the dark intervals

The heat of the day locks us in. The cool mornings and evenings pinched, gradually whittled away. More leaves fall than are swept up.

By the time you're ready, you don't want to go.But nevertheless you go through the motions with mechanical artificality, participate in the easy conversation and trite observations, the shallow humanism and lightly-worn conventions: dinner, then after-dinner pleasantness. One guest in particular has found an audience and spins off tales about Muhammad bin Qasim. N, bless her soul, is bored out of her mind, but puts a brave face on it. Where's the whiskey?

The pretence continues as we move from one room to another. Work to leisure. Paint your face. Since you're not really all there anyway, your mind already drifting, you talk to the kids-still green-eyed to the world- in order to pass the time. If you play the joker for long enough you can slip into your role unthinkingly. Slipping out: not so easy though.

Remember not to educate your daughter. Become a musician or something.

We speak to one another as if we were strangers, waiting for a late train at a departure lounge, incessantly and thoughtlessly, without any metaphysical consolation, and as if by doing so we could paper over the cracks, keep the dark intervals at bay.

R, little darling R, looks out and out, towards a tree. She's in one of her 'mesmerized' moods. Hears the shuffling of crows, the slow beating of wings, as if they were staving off mortality there, high up in the dense foliage. This dark window, this thin veil of night between us all. A few more leaves fall to soft ground.

"Where's my food?", she demanded.

Is that all you can think of, little one?

"No. But I thought I'd play your game for a while as well."