There is a bitter smell; there is a sweet smell; he is dead.
She is burying him in the forest.
Jagging
©
A N T H O N Y PEACEY
I needed to get to Otzapoc; I was on Greenball, a hundred and
sixty iightyears of dark silent lovely nothing lay between, dreaming
its ancient inscrutable dreams. I lacked the cred for a ticket but this
bothered me no particle.
So I got up early, cooked coffee, adios’d long tall quiet O rry now
tangled in blankets next to sleeping Fiorm aria — O rry grunting
‘Bye’ without unlidding his big eyes — and headed for Pororak
Space Centre. In the mono I watched a man’s face, warm, folded,
eyes open but flat and not awake, and felt pity for him riding to a
day of labour in some place thick with the boredom of its own
familiarity. But you can’t tell ’em. Outside the sky paled to lemon
beyond endless miles of Dourisburg’s black business towers, and
paling towers flashed by above us, and dark canyons still quiet
beneath.
From the mono dropping me in the passenger terminal I was
walking through to the amenities block used by staff and ship crew,
and this uniform stopped me.
‘You a pilot?’
‘Yeah.’
‘No you’re not.’
‘Sure I’m a pilot. Brought the Santos in from M eriam yesterday.’
But he didn’t believe me. ‘On your way,’ he said pointing a fat
finger at the floor then at my knees with a little wag. Give a floor
sweeper a uniform and that’s the way he gets. I beat it back towards
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Jagging
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the transit hall.
The night before, Orry, his lady Fiormaria and I had monoed a
hundred kilometres down the coast and sat on the end of a spit of
white sand that stuck out into the gentle sea. We drank a carafe of
spritzig from the vineyard of Phec, we listened to the tiny dark
breakers silk-swishing up the sand, we lay on our spines, dark
shapes of cypress trees back up the spit looming in the edge of sight,
and we felt our minds flow out among the deep silent loving stars.
‘W hen ya gonna jag again, Orry?’
‘Ah . . . ’
‘Yeah,’ Fior, too, asking him, ‘when we gonna jag?’
‘They do pull,’ he said, ‘they do pull, the old stars. Look at em
twinklin away up there — ’
‘An you down here — dirtfoot!’
‘Twinklin away,’ said Fiormaria, ‘twinklin away — ’
You could hear the spritzig stroking through her veins, stroking
out warm into her voice.
‘Ah, you’re a lucky jack, Bandy, jagging tomorrow.’
‘You could be too.’
‘Ah no, not yet, not yet. I’ve things to do. And the dreaded ennui
is still hidin in the woods — not so, Fior?’
‘Well,’ she said judiciously, ‘just about.’
‘Ready to come leapin out like a tiger,’ I said.
‘Yeah, yeah.’ She laughed.
The stars twinkled and beckoned.
‘Just up there in them cypresses,’ I said, ‘stirrin like a tiger wakin
from sleep, stirrin an stirrin an stirrin, an gettin ready to leap out
an rip yer throats.’
‘Aaaaahhh,’ she shrieked, laughing. ‘Aaaah! The dreaded ennui.
Once a jagger always a jagger. We’ll go again, we’ll go again.’
O rry said, Just let me finish my paintin, and drink some more
nights down at Baba’s pickin up on that Ja n ’s mento fragmento
musico, and finish learnin the old Firensieh jabber and read all
their litratoor, and finish teachin Benniman to play the karinga,
and talk to Stefanos some more about his peekoooliar phee-
losophies . . . ,’ lying long beside me while he said this with his
gentle head stretching way up the sand above mine and his gentle
feet going way way down the other way almost into the sea or
perhaps right into the sea with the silky waves swishing over them
and kissing them because he is so good a man.
But I just said ‘Dirtfoot!’ which he took in good part and
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Anthony Peacey
chuckled.
‘You’ll wish you were stayin and takin in all the sociability an
kultoor tomorrow when you get out to damned and benighted
Pororak,’ he laughed.
I could almost believe, now, that he had prophetically said ‘to
Pororak with all its uniformed floor-sweepers’.
