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physical love, he is first and foremost a gentleman, and so forsworn from
confiding anything on the subject without the express permission of both
sisters (which, given that my grandmother Aasni died some years ago, is
unlikely to be given unless it is at least partially from beyond the grave).
Salvador found manual work on Mr McIlone's farm to help himself and the
sisters through the next year;
meanwhile he continued to search and to write, with gradually less and more
conviction respectively as time went by.
*
It took me some time to fall asleep after the car-wagon train restarted its
journey; I suppose I was still excited after the whole business of stopping
the train and boarding it.
The car I was in smelled strongly of plastic; the dashboard and much of the
other trim was plastic and there were transparent plastic covers over the
seats. I had taken out my compact Sitting Board in case I
wanted to sit rather than lie down, then stowed my kit-bag in the front
footwell and got into the back seat where there was more room. Judging that
it might be rather noisy if I was trying to sleep, I had taken the plastic
cover off the back seat and left it folded on the driver's seat, then I'd
settled down for the night, but had not been able to sleep.
I felt uncomfortable just being in the car at all; it smelled so new and
seemed somehow designed to be so archetypically bland that a true Luskentyrian
could hardly feel otherwise. However my delight at having secured such an
Interstitial mode of transport helped to ameliorate the effects of the car's
toxic banality.
While I was still lying there trying to sleep, I thought of my cousin Morag,
the apostate, and recalled once sitting with her on the platform of the
Deivoxiphone, in the warm sunlight of a summer four years ago, when she was
the age I am now and I was fifteen.
The Deivoxiphone was a piece of army surplus which was there at the farm
before the Order took up residence; Mrs Woodbean - the lady who gifted the
estate to us - had had a brother who collected strange vehicles and pieces of
equipment and stored them at the farm (he was killed at a meeting of
like-minded enthusiasts in Perthshire when a jeep he was driving too
exuberantly turned over). One of the things he collected was a
bizarre-looking device on a trailer which had been used briefly during the
Blitz at the start of the Second World War. The instrument consisted of what
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appeared to be a number of gigantic fluted listening trumpets. Appearances in
this case were not deceptive, for that was exactly what the apparatus was: a
huge artificial ear for pointing at the skies and trying to hear German
bombers before they arrived overhead. A sort of poor-man's radar, in other
words, and from the little I have heard concerning their
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all efficacy, about as useful as one might imagine.
When I was nine I thought this piece of junk was just the most wonderful
mechanism on God's earth, and somehow got it into my head that it was
important to rescue the thing from the paddock where it was being slowly
submerged in weeds, and set it up somewhere. My Grandfather had been dubious,
thinking the device had too much of an aura of clutter about it, but he could
refuse me nothing, and so he'd had the thing taken off its trailer and hoisted
up onto a wooden platform built especially on top of the old circular barn at
the back of the farm. Grandfather named it the Deivoxiphone.
I did not, of course, believe that we would literally be able to hear the
voice of God any better using this extraordinary contraption, but as a symbol
of our ideals I thought it was powerful and important (I was going through a
serious stage at that age and objects and stories which seemed symbolic meant
a lot to me).
Of course, as soon as the instrument had been raised to its position of
prominence I lost all interest in it, but there it sat, perched on its
octagonal wooden rostrum to the south of the farm, aimed at the heavens like
an olive-green multi-barrel blunderbuss. There was enough space on the
decking around it for sunbathing or just sitting looking out over the gardens, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]