The Dolmens

Six thirty in the morning in a canvas chair at the Golden Gate National Park campsite. The day is fixing to be hot again – wind makes a rushing sound in the leaves of the big tree over my tent. Willows line the dried-out gully that would be a stream or a creek if the water was running, crooked charcoal lines among the backlit green.

Up early, the ground hard against my ribs, my hip. We are deflated, my air-mattress and I. Listened for a while on my back to the activity in camp. Christmas coming and lots of folks going. Trying to get on the road early or just enamoured of a day out in the wild - who can say?

Four hours back to the suburbs and then what?

I’m not suited to being alone. It takes training. I’m looking for some inspiration, a spark. My sentences are like one-line book reports. No music. No wonder. Even my handwriting is falling apart.

I have a slight headache, nothing really to speak of in the context of my hangovers – nothing to write home about. A dodgy stomach. Heartburn. I feel surprisingly good. The long days outside sap you. The wind and the sun. After three days, my clothes are saturated with grease and smoke and sunshine.

Here then is a letter, a few sentences strung together. Futile. Like trying to catch my voice in a net. Is that what you have been waiting for? Here I am. An echo. You like to know I am here, you say. More and more I am not. I am disappearing.

Certainly I am in no shape for conversation.

You’ll have to forgive me, I have been reading Charles Wright and my sleepless skull is full of his sidereal ramblings. My ribs are still sore and the light in the willows reminds me of the tree on Carrick Street. I have been struggling with the right name for the dried-out watercourse. Creek. Stream. Brook. River. I don’t what things are called anymore. A sandy, half-tunnel rifling through the undergrowth at the foot of a cliff. A massive stone wall hundreds of metres high. Red and yellow and green and brown headed into the white dawn sky.

Just there, a baboon suns itself on a rock.

At my back, a guttural conversation in Afrikaans. A family sorting out breakfast. Kids on bikes race round the campsite, clever devices inserted into their back tires to make a clicking noise. For us it was a hockey-card though, you preferred the Big Wheel.

Between me and sunshine, the nameless trees thick with bird voice. I know the names of neither. I am losing my own name.

In the night there were horses whinnying and clearing their throats. Unseen critters combed the campsite for treasure. If I had never been here, in Africa, would I have thought they could be zebras?

Why did I not dream of a starting again in Mumbai?

It’s tiresome, my brother all this accounting. To be thought mercenary doesn’t bother me that much, to be seen as the man on the road ‘making paper’ who has abandoned his roots, who has forgotten where he’s from. We work. We live. We choose our own way, given a set of gates. A campsite. Looking for level ground, for a safe place to put our boots.

In the night, there were horses.