MORNING SERIAL
GOUTS of muck and hot cinders rain down on us and hot cascading spouts of steam and water.
With the ship gone, the sea is a wretched habitation of debris and bodies, as if the last of the ship has become a foul midden of our past existence. Monogrammed bed linen, table napkins, wine crates and chicken coops, upturned soup tureens and paper book-boats that were orderly libraries, flotillas of entangled deckchairs to which people cling as best they could in the backwash from the sinking.
Amongst all this I float, and see men roll on and off wooden barrels and women grasping at passing spars and chests of drawers. Some push others away from them. They smack at each other with paddles.
Those whose life jackets have been wrongly attached, back to front, drift helplessly, faces into the water. Dead babies, their sightless eyes turned to the sky, are sodden bundles bumped along in this swirling stream. I hear the cries of the living. I make no sound.
And then, I am younger, walking home from school, a fee-paying prep for the sons of professional men, taking a short cut across the new city’s municipal park.
I am heading north, passing an empty bandstand, skirting the bushes alongside the red gravel path, when from the cover of the thick, glossy-leaved shrubs I see the four of them, boys of my age, around 11 years old or a little more, who swarm around me and taunt me.
I am smacked in the face by an open-palmed hand. They jeer at me. I am punched by a closed fist, its knuckles bony and hard on to my mouth.
My lower lip is split. I try to pivot away from them. I try not to cry but I do as my satchel is torn from me and is opened, school books and pencils scattered on to the path.
I feel no pain, then or in memory, only my shame at not being able to stop sobbing, my chest heaving uncontrollably so that I cannot take a breath, only gulping air, sobbing and helpless before them, laughing at me, pushing and shoving me to stumble into the bushes.
CONTINUES TOMORROW