The Ecstatic Silence: 7
Palm trees and a Spanish style bar on a steep sloping road down to the pale thirties Lido are just convenient bundles of poignancy. He reads all the Poirot stories on the sea front and eats ice cream 99s sloshed in sun screen like a pruned trobriander. Mother cuts his hair with a bowl. What he remembers are the hard soils and blasted, mysterious concrete walls, insane seaweed and eternity unfixed in the humming horizon and satin flowers, Dawn Redwood, Phormiums and Ginkgo. A strange menagerie of biological expression and flared gills. There are woods that are full of strange nuance and what went before. The little boy ran through the woods like through vocabularies of sick people and ruined museums.
Once they found a bone. A young girl, older than Johnny nevertheless, rose from her towel and pointed to the growing futility of their cosmic situation.
‘Give me the bone,’ she demanded. Johnny pretended to look away, out to some horror peeking from crab spirit.
‘I know you have the bone. Pass it to me. I collect them,’ she pursued. Her pinch-eyed bigotry dug into his levers and bombs.
‘Pass the bone. Pass the bone. Pass the bone. Pass the bone. Pass the bone. Pass the bone. Pass the bone.’
It was the first signal that he remembered.
