Heartstrings | Page 4

through everything, everything, it was all transparent to him, and
he was the judge of it, and her. And the awful knowledge that he could not, could not ever,
accept this infant that would carry his name. He could not be her father, because to him her
name would not be daughter, not Sue, not Sieu, the phoenix, but the name of her would
forever be ‘betrayal’.
‘That is not my child he said.’
Bonnie's expression changed, her posture supplicating, ‘Of course she is,’ she said, ‘how
could you say that?’
‘Woman,’ he had said quietly, ‘You have betrayed me. That is not my child.’
‘How you fuss. How would you know?’ her tone was scornful, and she could not conceal it.
‘Because,’ he said, ‘I can know my own. This child, God help it, is not mine.’
He looked into her dark, beautiful eyes, and saw mirrored in them the contempt she felt for
him, for his self pity, for his weakness, and the triumph in her eyes, for she believed she had
dealt him a mortal blow.
‘So.’
‘So I refuse it.’
‘So. What will that prove.’
‘It will prove to you that you have set me free, and that, as my mother would say, is a
blessing.’

Heartstrings

9
‘You can't just walk out.’
‘Watch me.’ And he had done. Just walked out. She had it - what she wanted she had the
big house, flash car, and his permission to fuck what ever she fancied. But that was all she
had.
The old life was dead. Its mountains were less than molehills, they were shitheaps, slag heaps
that the last vestige of good metal had been washed from. Dug from the bowels of his being,
the mine that he had dug had become the graveyard of his ambitions. Dead to that person,
dead to the man in the suit, the man with the briefcase, the notebook computer, the secretary,
the office, the world of meeting, conference, tender, the world of the city, of making and being
and doing, dead to it, and wandering now his own ghost, in the spirit world of the desert, not
looking for new birth, satisfied to be a ghost, glad to be just that - a free spirit.
And, he couldn't help himself, Mum said. That; what she always said, and it was a blessing.
Having health and a good whole body was a blessing.
The unquenchable hungers of that body, were they a blessing when the temporary satiation
gave ease?
Sight was a blessing, and hearing and smelling and tasting.
Was feeling a blessing?
His eyes, now that he was alone, were narrowed, and deep within their dark blueness was the
coldness, the anger, the remorseless need that drove him, and ,alone, he had no need to be
kind, to quell his need, his driven hunger, in consideration of others.
He could devour the landscape. He could swallow it, he could hold it in him, refusing to let it
pass away from him as shit, but could hold it in, till it burst him, and ran out of his pores like
sweat, the beads transforming into the colours, the shapes, the blood of the landscape.
And he could take it, and extrude it through his hands, through his fingers, while his eyes, the
eyes that saw and remembered, watched and supervised this excretion, this landscape, this
concerto, work, opus, painting that was just that, pain, and just paint, but really, the
landscape, his country, swallowed up and transformed through him, and his need and his love
and his gift, his art.

Heartstrings

10
He knew he was hungry. It was time to stop, to eat, to rest, for the encroaching evening and
the golden time played tricks with his eyes on the grey, empty road that he followed onwards
into the never-never of his dreams.
A hint of a track appeared on his right, and he nearly passed it. In the dimming light, he
nearly missed it, for it was no more than the tyre-marks of vehicles that had gone before over
the rise, and down into the hollow behind it. He stopped, looking around for traffic, but the
road was empty, and so he backed and turned back to the side-track.
Before he left the road he stopped, put the front wheels on lock, climbed back in, and
engaging the four-wheel high ratio, slowly allowed his vehicle to amble over the rocky,
uneven little used track. Up the rise it went.
The fall on the other side was steep. Down steeply to a cleft like a creek-bed in a land without
water, without creeks, and he let