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- Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
Edinburgh, 2014. Two writer friends, Damaris and Oliver Pablo, escape London, the city that killed his brother. They spend their days trying to get to the library, bickering over their tanking bitcoin, failing to write or resist the sadness. Then they meet Diego, a poet. He tells them he is named for his mother's island in the Chagos Archipelago, which she and her community were forced to leave by British soldiers in 1973. Damaris and Oliver Pablo become obsessed with this notorious episode and the continuing resistance of the Chagossian people, and want to write in solidarity. But how to share a story that is not theirs to tell? And how to account for a loss not theirs to grieve? A tragicomedy interrogating the powers of literature alongside the crimes of the British government, Diego Garcia is a collaborative fiction that opens up possibilities for the novel and seeks other ways of living together.
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‘Through the intricately woven histories and the corresponding fictions within fictions, the compassion expressed in Diego Garcia highlights the absence of it in those who, forsaking their obligations towards other human beings, exiled the Chagossians from their home. Written in a language at once distant and interior, dazzling, we see that until the Chagossian people are home, nobody is home.’
— Vanessa Onwuemezi, author of Dark Neighbourhood
‘A novel of shared and unshared experience that is wholly unapologetic about not knowing how such a thing is to be written, but risking it nevertheless. The result is compelling, challenging, unprecedented, essential.’
— Kate Briggs, author of This Little Art
‘As affecting as it is intellectually agile, Diego Garcia achieves what few novels even aim at – it opens up fresh ways of reading both history and fiction.’
— Pankaj Mishra, author of Run and Hide
‘Diego Garcia is a subtle contemplation of the uses of fiction and narrative (for good and bad) and how, where and why individual and collective narratives meet…. A moving study of friendship, allyship and creative forms of political struggle.’
— Juliet Jacques, author of Trans: A Memoir
‘This thought-provoking, brilliant book sends a hyper-sensitive probe into the subduction zone between solidarity and exploitation.’
— Nell Zink, author of Avalon
‘Diego Garcia is an important and highly original work, incredibly well-researched and thought-through.’
— Philippe Sands, author of The Last Colony
DIEGO GARCIA A NOVEL
NATASHA SOOBRAMANIEN & LUKE WILLIAMS
CONTENTS
Authors’ Note
At the heart of this novel are two real events. One is a personal tragedy. The other is historical, though its impact continues to devastate people’s lives today: the expulsion of the Chagossian people from their homeland, the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, by the British government between 1968-1973, so that the largest of the islands, Diego Garcia, could be leased to the US government for the construction of a military base.
It is this event we wish to highlight here: the facts of it, and their foundation on a fiction.
The facts are these: in 1965, at the behest of the US government who had expressed an interest in the island of Diego Garcia as a site for a strategic military base, Britain coerced Mauritius, then a British colony, into ceding part of its territory, the Chagos Archipelago, as a condition for independence. Not only was this strategy of partial decolonization a breach of international law but the British government created from the ceded territory a new colony, British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), at a time when the international community had committed to a global process of decolonization.
In 1968, the year of Mauritian independence, the forced exile of the Chagossian people to Seychelles and Mauritius began. They were coerced into abandoning their homes, communities and stable employment for a hostile environment, and lives of extreme precarity and misery, with families broken up across two countries lying over 1,000 miles apart. Those who did not survive are deemed by their community and those who support their struggle to have died from a condition called sagren.
At the time of writing, the Chagossians continue to fight for reparations and the right to return to their homeland. Meanwhile the base at Diego Garcia is still operational, and remains one of the US government’s largest bases on foreign soil. The Chagos Archipelago is now recognized by the United Nations as Mauritian sovereign territory. Britain’s continuing control of the territory allows it to pursue geopolitical ambitions in the Indo-Pacific region, namely inclusion in AUKUS, the strategic military pact with the governments of Australia and the US announced in 2021.
In our novel we have referenced, through the testimony and research of others, the facts of these events, identifying some of the Chagossian people who suffered as a result, but who nevertheless resist the injustices that continue to be perpetrated against them and their descendants by the British government. For example, in echoes of the ongoing Windrush scandal, the continued breaking up of families through systematic deportations of younger members of the Chagossian community who do not share the status of British citizenship granted to their elders under the current law.
