uncleanly. A house, many of them have learnt, is a fragile thing, a shell, easily crushed. Its removal will remove part of yourself from you.
Another change had taken place, among the staggering drunks. Loquacious, angry, grandiloquent, falling over, these people had for as long as he could remember congregated near the railway stations and at the warm mouths of tearooms, hairdressers’ shops and matronly hotels. At the docks and in the Old Town they would group, hellishly festive, and allow themselves in the year’s cold seasons to be impounded by such organisations as the Salvation Army and the Mission to Seamen. Many were old soldiers and sailors; some mutilated, though the limbless more often took to music – a mouth organ, a tatty set of pipes and a thrown-down bonnet on the pavement – than to alcohol. The hard drinkers were great talkers and boasters, gesticulating like generals talking strategy. When Alec was a child they were the wounded of a war. The pallid and silent heaps he saw now had been harmed at peace. The heat of carousal the old drunks used to give off had been replaced by a chill where the publicly intoxicated congregated. A drunk on the street would now very likely be middle-class, his desperation floated closer to the surface than in the days of the saving of faces. There are wet trousers where the trousers have been made for the wearer with silver pins and tailor’s chalk.
Up Gabriel’s neck grew soft pale hairs in a pattern that ended in two arrows that went deep into the stronger hair.
‘I’ll shop, too,’ Alec said, seeing these.
Nick, though he did not discuss what he wanted until it had been established Logan did not need him, was going to look for the conquering snails and some trace, maybe, of their victims.
‘Tell you what, Alec, then, you shop and we’ll collect you. It’s an unbeatable experience in these coves,’ said Logan. Gabriel gave Alec the shopping list.
The Zodiac nosed the jetty. Logan stepped on to the land and tied the boat up. The sureness of his movements was almost balletic, the graceful product of instinct and practice.
‘There’s the shop,’ he said to Alec. ‘We’ll walk you up there. I’m tempted to see if we can get a goat slaughtered by the time we set sail. Can you butcher or is it like diving?’
So he had noticed, not by words but by some bullying intuition.
‘I can butcher,’ said Nick.
The shop smelt of coconut, orangeade, sweat, petrol, beer, and quiet, perpetual frying. It was dark and hot with a concrete floor and muttering deep freezers, one full of parcels of hard meat in paper, the other of frozen vegetable macedoine and fanciful ice-cream desserts with names like minor works of soft music, Fantaisie en Rose, Aubade en Robe de Chocolat . In the low freezer were also kept beauty preparations. The shelves were deep in the attempts of French manufacturers to recreate American food and American food giants to conjure some sophistication. Drums of soda crystals and aggressively named washing powders had been shaped into impromptu chairs on which men sat with soft drinks in cans. A whole wall was dedicated to food for between meals, Cheez Wizz, Cheez Balls, Tandoor Chow Mein Pizza Bites, and sweet drinks. Pineapple and strawberry Nesquik stood next to Eucryl smoker’s tooth powder.
On a door that must lead in to the back of the shop was the poster of a controlled nuclear explosion at Mururoa atoll – a tall gaseous spire of bruise-coloured uncontrol with an orange heart and a sheer glare of white in its core, reflected in a quiet blue sea and
It is hard for humans, thought Alec in Moorea, to reside within an artificial smile without recourse to something stronger than marital sex or the word of God.
On the streets at home there are people living like snails without shells, slowly, featurelessly, uncleanly. A house, many of them have learnt, is a fragile thing, a shell, easily crushed. Its removal will remove part of yourself from you.
Another change had taken place, among the staggering drunks. Loquacious, angry, grandiloquent, falling over, these people had for as long as he could remember congregated near the railway stations and at the warm mouths of tearooms, hairdressers’ shops and matronly hotels. At the docks and in the Old Town they would group, hellishly festive, and allow themselves in the year’s cold seasons to be impounded by such organisations as the Salvation Army and the Mission to Seamen. Many were old soldiers and sailors; some mutilated, though the limbless more often took to music – a mouth organ, a tatty set of pipes and a thrown-down bonnet on the pavement – than to alcohol. The hard drinkers were great talkers and boasters, gesticulating like generals talking strategy. When Alec was a child they were the wounded of a war. The pallid and silent heaps he saw now had been harmed at peace. The heat of carousal the old drunks used to give off had been replaced by a chill where the publicly intoxicated congregated. A drunk on the street would now very likely be middle-class, his desperation floated closer to the surface than in the days of the saving of faces. There are wet trousers where the trousers have been made for the wearer with silver pins and tailor’s chalk.
Up Gabriel’s neck grew soft pale hairs in a pattern that ended in two arrows that went deep into the stronger hair.
‘I’ll shop, too,’ Alec said, seeing these.
Nick, though he did not discuss what he wanted until it had been established Logan did not need him, was going to look for the conquering snails and some trace, maybe, of their victims.
‘Tell you what, Alec, then, you shop and we’ll collect you. It’s an unbeatable experience in these coves,’ said Logan. Gabriel gave Alec the shopping list.
The Zodiac nosed the jetty. Logan stepped on to the land and tied the boat up. The sureness of his movements was almost balletic, the graceful product of instinct and practice.
‘There’s the shop,’ he said to Alec. ‘We’ll walk you up there. I’m tempted to see if we can get a goat slaughtered by the time we set sail. Can you butcher or is it like diving?’
So he had noticed, not by words but by some bullying intuition.
‘I can butcher,’ said Nick.
The shop smelt of coconut, orangeade, sweat, petrol, beer, and quiet, perpetual frying. It was dark and hot with a concrete floor and muttering deep freezers, one full of parcels of hard meat in paper, the other of frozen vegetable macedoine and fanciful ice-cream desserts with names like minor works of soft music, Fantaisie en Rose, Aubade en Robe de Chocolat . In the low freezer were also kept beauty preparations. The shelves were deep in the attempts of French manufacturers to recreate American food and American food giants to conjure some sophistication. Drums of soda crystals and aggressively named washing powders had been shaped into impromptu chairs on which men sat with soft drinks in cans. A whole wall was dedicated to food for between meals, Cheez Wizz, Cheez Balls, Tandoor Chow Mein Pizza Bites, and sweet drinks. Pineapple and strawberry Nesquik stood next to Eucryl smoker’s tooth powder.
On a door that must lead in to the back of the shop was the poster of a controlled nuclear explosion at Mururoa atoll – a tall gaseous spire of bruise-coloured uncontrol with an orange heart and a sheer glare of white in its core, reflected in a quiet blue sea and
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