Ghosts

Начало книги

HERE THEY ARE. There are seven of them. Or better say, half a dozen or so, that gives more leeway. They are struggling up the dunes, stumbling in the sand, squabbling, complaining, wanting sympathy, wanting to be elsewhere. That, most of all: to be elsewhere. There is no elsewhere, for them. Only here, in this little round.

‘List!’

‘Listing.’

‘Leaky as a —’

‘So I said, I said.’

‘Everything feels strange.’

‘That captain, so-called.’

‘I did, I said to him.’

‘Cythera, my foot.’

‘Some outing.’

‘Listen!’

Behind them the boat leans, stuck fast on a sandbank, canted drunkenly to starboard, fat-bellied, barnacled, betrayed by a freak wave or a trick of the tide and the miscalculations of a tipsy skipper. They have had to wade through the shallows to get to shore. Thus things begin. It is a morning late in May. The sun shines merrily. How the wind blows! A little world is coming into being.

Who speaks? I do. Little god.

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