In highlighting the facts of this event we must also highlight its foundational fiction: the one collaboratively authored by the British and US governments in 1965. In making the false claim to the United Nations assembly that the Chagos Islands had no settled population, we ask readers to note that the UK and US governments claimed by implication that the Chagossians’ status as a people was a fiction.
Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams November 2021
In memory of Saul Daniel Williams and for all those who have died of sagren
‘Rann nu Diego!’
— Chagos protest chant
‘The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?’
— Fred Moten
DANIEL & DIEGO
I. DEBT
This is the story of a book we are still writing.
—
Edinburgh, July 2014. The sluggishness of early afternoon. The sky clouding over, a slight chill in the air. The same uninterrupted sadness, a kind of listlessness that went with everything we did. We’d made it to the Meadows. It had taken us a while to get out of the flat, him offering to buy us a coffee from the Swedish café and one of those cardamom buns we liked so much if she would come to the library. We noticed how people passing noticed us. She noticed how much thinner he was than in London, joggers slipping down on his hips, constantly tugging at the waistband. We slowed our pace. We were still talking about the morning as if something out of the ordinary had happened, when really we’d spent it the way we spent every morning, him coming to her room with coffee, her accusing him of switching the heating off, him denying this. He’d told her, We really must get up earlier. It won’t help to stay in bed. This because we sometimes spent entire days in bed. In the kitchen she lit a tube, picked the raisins out of his cereal, milk still unpoured, put them with the other raisins extracted from other breakfasts. Currency she said, They’ll see us through The Emergency. He ate. We stared at his opened screen. We argued about whether to cycle to the library. But the sky seemed unsettled and unusually close from up here, on the sixth floor. We decided to walk. The billboard above ScotMid still read ‘Straight Talking Money. Wonga’.
In the Meadows, some kind of fair. Tabletop stalls and food tents. Let’s mill she said. He began to look for something – a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911 – he was always looking for a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911. By the time we met again the rain was falling. She took him to a stall and said, I’m buying this dress. Is that a dress? Yes she said. She paid then disappeared with the dress, made of material with some kind of special effect, like oil on water. When she came back she had it on over her jeans and raincoat. Just imagine there are whole loads of famous people who were never photographed she said. He thought about this. She thought: He looks like a young Nosferatu. Max Schreck. He would not know which screen star to liken me to because he’s ignorant about these things.
A fine rain. Dim light through the cherry trees. We walked away from the fair not speaking and when we reached the part of the Meadows that opens onto the tennis courts, just before the university library, we turned up onto Middle Meadow Walk. Ignoring the unbroken row of posters – comedy acts appearing next month at the Festival – not ready to stop – not ready for a coffee or a bun or the library – we took flight at the traffic lights and cut through Bristo Square, after that letting ourselves be carried by chance. And the sadness opened out.
—
The city is built on several hills. There are valleys and there are bridges and there are stairwells that connect the two. In those days we would stop on one or another of the bridges and lean over to observe the streets. Sometimes we watched the gardens but never the rail tracks. It was frightening and thrilling to come upon these sudden and dramatic views, which made us think of the postcards sold everywhere on the Royal Mile and all over the city for that matter. ‘The Old Town and the Grassmarket’, ‘Cowgate at Night’, ‘Princess Street Gardens’, ‘Princess Street Looking West’. We would stand there looking down but she didn’t say what she would have said before: We’re too fuckin scared to jump.
Because, when we walked, we failed to take in our surroundings, and because when we stopped walking we usually stopped on one of the bridges and looked down, we always had the sense of living above the city, of looking down – dizzy – on its many faces. We watched people flowing past as though caught in a flood. Knowing the city this way, from above, having arrived only recently, we didn’t feel part of it, though it had once been part of him, the city of his student years. We were nervous and irritable. This seemed to increase our togetherness. It gave us – only us together, not individually, never alone – a place in the world that we had not had before. We wandered the streets, unwelcome, leaning miserably into the wind or drinking ourselves stupid in a pub. All of this under the ugly haar-obscured sky that we didn’t realize we’d invented ourselves.
