digitalis lust lamu squat dark triad stickfighting days
dark triad
From the bedroom window, an arc of the city is in view: squat towers serried in uneven, slanting rows. Far below are streets like ribbons of light, filled with slow-going cars. The air is icy clear. In his journal, Ebanks writes, An old, settled city, plain, inscrutable facades: Europe. It had not been apparent when he alighted from the taxi that they’d fetched up near the brow of a hill. The city forms a bowl rimmed by four or five such peaks. He sees unimpeded all the way down into the basin, the city’s heart, where street lanterns blend and blur into an amber haze, and he hunts for a word that will cap his sense of the place. He knows this already: it’s not right for the next project, which will be an installation. Somewhere in the world is an inchoate city, some new Berlin or a Buenos Aires. All is stale in London, in Paris, nothing untried. [More]
digitalis lust
He looks forward to the second Wednesday of every month, and with the same impatience regardless of his libido. On those afternoons, which his colleagues believe have been set aside for squash, as his Mondays are, he leaves the office at half past four to drive into town, glad to go against the city traffic.
He turns the car away from the ocean road and wends some distance up the mountain. Here, the streets are close, cobbled in places and uneven. In the sunlight of early summer he sees no one walking. The building he is going to is shouldered on one side by a bed and breakfast; its other neighbour is a town house. He’s in the habit of parking directly outside or at the opposite kerb but today finds it necessary to go as far as the next intersection to find a space. [More]
lamu squat
They fix passage across the channel for three hundred shillings; Meroe haggles. The motorboats have long since skimmed into the dusk, the passengers smiling and laughing at the platitudes of the Lamuans.
Peter eyes the dhow. Meroe seems tired, too tired to mollify him as she has all the way along the coast. The sailor busies himself with rigging, clambering up the mast to ready the boat. Onboard, Meroe digs in her rucksack for the last few bananas and settles the bag between the boat’s ribs.
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stickfighting days
Thwack, Thwack, the two of them go at it like madmen, but the boys around them barely stir with excitement. They both use one stick and we find this swordy kind of stickfighting a bit crappy. Much better two on one or two on two – lots more skill involved and more likelihood of blood.
I turn to Lapy. “Let’s go off and practise somewhere. This is weak.” Lapy likes any stickfight, but almost always does what I say. His eyes linger ruefully on Paps and the other boy – don’t know his name but I see him a lot – and then he follows me. [More]