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They come in drenched with rain or from some unspeakable game into this grey-walled classroom with the greyer light outside, speaking Cantonese or Mandarin, complaining about tights stolen or mislaid, these Chinese girls I teach. At night, they cry under their duvets of brightly-coloured Tiggers and Pooh Bears, long for Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, escape from brutal England; the execrable food.
Half-term offers some respite; a landlady’s gain. And all the time. This rain.
This corner of Queensland, near the coast, has burning fields of sugar cane that smokes neon-pink in the sunset of dusk.
Here, distances are Siberian. Steppe on steppe of stars turn out: noctilucent in the blue-black skin of night. Bright as postage stamps,
the lorikeets play tag from tree to tree, merry in Regency green. Contemporary. On Kelly’s beach, crooked as English teeth,
the black rocks copy sentinels, and stand aboriginal against Caucasian sand – light as Chardonnay !
In the pool at the Las Palmas motel (early '50s, Festival of Britain style). we swim under shooting stars, and think of
sacerdotal Chekhov. Toughing it out on Sakhalin.
From my window seat on this Boeing 737 flight to Anchorage I can see, looking down, remote outcrops of tiny, liminal communities with their palette of green, amber and brown.
We’re flying over Vancouver Island now, into brilliant sunshine, snowy mountains in the distance, and a last wedge of blue sky before we reach Alaska, when all becomes white, impenetrable cloud, and this late October fin de saison day turns suddenly into night.
Today the sky is whiter than snow. The sun rises: red as Bac n’ Pieces in the Arctic Coastal Trading Store at the corner of Ankovah Street, where the frozen ocean, solid as Pompeii, is a tableau of crème de menthe green: a freeze frame, repeated again and again.
Black as bullets, cartoonish snow-mobiles, batman out of this frozen Gotham, on to the tundra, with its skating-rink ice, as buttermilk polar bears with curranty eyes, gather under the gothic arches of Bowhead whale jaw-bones: famished; framed, gigantic, mythic ghosts: immense; immane.
The Northern Lights weave coloured curtains in the sky. Browerville’s a bracelet lit by stars. Huskies in their dog lots bark all night – hushed by snow drifts down the streets. Upturned, a Chevy lies abandoned in the snow: shouldering the blows of the Arctic wind.
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