—
The first time she saw him was in a photograph on a website for a magazine. She thought he looked odd and his story sounded odd. She couldn’t find the story anywhere but found his email address. He could not send her his story because he had bought all the remaining copies he could find of that particular issue of the magazine and had shredded them at the vulgar, pseudo-political, faux-Dada readings he had given for a while at various art schools and gonzo bookshops – though he didn’t tell her any of this. The first time we met she said, I hope you’ve brought money and he said, I have. She showed him a photo of V. S. Naipaul and said, This is my dad, we don’t speak. He pointed out a figure in the audience and said, That’s my brother, he rarely speaks. Or else he never stops. Later when we went for a meal, Daniel came too and he and Daniel ate like rats let loose in a grain-store, even finishing the leftovers on a nearby plate, and it was sad but in the end it didn’t matter all that much. The second time we met it was at a party in a library. The party was honouring a famous English writer – one of those realists who writes like a politician – whom she approached saying, Do you want my autograph? The second party we went to together was a few months after that. We happened to be in Edinburgh at the same time. We found ourselves in a basement bar. We talked beautifully about Can Xue, Dambudzo Marechera, Elfriede Jelinek, all the while drinking ourselves stupid. At one point he came back from the bar with two shots of vodka spiced with hot chillies, we chimed the glasses and she said, To the Mauritian Greats, Devi, Pyamootoo, Appanah, Patel. I am indebted! We drank the vodka down and he said, Hang on! He ran downstairs to the toilet and boaked into the bowl. Meanwhile she’d gone and got talking to a dangerous-looking character who could not look or step or speak without a sparking flow of words conveying his stupid thoughts spilling into the smoky room. By the time he returned from the toilet she and the character were on their way out. She said, Come on come on, we’re going to a party. We left the bar and hailed a taxi. We drove through town. We looked out the windows at the passers-by, many were dressed as police, or perhaps they were police dressed in uniform, and many others were dressed in kilts, and we burst out laughing because we remembered it was New Year. The party was at Restalrig then it wasn’t so we drove on further out of town.
Our character was subterranean, his style of conversation mineral, the way the headlights of the passing cars slanted across her face seemed to dazzle him. London she said when the character asked. He handed round the tubes. She said, Can we? and the character said, This is Scotland and opened his mouth wide to catch the tube and lit it while his sparking words continued to flow. Can I have some of your water she said. Without stemming the sparking he reached into his jacket pocket. With his left hand he passed her the water, with his right an Apple Mac, she drank it down, eyes expanding like cameras chasing mirages in a desert. Would you mind not talking so much he said to the character. Jesus, OK. But the sparking…
We heard the party before we saw it. Felt the speakers in our chests. It was in a field somewhere up the coast, on a small promontory. Red 2 playing as we got out the cab. The character threw his head back and yelled, grabbed her hand, pulled her to the stage. He found them pressed up against the wall of speakers. The character reached out to encircle her with his arms (she didn’t move away) while the sparking flowed into her ear. She stood still, shivering slightly. Then the sparking was in his ear and he moved away, back through the crowd, he saw one of Daniel’s friends who told him Daniel was here, he went to look for him then needed to boak, and then there was Daniel, dancing & she started to dance thinking: Where is he I want to talk to him. She took another Apple Mac and the sparking.
When we came together again it was among a group sitting on the edge of the promontory. From there we could see the black and white sea, the moon, the character gone. Two women were building up the fire. A guy was pissing off the promontory. There were seagulls we heard above the noise of the music and the sound of the waves. Where is she I want to talk to her? Then we were next to each other and Daniel was there and Daniel was trying to tell us something. What? Do you know. What? we said. Do you know the German word for. What? we said. The German for. What? The German for promontory is half-island.
