Read Online The Crack by Emma Tennant - Free Book Online Page B

paradise!
    Waters gritted his teeth and pulled himself to a half-sitting position. Rousseau was forgotten. Man in his innocent loveliness, waiting only for the guidance of Waters, presented itself to his horrified gaze.
    â€˜Savages!’ he groaned.
    Slithering down the trampled mud towards them came two black-robed figures. With their long matted hair and heavy, purposeful stride they transported Waters to the nightmares of his childhood, when John the Baptist and Jesus together came to punish him for being naughty. Unconsciously, he prayed for deliverance.
    Harcourt and Thirsk stopped as they reached the fringes of their flock.
    â€˜A balloon,’ Harcourt announced. ‘Men from another culture, Joe?’
    â€˜A case of womb envy,’ Thirsk allowed. He put out a restraining hand as Harcourt was about to dash forward. ‘We must remember the new methods of anthropology,’ he went on. ‘We do not appear on the scene to annotate and classify. We observe, and we appreciate a life-style that does not resemble our own but is nevertheless contemporaneous with it. We do not overlay our post-imperialist value-judgements.’
    â€˜Quite so,’ Harcourt said faintly. Waters’s head and shoulders were just visible in the balloon and he was ashamed to find himself relieved at the fact the man was dressed. So much nakedness had once more caused a longing for order, which only a return to the States could gratify.
    â€˜We will not pronounce these people savages, whatever their ritual may be,’ Thirsk intoned. ‘Incest taboos – cannibalism –’
    Waters, catching the word cannibalism, shuddered to his feet in the balloon. Instincts normally denied to late twentieth-century bourgeois man crowded in on his feverish brain. The draft-dodgers he had sheltered in his Hampstead home were no longer a proud memory. His uncle George, a conscientious objector in the war, seemed now a ludicrous and pathetic figure. Squaring his shoulders, Waters snarled openly across the crowd at Thirsk.
    â€˜He’s certainly violent,’ Harcourt whispered nervously. ‘What do we do now?’
    Thirsk, who needed violence daily as much as a carnivorous animal needs red meat, bared his teeth in turn at Waters. Thirsk’s patients looked wonderingly from one adult to another. Memories of childhood traumas, impossible fights between their parents, aggression towards themselves flooded back. Ned and Mary, who had been in care since the ages of one and two, started to scream first.
    â€˜Who are you?’ Waters shouted over the shrieks. ‘Where am I? Is this the other side?’
    Thirsk smiled. He said quietly, ‘Yes, this is the other side. Welcome, brother. You must forgive the children. They are only expressing themselves. They need a father to vent their pent-up feelings, and I’m afraid the fact you descended from the skies caused the God/Sun King complex to manifest itself.’
    Waters gave a bitter smile. Thirsk’s speech was familiar –Hampstead was crawling with men like this – and he furiously regretted having been impressed by their theories. He had even bought their books! Once more, he bared his teeth in a snarl.
    â€˜We must work together for a new society,’ Thirsk went on in his too-reasonable voice. ‘And this is my colleague, Nigel Harcourt.’
    Without thinking, Waters extended his hand politely. Another wave of rage overcame him when he saw that such symbols from a dead culture had been discarded and Harcourt only looked him in the eye.
    Thirsk’s children, amused by Waters’s family, started to play housey with the youngest daughter in the roots of a great oak. Peals of laughter drifted towards the adults as the real and artificial children, darting amongst the branches of the fallen tree, exposed themselves to each other and set up fast-changing games of Mummy and Daddy. Mrs Waters, terrified that her children might become