In Gondwanaland
Ken Edwards
There was not, so far as I can recall, such an evening: we never again went for a walk in the park, we didn't sit on a bench, never watched the young Asian men play cricket on the common. I certainly can't remember them wearing brightly coloured polo shirts, nor whether any wore a turban. I can't imagine them showing the tremendous application that would have been evident. Nor their heartfelt appeals. Shouting would have an echo to it that would be evocative. It would have become a kind of liquid. Liquid would never condense on skin like that, sticky with it, wicked. There was no such park, and no such young men had ever been born. It was said there were two great coloured balloons in the sky above the park, if it had ever existed, representing mind and matter, but I don't remember them either, nor a large kite representing a footballer's lower torso that was said to have been observed. People hadn't set out their stalls. Had they done so, you can imagine how a Chinese couple in charge of one of them might have created calligraphed ideograms for their customers, a black couple, representing their names: his could have been Noir, rendered as the word Black, hers Bobbie, rendered as two equivalent syllables. A strange fancy. Cakes and beer were never offered. There was no mingle of scents. Days and days may have gone by, or not. Drifting over from a window of one of the houses overlooking the common it was not possible to recognise a melody, played on an out-of-tune piano; high over the ox-bow lakes of the Flood, whose water might have produced a matt sheen in the remaining late afternoon light, no distant hang-glider did ever float; tonight would not be a night of 100 violins. No lone cormorant, vigilant on a bank; no grebes; no heron. Some said a local group produced a poem-essay about 50 yards long, on a sort of parchment or bedsheet that was dragged along the pavement, but I never saw it. This "artwork" could never have been sold or bartered for other artefacts or opportunities, as some asserted. Which was in any event not at all interesting, or urban fox-like. A lamb did not land by parachute (and her name was not Larry); in the blue-grey dusk below, there was no distant scimitar of brightness, the kind that would have seemed as though reflected off a dome, but is actually a curving line of separate lights. You might have heard a storm circling far away, but the trestle tables were never restored and the party never took place as planned in the open. Tennis was not promised either. We didn't help carry the trestles, tabletops and benches back down the road whence they had come. Neither did we go on an hour's circular walk down country lanes that we never imagined existing in the heart of this city, picking windfall plums. Among the disused factories and abandoned office blocks, there was no strange attractor. The great bowl of the sky: vanished as though it had never been. On the various billboards situated on bridges and the sides of buildings above the high street, texts could not, as had been predicted, be observed to move and transform subtly, so that now they were Chinese or Hebrew and then English, yet seeming hardly to have changed. In any case, I wouldn't have been able discern what their messages were. That would have come in time, I was told, but I have my doubts. During the proceedings, I didn't encounter a fox rummaging in the dustbins and general garbage in the place where the fruit and vegetable stalls set up, just next to the Quality Butcher. If such an animal had been observed, its size and state of health couldn't have been ascertained; it could not have watched me warily with bright steady eyes but without fear had I stopped still to look at it. Were the houses clearly derelict? Was there a rusting hulk of a van? I can't say. But it got no lighter, wind did not arise, weather failed to break up, there was no thunder in the air. Life did not start all over again. It was not as though we were at the beginning of the era wherein everyone knew their place. Unknowing thus became the theme.
I had never noticed how very wide the floorboards were in the living room. Weirdly shaped rooms failed to open off one another unexpectedly. I was no "stranger in paradise". Gold sun on the horizon didn't blind me. Crows weren't flying to roost. I never spoke words of wisdom to you, and if I did, I can't now recall them, or their import. There was never a day of torrential thunderstorms, interspersed with weirdly bright sunshine. You don't remember them either. No drink, no piece of pie, no soup outside the Old Father Time, where there were no lightweight metal tables or chairs. No ancient dog lay near us. Cool, grey-blue? I couldn't discern any citrus fruit on dense, trellised branches. No twitter of sparrows, no hum of voices. I don't remember a beautiful and very intense young Egyptian student called Easter sitting next to us, who was interested in breaking up words into coloured fragments. And if she had been there, she never told us about her brother who was re-inventing extended vocal techniques even though he'd never learned music formally and had not previously been known to sing; nor did we learn about her mother, 75 years old at the last count, who recently smoked a spliff for the very first time. Would she have enjoyed it? I think not. Remember how everything faded into history and was lost? And how we got used to the fact that eventually everything that had once loomed large and exciting would be forgotten? This was not so fantastically great and truly out of time. I didn't know whether I was coming, going or standing still. We couldn't just walk back home in five minutes at the end of the day. We failed to observe the icy dew on the surfaces and the moon through gaps, nor the block ahead of us, all