—
Standing on North Bridge, the station roof like a hothouse roof. The rain gone, the afternoon swelling with warmth. She took off her raincoat. The sadness – amplified by something with an edge that felt like hunger. Some kids were throwing bottles onto the mess of broken panes. Now is a dumb lie. Her screen flashed, ‘Unknown number’. She didn’t answer. Since coming to Scotland she almost always kept her screen powered down. She was afraid that RBS, with their clever moves to try to recover the substantial sum she owed them, would find out she was in Edinburgh, right under their noses. She was also afraid but defiant of the nefarious tactics of DCA Mappots, the debt collection agency EDF had sold her less onerous but not insignificant debt on to after two years of failing to recover it themselves. He said, Why don’t you just answer? She said, Why don’t you stop giving advice? He had given his screen away a few months previously, straight off the train from London, numb and crazed, to a teenager who’d asked us for change. Now he didn’t have a screen of his own. He wasn’t on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. for the same reason: The Emergency. She respected his viewpoint and listened with grave concern to his theories concerning asset bubbles, derivatives, guns and whisky and hollowed-out Bibles, total surveillance, TEOTWAWKI, the precariat, Charles Ponzi, the distribution of pornographic images and images of abuse, the totally administered society, the Pharmacopornographic era, structural adjustment, bitcoin, gold, hunger, debt – personal, civic, regional, national, federal, continental, intercontinental, transnational, global, universal, dark pools of – but she could not rouse herself to respond in any particular focussed way. Even so, she did not want them watching him. He did not want them watching her. He did not want them watching us. We did not want them watching us. She did not mind them watching her because she didn’t believe in them, not really, not when it came down to it.
The kids smashed another pane on the station roof, all of the panes dazzling in the sun, now the broken bottle too. She took off the dress from the fair and threw it onto the roof and we watched it being dragged here and there by the wind, which wasn’t so much wind as a kind of constant agitation of stuff, the kind that collects around those sites of perpetual transition such as railway stations, docks, border crossings, motorway service stations, etc. She put her raincoat in our bag. She leant her elbows on the bridge, rested her chin in her hands. He took a deep breath, feeling really shit. Allowing the sadness to overwhelm him, he closed his eyes and rested his head on her shoulder. She smoked a tube. He started to doze. Her/his shoulder/neck felt warm against his/her neck/shoulder. We stayed there resting on top of the bridge while she, not taking her eyes off the station roof, tried to remember a dream she only now realized that she’d had. It had left her feeling lost. She was trying to find her way back into the memory of it, to the almost pleasurable sadness it had left her with, searching for the point where it had begun. But then her ringing screen pulled her back, and his needling about her not answering. He had been in the dream too. A dream about that day in London, the time they tried to find Daniel. The blue honey of the Mediterranean, that’s what Fitzgerald said he’d said.
It was the kind of thing he would say, the quoting of a writer. At least it was the kind of thing he used to say. Since we’d come to Scotland she could not remember him doing it once, this previously constant quoting thing. Unlike most white men who liked to quote writers he would quote as many Black and brown writers as he did white. Dambudzo Marechera:
Whatever insects of thought buzzed about inside the tin can of one’s head as one squatted astride the pit-latrine of it, the sun still climbed as swiftly as ever and darkness fell upon the land as quickly as in the years that had gone.
But all men. Always, always men. She had had to teach him to read women, and now he read mostly women, and no longer quoted.
She shook him and without knowing she was going to say it, said, I’m hungry. Do we have any cash? He lifted his head off her shoulder – feeling really shit, almost violent – saying, Yes, but we should go to the library. I need spaghetti vongole she said, they have it at Marcella’s. Not wanting to feel violent. She took out a tube and lit it to take the edge off her hunger. I don’t think they have it at Marcella’s he said. We stood in silence while she smoked, looking down at the station roof. The dress was still there. Why did I throw the dress away? The kids had gone, leaving smashed panes and the dazzling. When she’d nearly finished her tube she said, Let’s eat then go to the library. OK he said, but I’m not hungry. You can’t share mine she said. She took a fresh tube from the pack and lit it with the still live butt of the first.
It was at the moment of ignition that we first laid eyes on Diego.
—
He was standing on the opposite side of the road, visible in flashes between passing cars, bent over a heap of bags. He seemed to be looking for somewhere to sit down. Why didn’t he just sit down on his bags? Maybe he didn’t want to. We watched him thrust his hands into the pockets of his jeans then pull out a small black notebook. He squatted down, unzipped the side pocket of one of his bags and took out a pen. He balanced the notebook on his knee and wrote in it. When he stood up again, he looked around, nervously. No – more than nervous he seemed afraid – his fear telegraphed by every jerky and deliberate movement and by his body which he held as if about to break off down the street, away from the heap of bags.
