Adverbially Thinking By Robert Edward Gurney
West Coast Eisteddfod Short Story Competition 2014
(Edward Ponsonby-Jones lives now in a care home in Gower, West Glamorgan. In his heyday, in the nineteen sixties, he headed a British-American overseas aid program in East Africa. An old friend of his, Clive Probert, who now lives of top of hill in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, is writing a book about the group’s experiences. Edward knows more than anybody and he, too, is harbouring a desire to write the definitive story of those years, the period when Idi Amin was on the rise. He feels that, as the former programme head, possessing a secret card index system listing his colleagues’ youthful peccadilloes, he should be the one who writes the story. He is sitting at the window that overlooks the Bristol Channel. In the distance is the English coast. His eyes rest on the hills opposite called The Hangmen: The Great Hangman and The Little Hangman. Copies of emails are pouring in but they are not addressed firstly to him. They are all going to Probert, with copies to him. In they come from Aberdeen, Boston, St Louis, Dar, London, Cardiff, Cork, Blackpool, Leeds, Saint Albans, San Francisco, Sydney, Ontario, Tunis, Limassol. Edward is seething. For some obscure and possibly perverse reason, he finds his mind is playing with adverbs. It gives him some solace.)
I seem to have been sitting here for years, here in Gorseslade Care Home. Sullenly, I hear you say? Well, hardly anybody ever comes to see me. It’s too far, they say.
Silently, when my wife leaves, I check my emails.
An email arrives: Ping.
I open my laptop suspiciously. Are the emails about me? I study assiduously the possible allusions.
I approach the task seriously although I sometimes feel I should be above this immature behaviour.
Sometimes I feel morally superior. My ancestors, big in the Church in Wales, put vulgar things behind them.
Ping
Yet some days I open my Mac fearfully, in case it ever leaks out that I was once chased naked by an angry woman with a machete down Kampala Road.
Disdainfully, I go to my inbox. I have better things to do, I think. My bible lies open next to me at Genesis.
Ping
Other days I feel that I open it almost anally. I could, after all, tell them all much more than they all know put together. I had been the lynch-pin out there in Africa. I was in charge of the programme. I knew everybody’s secrets. ‘Shan’t tell you’, I hear myself saying with a smile.
I often turn my back on the other residents and look out of the window at the sea, separately, so to speak. After all, I have always, in my life, tried to keep a distance from all the others, even when we were out there. I would often rather be by myself on top of Mount Kenya or Tororo Rock.
Pauline comes in.
Look, Mr Ponsonby-Jones! There’s that tanker, still out there in Swansea Bay. There, look, straight ahead. It’s been riding at anchor for weeks. They say in the Evening Post that they are waiting for the price of oil to go up before they dock.
She goes out.
I feel, at times, that I am behaving stupidly and that I have nothing really valuable to say.
Ah well, I say to myself, phlegmatically, if I keep quiet, it will all probably blow over, this email blizzard.
Ping
I often sit here parasitically, overlooking Oxwich Bay. I feel I am bursting with stories that I shall never tell others and anyway, perhaps they aren’t really mine. I can’t remember now very clearly.
Ping
Today I find myself saying, in a moment of insight, that I am stuffing myself greedily on the tales of others. Yes, sometimes I feel I could burst. But I need to do it. I need to write that book that will stun them all. It gives me a headache just thinking about it.
Ping
Mind you, my church forbids me, religiously, to engage in such frivolous activities. It’s fun, though, to see others rushing down the road to hell.
Yes, idealistically speaking, I should keep myself pure for when the magnum opus finally begins to take shape.
Ping
It has to be said, mind, that I get the strangest of sensations, voyeuristically you could say, when others confess their antics and the scandalous goings-on in the Starlight Club in Nairobi.
Prudishly, you might think, I have always tried to keep myself clean, apart from that fateful night – I can feel my eyes glistening at the very thought – when I came face to face with Wandegaya Margaret.
For God’s sake, what am I doing? I went to a top school in Bridgend. I must think properly, snobbishly perhaps, my head is saying. I can’t be seen to be enjoying this sort of thing, well, not often, anyway.
Ping
No, I am above all this sort of thing. I should shut the thing down. I have to admit, though, that I sometimes can’t get enough of reading about it, disdainfully, mind,
and feeling, at the same time, yes, strangely above it . Curiosity killed the cat? No, isn’t it the fifth main human motive? Get thee behind me, Satan!
Pauline pokes her head round the door.
“You all right, Mr Ponsonby-Harris?”
“Yes, I’m fine, Pauline”
“Tea?”
“Not now. I am busy.’
“All right, then, later.”
Ping
My eyes go jealously green when I see that that Clive Probert, ‘Crofty Clive’, living in that mansion with all those bloody servants on top of the best hill in Dar es Salaam, is hogging the limelight with his thousand and one tales. After all, it is I who should really be there, in the spotlight.
Ping
I open enviously Clive Probert’s emails. Yes, I do, I envy him. I envy his popularity.
I envy the fact that he is half-English. No I don’t.
Ping
I suppose I shall have to go on listening, wearily, to his eternal prattling. It makes me so tired. There’s something nice, mind, about putting your feet up by this window.
Ping
Sadly, I must say it. Yes, it makes me sad to see grown men still acting out their misspent youth. The problem is, that, sadly, I cannot remember much of mine.
Ping
Well, I have always felt it is better to be by myself, to sit on the edge of things, ‘isolationistly’, you might say, letting others do the talking. It’s not really lonely. The noise, you see, can sometimes be deafening as, one after the other, they jostle with each other to tell you about their shameful lives.
Ping
“Ach-y-fi.! Sudanese Margaret!” I hear myself muttering, dismissively. I can’t be doing with all this. My story is ten times better than theirs but nobody would believe it.
Ping
Yes, I like to look down on the others, condescendingly. Sometimes I may even have given them a snatch, a snippet, of my secret life. No more than that, mind.
Ping
I have so much to give but it just won’t come out. I sometimes wonder I am suffering, ‘constipatedly’, from writer’s block but, I don’t know, perhaps there is nothing really there.
You know, I can’t be bothered with all these stories of standing there peeing in front of a lion on the Kenya-Uganda border and other things that are even more disgusting. I am not like that, at least, not when people are looking. Disgustedly, I like to delete such stories.
You see, I am really too proud to join in this sort of thing wholeheartedly. My ancestors, I have been told, came from Essex, although I feel Welsh. I am above it all, you see. I can say proudly that it is all too infra dig for me now.
Ping
I can’t tell you how pleasurable it is, spiritually speaking, to hear others making fools of themselves, confessing publicly their sins. Pride, Lust, Anger, Envy, the list goes on and on. I suppose, in a mysterious way, I love it. But I thank God I am not like them.
Ping
I don’t know why people keep sending me these stories. I ought to block them, ‘uptightly’, do I hear you say? I mean, who do they think I am? Don’t they realise that I used to lecture, after Africa, at the local university, in Swansea, the old one, not the new one?
Ping
In they come, ping … ping, one by one, one after the other, the bloody emails. There’s a funny bit there and something here. I occasionally feel that they are getting at me but I can’t quite put my finger on it. I know what you are thinking, that I am behaving ‘paranoidly’.
Ping
And aloofly, you say? Well, what do you expect? Your grandparents were probably servants. Mine were too but nobody would guess and I’m not telling. I tell everybody I am Norman.
Ping
I’m closing down now. The signal’s bad, anyway, here in Gower. It’s what they call a ‘not-spot’.
Port Eynon, Gower
November 2014
updated by @robert-edward-gurney: 02/13/16 01:29:17AM
