Dick leaned out an upstairs window, from which he was
stripping layers of old paint, and yelled for Tracy to ‘get up here now’. ‘I can’t’, said Tracy – a disembodied voice coming from a
large shrubbery at the end of the garden. ‘Why not?’, Dick asked, putting aside
his tools. ‘I’m stuck’, said Tracy . ‘How?’, Dick asked. ‘Firmly’, replied Tracy , ‘sorely-’, and then she fainted.
When Dick made it to the bottom of the garden she was
dead. The previous tenants had issues
about home security, and neglected to mention the Japanese man-trap hidden in
the undergrowth when writing the home inventory (the Estate Agent had,
miraculously, forgotten about it too).
Propelled by guilt, and driven on by the memory of his dead
wife, in the aftermath Dick became a firm advocate of the Geneva Convention,
and an anti-land mine campaigner; between campaign visits, he also continued to
furiously do up their house. He painted
the master-bedroom rose-pink in honour of Tracy ,
and bought curtains with little cherry cup-cakes for more or less the same
reason, and adopted a stray dog, similar to the one Tracy said she always wanted, to talk to in
lieu.
Then, when campaigning in Africa against land mines, he lost
both his legs in a big game accident, but the memory of his wife stone dead in
the Japanese man-trap didn’t keep him from his mission: soon he was back out in
the field, albeit in a motorised off-road wheel-chair; and on the domestic
front, with a little help, he built a gazebo in Tracy’s honour.
And it was only when Dick had both his arms pulled off, wrestling a 400lb marlin in the Florida Keys ,
that his remarkable tenacity looked like wavering, and even then he learned how
to ring the door bell of his psychotherapist with his face.
No comments:
Post a Comment