What was he writing? He said, Do you think he’s OK? He thought: Daniel. The neon numbers above Argos showed 14:10. He felt his face break out in a sweat. Then she said, He looks like he’s waiting for someone. No he doesn’t. Let’s go she said. We started walking along the bridge, in the direction of Marcella’s. The noise of the trains, the electric sound of the track, the roof shaking in the sunshine. He stopped. We could be friendly he said. What do you mean? Show him around or something. Does he look like a tourist? He has bags. Too many she said, anyway I’m hungry. It would give us something to do he said. I thought you wanted to go to the library. We carried on walking along the bridge toward the High Street. Every now and then we turned to look back at the man. A bus with an ad for Wonga – ‘Tired of waiting? Money in your account in 15 minutes. Wonga’ – stopped, blocking the man from our view. We waited for it to move. Some school kids got off, they were carrying screens playing a song, the same song at different times. The bus drove off and he said, I’m going to speak to him. He lit a tube and darted back & she thought: There’s something in the way he’s holding his tube down by his thigh there’s something about the way his back suddenly looks a bit less collapsed & as he got closer to the man he examined his face, about his own age, early 30s maybe & she watched how he – back straighter still – gesticulated, tube in air, then tossed it to the ground, stamped on it carelessly. The man seemed wary at first but then smiled taking out his own pack of tubes, patting his pockets, saying, Wait a minute, I don’t have my lighter, saying it in an accent he recognized from her family! Always a surprise to her and so to him to encounter a Mauritian accent in people not personally known to her. She thought: When he frowns he looks older and when he smiles he looks younger. But there was something else, what was it? My friend has a lighter he said, and jogged across the road to her, saying, Can I have our lighter? I’m going to give it to that man. You want to give our lighter away? Yes he said. Arsehole she said handing him the lighter. He said, I think he’s Mauritian! I recognize the accent. He turned and faced the traffic, almost bounding across the road.
—
She asked him what they’d talked about but he didn’t say, just that when he heard Diego’s voice he was sure he was Mauritian. Did you ask? No he said. I should have gone over and spoken to him she said, but I’m too hungry. You can do that later, we’re meeting him for a drink.
On our way to Marcella’s we passed Till’s. He wanted to go in. She didn’t. In this mood she could not be persuaded to do anything unless it involved food or the promise of food, so he offered to pay for lunch. Spaghetti vongole she said. Till’s sold mostly novels. Some of the novels were old and some were new and written in a slightly different style from the old which now read exactly like the new. We browsed the novels then went to the back room where the shelves were labelled History, Social Science, Philosophy, Literary Biography, Botany, Psychology, Science, Popular Science, Reference – a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica 1933 (incomplete) – and Film. We hung around by the Philosophy section where there was an armchair. She sat down. He happened to pick up Minima Moralia by Theodor W. Adorno. He happened to sit down on the arm of her chair and flick through it and stop on page 42. The section was called ‘Articles may not be exchanged’. Honest giving is impossible in these inhuman times, Adorno wrote. We read:
Instead we have charity, administered beneficence, the planned plastering-over of society’s visible sores. In its organized operations there is no longer room for human impulses, indeed, the gift is necessarily accompanied by humiliation through its distribution, its just allocation, in short treatment of the recipient as an object. Even private giving of presents has degenerated to a social function exercised with rational bad grace, careful adherence to the prescribed budget, sceptical appraisal of the other and the least possible effort. Real giving had its joy in imagining the joy of the receiver. It means choosing, expending time, going out of one’s way, thinking of the other as a subject: the opposite of distraction.
He folded the corner of the page. This made her angry. She reached across to unfold it, scolding him because it wasn’t our block. Also because the corner folding suggested he was getting interested and might stay to read on and she was hungry. Let’s go she said. He didn’t answer. It was hard to concentrate especially when she was looming over his shoulder like she was and he could hear her breathing and even see the page lifting slightly from her breath, but he thought he’d understood the gist of Adorno’s argument. Moment of lightness.
