Prophet Song

by Paul Lynch

The phone is silent in her bag throughout the evening and into the night, it is silent throughout the night’s passing. Waking in the dawn from a sleep that was no sleep at all she is met by a silence that has become some roaring abstraction.

She glides into the seat across from him and places her hands on the table and looks into his eyes while he leans back and puzzles at her. So you decided to have some lunch, she says. I’m having a quick bite to eat while your mother sees the consultant, he says, you should get yourself a sandwich while we’re waiting. He is smiling now and for an instant she is a child, watching him eat, the pink tongue lolloping an escaping prawn, a smear of mayonnaise on the corner of his mouth. He is looking for a paper napkin when she hands him one and he wipes his mouth then reaches out and touches her cheek. Don’t worry, he says, everything is going to be alright.

I’m not crying you’re crying

She wakes to the sound of war come like some visiting god, a hammering fury that brings out a hammering in her heart, she cannot find the light switch, her hand padding blindly until she finds it fallen behind the bedside table. There is nothing to see outside but a lone gull pearled in blue light on a chimney top, a gauze of fine rain. Every dog in the area is baying at the noise as she pulls the window closed, looking down at Ben, the puckish smile on the sleeping face, the small fists surrendered above his head. She cannot find her dressing gown and unhooks Larry’s from behind the door, her hand is caught in the sleeve and cannot push through.

She moves through the house trying to see ahead, the world branching into impossibility, the dread thing visible in the growing light from the kitchen window, two columns of dark smoke adrift over the south suburbs, a helicopter gunship nearby, she cannot guess how far, perhaps three or four kilometres away. She turns on the radio awaiting the news and steps outside to the washing line, watching the trees in roseate light and wondering what it is they can know, perhaps it is true what they say, how the trees sense the air and speak their terror through the ground, letting other trees know that peril has come, what sounds in the sky like some all-consuming fire chewing wood in its mouth. She drops the clothes in the basket and looks down at her hands and does not know why she remains so calm, another door has been opened, she can see this now, it is as though she were looking out upon something she has been waiting for all her life, an atavism awakened in the blood, thinking, how many people across how many lifetimes have watched upon war bearing down on their home, watching and waiting for fate to come, entering into silent negotiation, whispering and then pleading, the mind anticipating all outcomes but for the spectre that cannot be directly looked at.

History is a silent record of people who could not leave, it is a record of those who did not have a choice, you cannot leave when you have nowhere to go and have not the means to go there, you cannot leave when your children cannot get a passport, cannot go when your feet are rooted in the earth and to leave means tearing off your feet.

and he will always be here because the love we are given when we are loved as a child is stored forever inside us, and your father has loved you so very much, his love for you cannot be taken away nor erased, please don’t ask me to explain this, you just need to believe it is true because it is so, it is a law of the human heart.

Listening to the empty house, hearing the old voices upstairs and her mother calling them to dinner, their feet booming on the stairs, the fire in the stove ticking as though it spoke to time like some deranged clock, as though the log in the stove were spitting out the time stored in its wood, thinking, time is at once addition and subtraction, time adds one day to the next and always takes away from what’s left, the slow sleeping breath before her. It is the body that breathes the mind, this is what she thinks, it is the heart that beats the man until the man is beaten and she finds herself reaching out for his hand, whispering, I never wanted you to be anybody else.