Free The Dust Diaries by Owen Sheers

always valued control, both physical and mental, but his body had disobeyed him for quite some time now. Hurting. He had come to terms with this, but his mind, however, he would not let slip from under his restraint so easily. That at least was his wish. In reality he was helpless, as he lay there, feeling his head lighten, his linear thought waver, and the dreams and memories gather at the edges of his sleep.
    A fleeting idea brought him some relief. If he was dying, then maybe this is how the soul prepares, emptying itself of memories so it can leave the body how it entered it—unburdened. But there were some memories he did not want to return to. He had kept himself at a distance from them for over twenty years now, and that is how he wanted it to stay. He refused to even think of them as memories anymore. They were just thoughts, thoughts from another life, a life before this, before him as he is now, lying here, sick and old. Thoughts and memories, the difference was important. Memory was a place revisited. And he could not re-visit. He had held on to those memories for long enough, until he could no longer endure the pull of them. The unbearable sadness of them, opening like a universe in his ribs.
    So, just thoughts then, and old ones too, worn out with examination long ago. Thoughts that had happened, and had gone. Not just been but gone. He could not return there again.

SUNDAY, 30 JULY 2000
    Harare, Zimbabwe
    Last night I danced on your grave. There must have been more than two hundred of us crammed into the ruins of your church: old men and women, children, mothers with babies swaddled on their backs, young men in Nike and Puma tracksuits, young women wearing coloured headscarves. And all of us dancing…
    But this isn’t where we begin. This is the end of our story, and I should begin at the beginning. Before all this, when I didn’t know you at all. Before I had ever set foot in Zimbabwe. Three years ago. That is when we begin. The summer of 1997. The end of a hot day, when I entered my father’s study, the whisky-and-water light of an evening sun burning up the room, lighting up the bookshelves along the back wall and playing over a scattering of photographs propped there. The photographs are of my family in the past, together and apart. We look out from them, our future selves just beneath the skin, waiting to happen; the scars, the growing, the gaining and losing.
    There is one of my mother as a young woman when she met my father. In monochrome, she smiles out of the shot, looking like a young Liz Taylor, dark hair, white dress, Welsh eyes. My father’s head is in her lap, held in the bottom left corner of the frame. He is looking up at her as she looks away. He looks young and completely happy.
    I am escaping inside from the day outside and from the same family as in these photographs. We are all home, back in the old Welsh longhouse that has been home to me for as long as I can remember. Even when we didn’t live here it was home. We are all together, my parents, my grandparents, my two brothers and myself. We have been eating outside, and now the plates and leftovers litter the plastic table with the sun-shade at its centre, the odd bluebottle dog-fighting over them while my family rest back into the long light of the evening. Except for me. I have come inside to release the pressure of other people for a while. And, of course, to come and find you.
    Your name was mentioned that afternoon, just in passing, by my grandmother. We were talking about writing, and about poetry in particular. She said that her uncle Arthur had written poetry, her uncle Arthur the missionary to Africa. I had never heard of you before and I asked who you were. My father said he had a book about you somewhere. That someone had written a book about you. And then the conversation turned, passed on, and you weren’t mentioned again. The swallows cut between the telephone wires above us, the horses flicked their tails in time to