Free The Gift of Stones by Jim Crace Page B

an ember settling on the fire. If there was noise it was the rasping in his uncle’s chalky lungs. If there was exultation, it was in dreams. It ended when they woke.
    My father made too much of this, his celebration on the cliff, his sense of liberty from toil at being up so weatherswept and early with the sun. But what is liberty anyway? Not much more than self-deceit, a fantasy. It only takes one stolen dawn while all the world’s asleep for the prisoner of dull routine to count himself quite free. It does not matter that the days that follow are as patterned and as uniform as the cells and chambers of a honeycomb. And so it was that father walked along the clifftop path emboldened by the dawn and relishing the cold and deathly night he’d spent huddled by his fire.
    At midday, he reached the low coast, the juice-red rocks, the overhang of salty heath where he had sheltered from the rain. Again there was a mist. But this time he did not stand and fill his lungs with damp and heavy air and cry, Who’s there? He knew. He turned his back against the sea and walked inland through the fringe of arrow grass on to the heath. Quite soon he found the smudge of smoke and heard the wolf-like barking of her dog. It was the woman who called out, Who’s there? He stood a little distance from her hut and did not speak. He took the goatskin from his shoulders and held it out. His gift. She came into the open armed with a stick, the baby in a leather sling, the dog held by its neck. What she saw there was a young man in silhouette, standing on the spot where many men, on horseback, drunk, defiant, shy, had stood before, awaiting her and holding chickens, honey, cloth as payment for her time.
    ‘Wait there,’ she said. She took the baby and the dog back into her hut. And then came out, untying as she walked the strings and laces which secured her winter clothes. Her eyes were on the goatskin not the man. She’d use it as a cover for her daughter’s bed.
    ‘That’ll do,’ she said. And then, ‘Lay it down. We’ll use it as a mat. The ground is wet …’ And then, in tones that matched the pallor on my father’s face, ‘It’s you!’
    If my father was in a mood for teasing he’d entertain us at this fork in his narration with a treatise on temptation. ‘Life is a double-headed worm,’ he’d say. ‘It can wriggle either way. It has the choice. My choice was this: to give the goatskin as a gift, exactly as I’d meant. Or to trade the goatskin there and then, with her, upon the ground.’ His audience, of course, would want the second of the two, the choice which would place my father’s hands upon her waist, her hem tugged high. They’d opt for barter, fair exchange – his skin of goat, her hardly breasts, her punctured water bags of thighs, her patch of black, untended hair.
    And then? Could he then join her in the hut and tend the pot and rock the child? Did merchants on the market green invite their clients home once all the trade was done? No, no. The pleasantries of commerce do not outlive the moment of exchange. If father had sunk down with her then their passions would be spent for good; client, merchant, interchange. She’d take the goatskin to the child, without a word. He’d set off home with only breathlessness and muddy knees to show for all his efforts. You’d think it was an easy choice. But father – sweating, blushing, tempted, shy – could hardly speak.
    The woman was looking closely at him now.
    ‘What have you done?’ she asked. ‘Your hair!’ She reached forward and pushed her hand across his forehead and his skull. ‘Who’s done that to you?’
    ‘I did it to myself,’ he said. ‘To light a fire. I had no moss. I just had hair.’ He twisted a skein of hair between his fingers to show what he had done. ‘Here, I brought this skin.’
    ‘For what?’
    ‘For you. A gift.’
    The dog was barking now, and the baby mewling like a gull. My father and the woman walked back to the hut with