prologue to a story about murder
As the night becomes you that patch of skin flecks and writhes into a mural. I have now sat down to pick at my fingernails, reaching out into the air, and already the sickly sweet smell of What You Are has arranged itself. And begins the cold summary of country, experience and back-of-the-hand noting that will suggest to me not intimacy, but exhaustion.
Vapour, sweat and vapour crowd out the space. A taut exhortation of canvas, and we know there is wind and world outside. How confined are we really if we can feel the outside pressure, can see it reflected and pretended in the walls?
Elsewhere, over the ridge, three others sit together and warm chapped hands on a fire, soil sunk into their eyes and brows. But here that patch of skin, resting under your cheekbone, with profound non-argument, exhausts me. It’s a whole part, a dissection of my understanding and proof of the non-existence of my travel. Focus on the skin stops focus on the eyes or on our mouths and anything they have said.
The suet-looking vomit glistens on the floor, caressing itself silently. The lethargy is such that both of us have rationalised its need to stay right in front of us. The food was rich, the discharge acrid and acidic.
Just as the greasy pores of your patch of skin have taken to allowing matter to accrete and glisten on its canvas, the damp earth lets the vomit sit, immutable. I see your nail dig into your thigh, remembering the scalp outside.
A lot of forehead, more than expected, and the patch of skin that emerges from the blonde hair, blonder than in paintings or films, is clean. The scalp rests on a rock, visible to nobody in the blackness but I remember its weight. It sits, waiting for rebuke or for argument, but I will make none, and you shan’t either. The skin and hair just had to happen, and as birds fly over the land tomorrow they will see the flop of hair from their elevated vantage point and see another human down beneath them, untouchable, vicious in its breathy anger.
But to you and I it will be the attempt at understanding, tactile brain-and-mind-touching, and in the end pain and death, probably. We know more than the birds. Hands and beaks, sweat and dirt, and the subtle stability of What Is.
Fire inside a flower, and the day arrives. 24 hours before, both of us were walking with pained feetover rocks of all sizes. It was perhaps 12 hours since we first saw the poachers encamped on the other side of the plateau. After they saw us they moved away and our sedate chase involved following footsteps and the hazy spirits on the horizon.
‘How far?’
No reply.
‘Water?’
No reply.
I drank.
‘We can make up the ground in about two hours reckon. If I don’t fall down.’
No reply.
As the day crept past us, the distance to the figures shortened. Eventually we were close enough to see the muscles of their backs. You ran for them, and plunged the blade into their stomachs, one by one. The killing was so swift and silent the main sound to be heard was the tear of flesh as the rusted and serrated knife lacerated skin, rib and diaphragm. The rest of the night was then a matter of sawing through the necks of the chasers, and placing the finest head, with its bushes of hair, on the rock by which we made our tent.
The fortnight we have been here has been more active than expected. Our bodies have waded skin-tight through the days and the succession of sharp edges and exhaustion they have brought. I can feel the outline of my forehead marked by sweat, poised against the cut-glass morning breaking over the rock and scrub behind it. You are pressed against the rock, tent rolled up on your lap. The next 14 miles of the day will be rubbed into the soles of our feet and squeezed out at the end of the day.