It was hard to concentrate when she felt as hungry as she did but she’d been moved by what she thought was the gist of the argument, despite her hunger and its present insatiability. She thought: blocks blocks blocks and not a fuckin thing to eat. Ten minutes you said she said. Don’t you think this is amazing? he said. She was too hungry to understand and this was making her angry. The point about object and subject was clear enough. What was hard to grasp was the last bit. What does Adorno mean by distraction? What about my spaghetti vongole? He said, Let’s finish this paragraph, then we’ll go, I promise. Which made her even angrier. Which made her even hungrier, that dangerous spiral known as hanger. He began to read aloud:
Beside the greater abundance of goods within reach even of the poor, the decline of present-giving might seem immaterial, reflection on it sentimental. However, even if amidst superfluity the gift were superfluous people who no longer gave would still be in need of giving. In them wither the irreplaceable faculties which cannot flourish in the isolated cell of pure inwardness, but only in live contact with the warmth of things. A chill descends on all they do, the kind word that remains unspoken, the consideration unexercised. This chill finally recoils on those from whom it emanates. Every undistorted relationship, perhaps indeed the conciliation that is part of organic life itself, is a gift. He who through consequential logic becomes incapable of it, makes himself a thing and freezes.
He thought this was one of the most brilliant things he had ever read. She thought it might be brilliant but her hanger was preventing her having any kind of nuanced understanding. Each word evaporated before she’d fully registered its meaning. Soon her hanger would prevent her not only from understanding this or any other argument in Minima Moralia but pretty much anything at all – whether philosophical argument, moral argument, negative dialectics, the workings of chance, questions from tourists, how DCA Mappots had got her number, why the green person was never green when we came to the lights – the condition of hanger being something like debt during The Emergency in that its growth factor is exponential, the greater one’s hanger the more difficult and specific its assuagement becomes, which meant at this moment – as we left the shop and headed at pace across the Meadows – it was no longer enough just to eat spaghetti vongole from Marcella’s, the spaghetti vongole from Marcella’s had to satisfy a particular set of requirements which became increasingly precise as her hanger raged unchecked, e.g. it was important that the dish be hot enough when served, without being so hot that she could not immediately eat a mouthful and begin to arrest the hanger. We passed the fair. It was busy. He said, We’re nearly there. He thought: It’s almost 3 and we’re still not at the library. She said, I want a Coke with my spaghetti vongole. She thought: can you move please can you move please can you just fuckin move THANK YOU. He said, OK (conceiving of forms of giving which might be possible when The Emergency is over). We reached the edge of the Meadows and spotted Marcella’s. He thought: Emergency, the rule and mode of existence hence never over. He tried to say something about giving and The Emergency. Don’t talk to me she said. It was no longer enough that the spaghetti vongole be hot enough without being too hot, now it had to have the correct ratio of sauce to pasta and vongole to sauce, fresh not dried parsley, and if the sauce appeared with the tell-tale bubbles of microwave after wave convection—
but there was no spaghetti vongole.
In Marcella’s she swore at him. She tried to swipe the napkin holder off the counter but he removed it in time. As we left she was almost in tears saying, Fuck this let’s just get a pie. Back across the Meadows. The sun hot. Tourists and students in our way. Progress slow, the people, peopling paths, the grass, everywhere, moving in all directions. She waited outside while he bought a chicken pie, a cup of tomato soup and a can of Coke. We took her lunch to Greyfriars Kirkyard, pushed through the tourists. Our usual bench near the entrance, near that long list of buried bodies. She sat down and ripped open the bag, tearing off pieces of pie with her teeth, muttering to him – now sat down next to her – with a mouthful of pie, Don’t talk to me. Distorted relationship. Suddenly she stood up half-sobbing and flung the pie across the yard. It hit a gravestone, disintegrated. Lumps of white sauce on the stone, chunks of white meat sliding. He said, Drink your Coke, please? He walked over to the gravestone. Bent to wipe it with his napkin and pick up the bits of pie, then turned back. You hit Greyfriars Bobby. She shrugged. Greyfriars Bobby, the dog he said. I know who he is. I’m sorry. My pie was cold. She started to cry. It’s OK he said. Dogs love pies. Right she said, dogs are greedy bastards.
