Carlo Gébler
|
|
 |
|
|
Walberberg Seminar 2006: Home? |
|
|
They got up and hurried down Blomfield Road towards home. Thunder rolled. The rain really started to pelt down. Within seconds, the dry patches between the splodges on the paving stones had become wet‹so now the ragged shapes were joined together‹and then the whole of the pavement, as well as the road, and even the leaves of the trees, glistened and shone, as if all had been newly varnished.
There was rain running down Amos's collar and goose-pimples were creeping up his arms, but he hardly noticed, for his thoughts were turned towards the street along which he was going, and the sleeping city which stretched beyond the street, and the sky which stretched above, and the rain‹how demo-cratic! ‹which fell on everywhere, on everyone, on every place.
For the next half-hour or so, while the storm raged, the city would be awash with rain. But then, the rain would stop and the clouds would move on, hurried by the wind, and the rainwater would drain away, along the gutters and down the drains and into the rivers, taking all the heat and the dust of the city along with itself; and the rainwater would flow on, bearing its cargo, until eventually it tumbled out into the sea.
And then, when the people of the city awoke, they would discover their streets were not sticky and dirty, as they had left them the night before; they would discover their streets were clean and cool and as new; they would find that the air was dry and that it was possible to breathe again; they would find sky was blue and clean and open; and they would find that sun, where it fell, was warming the chilly world with its touch.
And, at more or less this very moment, Amos decided, as rain stopped and the clouds scrolled away, he would go down the communal garden. He had planted a rose bush there, which Jonathan had given him‹this was many years ago. The petals ‹which were red‹would be swollen, and the scent, after so much rain, would be sweet and yet sharp. He would cut two or three blooms. He would smell the smell of the rose sap, leaking from the cut stems. He would lay the flowers in the basket he would have brought this with him, he would not forget. Then he would carry the red roses back to the flat, to their eyrie as they called it sometimes, and he would present them to Katya, his love.
With this thought, he linked his wife's arm and they hurried through the falling rain, towards their home.
Excerpt from "W.9", a story in the collection W.9 & Other Lives published by Lagan Press, Belfast , 1996 and Marion Boyars, 1998
|
|
