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an impossible match.
    As for Walker, he was in one of the countries of his origin. Sky was higher there. Was all jets of sun and blue. One of those eight months to every year in which, definitely, weather reliably making decisions, coats and umbrellas were not needed.
     
    The sky is black, thought Teresa, knowing that somehow her mother was counting stars, probably talking to them, reeling them through her vision like cinéma verité. The taxi was nearing Guangdung and the sky would soon be a lamp-lit haze. My brother wants to be black, thought Teresa, for the sake of one special conceit. He would like the contrast as he sits on the mythical white horse. Most of his time in the West he wore only black and white, a designer shirt and suit that limped. Even his walking stick, a gift of his African friends, was made from ebony and inlaid with ivory from, she was assured, legitimately-culled elephants. How brother could lean on that and, at the same time, advise CITES and other conservation groups on draft treaties and the like was beyond her. Only force of will had prevented him from strutting his stage with an elephant-skin briefcase, now, thankfully, consigned to a wardrobe. The contradictions of the brother – who imagined himself purely black or, in an occasional though gracious concession to genetics, half-black and half-Chinese. Parents were horrified by his aspiration, and the implication that they should have been black for him. As if being refugees and poverty-stricken was insufficient. But they dismissed it, after a suitable interval of horror, as they had learnt to dismiss most of his unconventional ways. What they did was to abstract from the list of his paradoxes, odd-ballisms and plain stupidities those romantic but reasonable touches that could embellish the telling of tales about offspring. Worked every time. Not one meeting of proud parents when mother and father could not trump all recitations of pride with a single note from their repertoire of son’s adventures under African skies. But he was never, in their stories, the black soul which, son felt, the African sun slowly but surely was drawing to his yellow-bleached surface.
     
    Empress Wu of the Tang saw the bright lights of Guangdung. She was decreeing the demolition of all modern buildings, of all modernity. Teresa gently removed her wrists from the smudged taxi window. No more thunderbolts tonight, she smiled, and for the first time since it all began in White Stone, pulled her mother to her shoulder thenturned and held her and placed their foreheads together. The taxi driver, aware equally of the tumult recovery of the past can bring, and of the prospect of a large tip, began to sing and it was the music of the clouded spheres, and it was not the music of grand courts, it was the music of men who sing because people make light because the night is black. Those in love with the depths of darkness have lost souls.
5: The black hand
    In the years that came, it emerged that the cancer was not in his stomach but in his liver. By now, doctors were no longer evasive, they were brutally frank, and he had stormed out of the surgery vowing to live long enough to piss on the doctor’s grave. Even if he did not, he vowed to die with the same bravado that had always sallied from his lips and which had always grown in his heart – an organ he understood, for it partook in all his emotions, and was not the clogged and corroded parts that stomach and liver could only be, blind machines that sucked and cleaned. The heart was an eagle of the sky and led him on like a pulling string, and the eagle was red flame in the free daytime gods’ cup of blue. When a god finishes his drink, he thought, he turns over his cup, and a universe is created, from the soaring aspirations of freedom to the blind gropings of disease. The universe as tea leaves or coffee grounds sobered him. Not long to live, he thought, no pain as yet. He planned to let his eagle fly and be towed