Five Bells Read Online Free Page B

front page of a distraught woman in a headscarf, bending in torn, rigorous grief over the body of her son. It was generic and familiar. She was a no-name mother who had lost a no-name son, the convenient portrait of another attack, and selected because the contortion of her face, and her anguish, and the plea of her uplifting hands, told in dumbshow what exceeded the journalist’s skill.
    Death’s enormous sickle.
    History would record this time as one of relentless repetition. How many images of grief might the reader of any newspaper see? How many scenes of blasted terrain, or medics rushing headlong with a stretcher on which lay a figure beneath a sheet, too small, too anonymous, and too deathly still? How long would they mean? Ellie thought of the Japanese photographer, Hiroshi Sugimoto, who photographed movies inside the cinema. He left the shutter of the camera open in the dark auditorium and the film exposed for the entire length of the screening. The result was not a wildly complicated superimposition of images, but simple white-out, pure light, a flare of nothing. Too many images, layered together, left only a blank. She imagined Hiroshi Sugimoto gazing at his photographs in a gallery, marvelling at the mystery of what excess might delete.
    Â 
    From somewhere in the streets beyond a siren sounded. Then another, following, in a high panicked drone. Ellie wished to protect herself from what might overwhelm her mood. She read only the first two paragraphs on Iraq, then sought the national news. The stories were still of the change of government and the ‘honeymoon period’ of inauguration (how strange, she thought, this sexual connotation). But there was optimism about, and the sense of a new beginning. The youngish Prime Minister, his moon-face beaming, looked pleased with himself, like a school prefect dressed in his blazer, receiving a prize. Ellie was always struck by how many male politicians retained a little-boy visage. Or managed to look poignantly dazzled at their own ex cathedra announcements, insisting to the TV spotlights on the innocence of a feckless decision. The microphones looked like listening insects, leaning to suck up the nectar of scandal. Now the government had changed. One might yet be permitted to expect reform; and one might yet be disappointed.
    Ellie extracted the book review supplement of the newspapers. These she would save for later, for a casual perusal of the wordy dimensions of the world, the unremitting, mock-heroic, making-of-sense. She had no money these days to buy new books, but for now there were libraries, which she cherished, and these compact descriptions of other worlds.
    Â 
    One of the workers in her local library looked like Miss Morrison. Why had she not made the connection before? And both, in weird likeness, resembled the Queen of England, that abnormally stiff face, that taut string of a mealy mouth. Miss Morrison would draw on the blackboard and write fancy words, underlining them with an oversized oak ruler that clacked as it struck. When Ellie recalled her now it was often in a static rearview, the woman of indeterminate age communing with her own messages, turned away, serious-minded, her back to the class. In their small country-town school, with James sitting beside her, the children were tempted by an impulse to mock, but somehow constrained and respectful. Away from school, however, James could be cruel. He was the child – there is always one – able to parody others. For the guilty enjoyment of his classmates he mimicked Miss Morrison’s hunched-over posture, he copied her rather high-pitched voice, he pretended to underline words on an invisible blackboard, turning back to face his classmates with a grimacing smirk.
    Â 
    Ellie folded the newspapers and drank the last of her coffee. Frangipani scent hung lightly in the room. Another sun-drenched day, the kind that might sell a city. The kind that might signify package-holiday