All These Are Memories of My Voyage

When I was little it was said of me that I was `not quite all there’; and this was true. I felt like one side of the moon. And this is how it remains; half of my face seeks half of my face. Like an amputee I can feel, with absolute distinctness, part of myself that no longer exists.And it is certain that as we grow older we begin to be invaded by childhood. **** Serena Ryan was about seven years old when her cousin Jennifer came to the house in Talavera Street. She saw wide greenish eyes and bony legs below a short cotton frock; and this was in February. The girl had a shawl round her shoulders and was clasping a brown paper bag very tightly in both hands. - Hello, said Serena; and the girl said nothing. - This is Jenny, her mother was saying. She’s to stay with us now. We’re tekin’ her in. She’s your cousin and you’re to look after her. As simple as that she said it and no questions asked for. That’s what Mam was like. ***** Another conversation; later. The girls are both sitting on the wooden rail of the footbridge over the goyt. This mill-race flowed, at increasing speed, toward the distant flume and the great Foundry wharves and at length into the locks where iron barges pass. Serena begins; - Mam says I’ve got to tell you something. - What about? Jenny has this idea of hanging upside down over the water. She leans further backwards over its swift black surface. - You know. Bosoms. Babies. Bleeding. All that stuff. - But we know all that! says her sister, contemptuously. - Still and all, we don’t know everything. Jennifer slowly and evenly raises herself and smooths her clothes. She says, definitely; - I don’t want to have b..bay..babies. You have the babies. - We’ll share, declares Serena, just as definite. - I’ll have them....but we’ll share. - You can’t share a baybaby!. - Why not? This one can have two mams. They think about this for a while, without speaking. Then Serena announces she don’t want to get married, no, not never. - If you want a baby, you’ve got to have a fel..feller, explains Jenny. - We’ll share - You can’t share a husband! Jennifer is now exasperated at her sister’s serious tone. - Whyever not? Mrs. Stepanowska does, with that woman over on Salamanca Street. Her chap’s in and out both houses. I seen him. - Well O.K. then, says Jenny. This is what we’ll do. You have him M..Mun..Monday Tuesday Wednesday. I’ll have him Thursday Friday Sat’day. And then (she pauses). On Sundays we’ll forget about him. - Now who’s daft? - Both. That’s both of us daft. ***** Serena, for example, was a Heathcliff. No doubt about that. You didn’t have to be a man to be a Heathcliff. Whereas she, Jenny, was a much more Cathy-character even if it was she who didn’t have a father nor a real mother. She could recognise exactly how it might be to do one thing and still be loyal to the death to someone else. It worried her sometimes that Martin might turn out to be a kind of Linton and so not worthy of serious attention. For going back to the book, she had a good idea of what Heathcliff and Cathy were doing in all that heather. It was what the Anderson boy had been showing her in Nab Woods, and more recently in the back row of the Alhambra cinema. This, she decided, explained the whole story, which was otherwise unlikely. You could get so mixed up with another person that you wouldn’t know where you ended and the other began. Then dreadful things would follow.... ***** The little boy provided Anderson and Jennifer with play; they passed him between them, making faces, as if the whole occasion were quite ordinary, until it suddenly fell asleep against her shoulder, imprisoning her. Against her cheek she could feel the soft down of his dark hair and that small depression on his skull within which a strong pulse beat. Sitting there on the hard chair, as if bound, with the father before her and Serena moving about from cupboard to kettle, Jenny seemed once more to slide right out of herself and to be looking down from a space above them all. She could not now recognise the woman who was holding the child but she recognised the flashing lights that played about her, as a glint from the scales of the giant, glittering mirror-scaled serpent of madness. ***** And I am sitting in a shelter on the esplanade before me gravel and an iron rail I have become, they tell me, a marginal man of the the edges, the creeks and the shingle walking, walking always looking at the ground where between the irregular discs of shale and nodules of quartzite the children could find it A thumb’s length of pale golden amber, returned Amorphous, non-crystalline fossilized eocene resin when balsams ran down when sundarac oozed in the taiga mastic and dammar were flowering far beyond Tallinn The seals of my brain are broken and I know all things through that gash streams blood-red cognition I want to go back to my dreams