Dada 118

Apart from those problems I wasn’t too unhappy. Time was the big master but once I understood that I was fine. When I saw I could do nothing about the way it was passing through me rather than me journeying through time, then things then became a lot easier. I stopped being bored all together when I  learned how to remember. Sometimes I would start thinking about my room and I would imagine starting at one end of it and walking around in a circle while listing mentally all the things I passed. In the beginning it took no time at all but each time I started to do it again it would take a little longer. And over time walking around my cell as if it was my room and then sitting down on my bed each time I had completed the survey it took a little longer and then a little longer because I would remember all the different pieces of furniture, their colour and texture, soft, hard and any marks, scratches or chips. I concentrated so hard I would have a complete inventory.

And the clock, the clock my Dada used and what he gave me when he had to go up country to the home, the clock he had with him on every ship. He never used the shake man he said. His alarm would always go off in good time. He had that clock since The Brooke’s family had ruled the island and raped his mother. He had it through his marriage and my mother’s early years. The woman in blue told me she could remember every finger of its face and which part of the numerals she scratched. I could see him down below on the Blue Funnell boats, going to the harbour ports of China and Australia and Liverpool and time ringing through every part of him as a marker to his life and what he had done.