His ambitions, like his body, were collapsing. He found balance difficult. He hoped for a brass plaque to be attached to his house after his death. He was no longer sure how best to lobby for, or even obliquely suggest, such an honour on the ever-rare occasions he met the few who paraded themselves as powerful in the old Regency spa town. What was he commemorating? His thoughts were mist. He heard strange chanting. Saw a naked man dancing between the stars and the earth. Remembered rivers, a dark child at his door, fingers greasy with sawing. He awoke early on the eighteenth of October, 1866 and, rolling his head to one side in his warm bed, he looked at an autumnal light, red and diffuse, softly falling through a window. He felt a great serenity wash over him, his body peacefully stretched out, and, secure in the knowledge he had been a good man who had helped many others, he died.
It was noted with approval how Sir John was finally decisive with his wife on the matter of the black child, who, he now said, would not be taken with them to England. He declared medical opinion against it: experience showed savages' bodies were constitutionally incapable of surviving a robust climate; it was as proven and undeniable as were the advantages she had enjoyed which would ensure her future was bright indeed. He did not involve his wife in the matter of the memorandum ordering that the child be taken away to St John's Orphanage. He would not hear her protests, but observed that it was as fine an institution as had ever been erected, and that the child would there be able to finish her education to the satisfaction of all. He would not enter into an argument with Lady Jane about the experiment being not yet ended.
'It was unscientific yearnings from the beginning,' Sir John said, and though the word they both knew he intended was mad, there was about his statement the tone of undeniable conviction. When Lady Jane said that she must prepare the child, and went to assure her that her destiny was still promising, it was already too late. They had taken Mathinna the morning before, without warning or explanation, but with the precaution of giving her a special breakfast of toasted cheese. Whether this was to calm the fear she might have or to assuage the guilt he possessed, he was unsure: he simply felt it an act born of necessity, rather than nostalgia.
Mathinna lay down, curled into the rug, closed her eyes and let her frail shell of a body ride the bumps and jolts. She told herself she was warm and safe and, consoled by such necessary untruths and with the comforting fullness of toasted cheese in her belly to further the illusion, she somehow fell asleep and dreamt of running through wallaby grass.
The Warden believed in God's love and pity. A terrible love. A most terrifying pity. And against all that belief and all that love and all that pity, against all the questions already answered, even a spirit as indomitable as Lady Jane's faltered.
She wished to rush down to the filthy courtyard, grab Mathinna and steal the frightened child away from all this love and pity, this universal understanding that it was necessary that she suffer so. She wished to wash and soothe her, to whisper that it was all right, over and over that she was safe now, to kiss the soft shells of her ears, holder her close, feed her warm soup and bread. She wished to be the mother she had tried so hard never to appear, to put her nose in Mathinna's wild hair and comfort and protect her, and revel in her difference and not seek to destroy it, because in that moment she knew that the destruction of that difference could only lead, in the end, to the terrible courtyard below, and the white coffins below that.
Mathinna swung the conversation to dresses they were now wearing in London, and, though she knew she was only repeating what she had heard years before, she tried to lead the conversation as she had seen Lady Jane lead her soirees, introducing a topic and then turning to someone else for their opinion. Yet when she tried to look her companions directly in the eye, Mathinna realised this wasn't Government House but Ira Bye's sly grog shop--an earthen-floor split-timber hut of two rooms at North West Bay--that it wasn't a soiree and they were anything but society, just stinking no-good stupid blackfellas. She wished she had the Widow Munro's bamboo cane to hold under their chins until they did look back at her, these no-good, good for nothing savages who knew nowt.
We spend our time in life wanting. Wanting, we need; wanting, we desire; wanting, we hope; wanting, we build and build. All of life is a wanting. And everyone has their theories about wanting and how to address the thing. But when it comes down to it, everyone still wants and they cannot escape the wanting. Even in wanting to not want, we want. So much wanting, that the word begins to twist in our minds and our ears and on our lips. Can you say want want want want want want without the word warping?
Put a list together of all the things you've ever wanted. How many times does this wrap you in want and trail about your feet and trip you up, like some clothing made for a person many times larger than you. Indeed the human appetite for wanting is larger, much larger than the human capacity for attaining or realizing or accepting or handling. How could we want so much more than we can have?
I don't know what to tell you about the wanting. Cross your fingers and hope to die, you won't ever get all that you want. And what you want can be what you need, no matter how good the Rolling Stones are. So sing and sing, but remember that a bird does sometimes sing for what it wants, though sometimes it may only want to sing.
Wanting is the baseline of our lives, wanting is the thing that we have in common, wanting is our humanity. Can you say you haven't wanted? Who can?
No comments:
Post a Comment