Read Online The Brooke-Rose Omnibus by Christine Brooke-Rose - Free Book Online Page B

What did you say you used to be?
    – A fortune-teller.
    – Yes well, there’s no future in that, not nowadays.
    The gesture is one of denial, palms up and vertical, paler, almost pink, and heavily lined. To live the gesture in immobility is to evoke it and therefore to have observed it. Or something like it, the palms being white perhaps, the head gardener’s, and the earth dark and damp, swallowing up all gestures as realised and rejected, leaving no trace of error in us.
    – You won’t need the hose yet, at least not with water running through it, but you could practice with the dry hose. It’s best to identify with each of the plants one at a time. Then you will know exactly what its needs are on any one day during the dry season.
    – Excuse me but how can I identify without the water?
    – That’s a very good question. I congratulate you on having avoided the trap. What did you say your occupation was?
    – Well at the moment –
    – No, I mean, before the displacement.
    – I used to be a welder.
    – Oh, I see. Somebody told me you were a historian of sorts.
    – That’s not true. Oh, no. Never.
    – Oh well, it all comes to the same thing in the end. The important thing is in the holding and the applying of the instrument. At least you’ll be used to aiming correctly, whether it’s fire or water.
    – It all comes to the same thing I suppose.
    – Don’t be impertinent. We haven’t built you up yet. There will be a period of initiation. At the moment all the plants are shrivelled and blackened with the frost. But the leaf is in the seed. That is an article of faith. It is with the seed that you must identify. This will give time for the black and white image to percolate. We can add the colours later, when they crop up. The process is known as osmosis.
    – What is the catch, though?
    – Well, there might be an explosion. Too many to the square centimetre.
    – The flowers a mass of red.
    – I don’t know about red. In any case one type of explosion tends to cancel the other. The answer to the one is to fill the body’s reservoirs with minerals like potassium or carbohydrate complexes found in seaweed, so that radioactive minerals are absorbed and passed out. This of course tends to encourage the other type, the population explosion. However, it is a risk worth taking, and square centimetres can be enlarged.
    – I thought you said that it’s best to identify with the plants one by one?
    – That’s a very good question. But these are mere statistics in time. You must learn to identify with the flux.
    – It’s an article of faith, I suppose … it is difficult to tell who’s talking in this type of dialogue.
    – If you must have your schematisations the job can go to someone else. There are other candidates for initiation. But Mrs. Mgulu made a particular point of taking a special interest.
    The number of the vehicle has no numerical significance. The gesture is of holding a conventional weapon. A flame-thrower for example, or an atomic machine-gun. Sooner or later some such interruption will be inevitable. Under the fig-tree, however, as in a brain, there is only immobility. The sky is entirely filled with long grey twigs that poke into the eyebrow line topping the field of vision. In the lower part, on either side of the nose, the branches that bear the twigs are thick and contorted. To the right of the nose, with the left eye closed, the thickest branch sweeps horizontally along the edge of the grass patch, underlining Mrs. Ned’s shack, as if the shack were built on it. To the left of the nose, with the right eye closed, it darkly cuts across Mrs. Ned’s dark shack, cancelling it almost. Close up, the fig-tree looks blasted, filling the sky with its metallic trellis.
    – The gardeners’ union, however, would not object to your working overtime only. At overtime rates I’m afraid, which is quarter-pay at the moment.
    – That’s all right. What are the overtime hours?
    – In the dry