lit up like an ocean liner (unless it was the Titanic). We could never again both work separately and together in the same space and then meet once more. You didn't acquire a set of pastels nor a new miniature wall of books. We didn't stir-fry giant prawns. In the early hours of the morning you could not have pulled me to you in bed, almost asleep, saying I was your music and I was getting away from you, a dream state I couldn't have understood. Because you weren't there. You were never there. During that walk in the woods, no sexual itch coincided with a fox crossing the path we had just traversed. Spent bluebells, and blue dragonflies stationary in the air – there was no trace of them. You never disported yourself, eyes shining, in a shirt of muslin and a floppy hat. You never bounced with excitement as we slipped back for sex in the afternoon while the Titanic sank all over again. I must have invented your unnerving and moving gratitude. No sulky warmth settled into the streets. You didn't wake me with kisses in the middle of the night. I don't recall asking "Where am I?" nor my lack of disturbance. (If I did, you didn't answer.) You didn't excite the molecules of my body in unforeseen ways. What were the limits or boundaries? What did "unforeseen" actually mean? We couldn't have pretended to be on a package holiday in our own back yard. How could we? The work, meanwhile, ceased. That week we could have planned to turn our attention to the bathroom, to clean and paint to the sounds of African music coming over from the pub garden, but this didn't happen, nor were there children from many ethnic backgrounds playing in the back yard in sunshine, following each other in a conga line that snaked all up and down the fire escapes. No, nothing could ever become human again. At the end, there was no sparkling, seaside-themed bathroom, with conch shell, pebbles and flourishing plants on the gleaming window shelf. You weren't kissing and cuddling me nor telling me how attractive I had become.
8.00 am: Did not make love. "Lightness & drift."
10.00 am: Did not move books from shelf to shelf.
The flat failed to glow in the early evening light. There was no trace of your rug on the living-room floor, the dusky red throw over the sofa, the flowers, the rearranged books, your pink lampshade, the view from the bay – all were gone. It was no pleasure to contemplate where the bookshelves and wooden music stand had been. No kids were playing or screaming outside. Not tapping on metal. The wind-chimes didn't move at the fire-escape door outside the kitchen. There was no feeding frenzy of tits in the early morning light outside our bedroom window. We failed to go for another walk when the rain clouds lifted, giving us brief sunshine once more. I don't remember waiting for you to get out of the bath so I could use your water. Observing cumulonimbus beginning to cover the sky over the park at the end of a very hot and humid day, I believe you would have predicted another thunderstorm, one that would arrive just after midnight, crashing dramatically for just a few minutes almost overhead, flashing golden-white light through the blinds and bringing with it sudden torrential rain. But this didn't occur. Because there was no you. Because you had not been born. No, there was no thunder, nor sheeting water, nor lights passing away. And we didn't awake or hug. Didn't drift from room to room. You didn't compare me to an ant in industry and resilience, nor to a rock in fortitude. I had no occasion to be flattered thereby. Beech did not gleam. We didn't clean the flat, nor install Busy Lizzies in the window-box. I didn't plant a herb garden on the fire escape: neither oregano, marjoram, thyme, rosemary, nor basil. If there was ever yellow blossom in the back yard it had now faded, and none of the young trees lining the diagonal path across the common to the Flood carried such a heavy freight of white or pink blossom. I can't say whether the mature plane trees across the road from us were beginning to sport their full complement of young leaves, nor whether the growth started very conspicuously from the lower branches, and only reached the upper parts later. There were no buds on the biggest tree, and the tall spindly one to our right, bare last week, had not acquired greenery; while behind it, bronze leafery, deepening to copper, had not appeared. No gardeners were at work, I never found my way to the secret room with the aspidistra and the view onto the imaginary garden, I never played the piano, I didn't experience a single note reiterated, the warped reverberations of heavy bass chords
The music was not broken
Because it was not loved
and I could have played for hours in the darkening ambience which had become a new theatre, a note becoming a chord and a chord's multiple possibilities dying and dying, getting further and further dispersed on an impossible trajectory that had no end, as the lights went on and off in the buildings outside and distant figures moved – yes, it's all possible, but again, I have no recollection of this. There was no pleasure, there was not even scary rolling thunder and screeching bits. There was never one music, manifesting to us in different ways, depending on the methods we used to perceive it: either introspection, or observation through the senses, that is to say, hearing. No – you never existed. Therefore you never told me that Freud said consciousness was a perception of what was going on in the mind, but that the mind itself was unconscious. I didn't discover that we could only perceive evidence of "the soul" but never the soul itself. That consciousness created the illusion that mind and matter were two different things, but that they were the same, just as lightning and thunder are different aspects of the same phenomenon.
Ken Edwards