—
They is the THEY. That’s what Marechera said she said.
—
A bench outside the pub we always went to, though it was not our favourite pub. The sky clear and bright and the sun hot but not too hot. The sadness as always but the listlessness abated just a bit. He’d bought a new lighter, a pack of tubes, two pints and now we were sitting and smoking. The pub was dead inside, through the window yellow with dust and reflections we could see the barperson with their mongrel who was sleeping. The picnic bench where we were sitting was dry. None of the slats was missing like on some benches outside pubs sometimes and it was stable on its legs too. She helped herself to a third tube – she normally chain-smoked while drinking – and he did not object. He was too excited to care. Nose like a beak poking in his bag, a mumbling coming from the bag which could have been Leave me alone or I feel great. He reemerged. Flexed his shoulders. Then he took two tubes and tossed one to her. She lit it and held it between her knuckles then lay her arms flat on the table and leant forward, resting her cheek on one arm and letting the tube just burn. She said, What’s wrong with you? He said, I’m thinking. About what? I don’t know he said. Yes you do. You’re thinking about Adorno. No, I’m not thinking about anything. She lifted her head and took a drag of her tube, looked at him directly. I demand you tell me what you’re thinking about. Then when he didn’t answer she said, You’re not looking yourself these days.
A motorbike drove by noisily. A sort of tearing sound. Once, we walked through Regent’s Park with Daniel in the early morning, passing the zoo, hearing a tiger roar – a tree being torn up. She lifted her head from her hands and said, Look at me. Do this with your mouth. As the noise of the motorbike receded we looked at one another, she opened her mouth wide as if she were afraid – he didn’t move his mouth – she smiled with her teeth showing, she closed her lips and furrowed her brow. We continued to look at one another but he didn’t move his mouth or change his expression in any way. You know what? she said, It’s those stupid glasses. Why do you mend them with Sugru? He reached inside his bag and took out Minima Moralia and began to read. Did you buy that? It was a present. He said this without looking up from the page. Who from? He didn’t say anything but carried on reading for several minutes. All clear now but not like he’d thought. The argument about giving and capital. She leaned her arms on the table and rested her cheek on one arm. After a minute he looked up from Minima Moralia. He said, It was stupid of me to give Diego your lighter. She didn’t move or say anything, just let the tube burn itself out. He looked at her hand then returned to the page. Her tube burned completely out and she sat up and threw it under the table. She said, That was Scottish giving. What? He looked up from Minima Moralia. Scottish giving. It’s when you give something away that belongs to someone else. Huh? You know, like ‘Indian giving’. Meaning someone gives you something then takes it back: you know, white settler-colonialists murdering Native Americans and calling it trade? You are being a Scottish giver – being Scottish. But I gave you that lighter in the first place he said, and I took it to give it to someone else – someone who needed it. Needed? We stopped talking and sipped our pints. He put Minima Moralia on the table and thought about The Emergency, then he looked at her, at her beady eyes, and he thought about how clever her eyes looked, especially with her green raincoat. Hey and what about the block? she said, That’s a kind of giving. You’re right. The shop gave me the block. I suppose but I was thinking more about the writing of the block. Didn’t Adorno write it for his friend’s birthday? German giving she said: a gift that places a burden of reciprocation on the receiver. After a while, smiling at her, he said, Mauritian giving: when you give something with a flourish in a show of great generosity when it’s something you owe anyway. Like the Chagos Islands she said, That’s what the British would say. Britain says Mauritius gave the Chagos Islands to them… That Mauritius owed them to Britain, in exchange for independence. The US thinks it owes Diego Garcia to the British but really the British owe the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, who owe it to the Chagossians. The pub was in a courtyard, overlooked by antique buildings. Our voices resonated. She said, Mauritian giving is when you give something great to someone who doesn’t really deserve it. Well, Scottish giving is when the gift is so much greater than the recipient deserves that it dignifies the receiver. Sounds like Adorno she said. Not exactly he said, Adorno says – I was kidding, you arsehole! Then, No, sorry, tell me, I want to hear. He thought for a moment. I don’t want to talk about it right now.
