The Heat of the Sun

had shattered my right leg. How many times had I played that scene over? Each time it felt real, as if the
accident were happening again: the green boxy sedan ramming into me, sending me sprawling, while the driver, too late, blared his horn, as if to silence the crunch of bone. The moment, I thought
sometimes, had been the greatest of my life: the time I stopped traffic in the Champs-Elysées.
    Wildly, I had run from the honey-coloured house that meant only a coffin in the front parlour, and silent servants, and the concerned lady from the consulate, and the weeping Latin Quarter
mistress, who had to be asked to leave. As I ran, tears blinded my eyes, but I needed no eyes; if I ran fast enough I could fly: fly faster than time. And I flew, only to be snatched back suddenly
to earth. In my shock I felt no pain, not at first, only bewilderment that I didn’t, that I couldn’t, rise up and keep flying, outstripping the leaden chronology that said only, in its
remorseless drumming march, that my father was dead... that he was dead... that he was dead.
    Aunt Toolie touched my hand. ‘Take care of Benjy, won’t you? Friends like him are rare. In Savannah, as a girl, I paced beside the railroad tracks and wished the train would take me
away – away, like your father. Have you ever thought why he travelled so far? Couldn’t stand his ruined Southern family, that’s why. Couldn’t live on a desolate plantation
with empty slave shacks rotting out the back. What boy of spirit could? What death-in-life, to know your world is ruined before you’ve had your chance! Oh, if I’d been a boy! But
wherever I was going, I’d find a friend. That was it, you see. Not fame, not wealth, but a friend. There’s nothing more important.’
    I agreed there was not, and almost asked her about the man who would have married her, but she tossed aside her cigarette and rose, ready to return to the fray. On the lake’s brink, she
turned to me. ‘I say, look at that Japanese boy, all in yellow. Rather fetching, isn’t he?’
    ‘How do you know he’s Japanese?’ I said.
    But of course he was. Again I looked at the boy’s attendants. I had seen them before: Yamadori’s servants. And what connection, I wondered, had this boy with Yamadori?
    Aunt Toolie said, ‘Your father adored the Japs, of course.’
    ‘Did he? He didn’t stay long in Japan.’
    ‘Something happened there. Some scandal, I think. Upsetting, whatever it was,’ she cawed back, and slid away from me. Trouble, in a stately arc, cruised towards her; behind him,
threading with insolent aplomb between plaid-jacketed burly youths and red-cheeked laughing girls, I saw the Japanese boy. How graceful they looked, these phantoms of the ice! I loved and envied
them. I imagined slipping outside myself, joining my spirit with the circling figures: I was Trouble; I was Aunt Toolie; I was the Japanese boy; I was all of them and none of them, captured in the
pattern.
    My eyes flickered shut.
    In my dream I skated, revelling in my prowess. Trees thrust upwards, barren-branched; snow piled in drifts; but between the obstructions ran a web of icy paths where Trouble and Aunt Toolie and
the Japanese boy and I careered in enthralling, unending chases. As I whizzed down entangling roads of ice, I felt I might take to the air, vanish into realms above the clouds.
    I skidded into a clearing. Paths branched in all directions. For a moment I thought I had lost the others, but a red deerstalker flashed: Trouble, circling on a frozen lake.
    I called his name. I called again.
    The lake was growing larger. Round and round went Trouble in his revolution of nothing, but I had no power to reach him. Mist hung low over the lake, and the sun glowed red as the ice began to
crack, radiating from the centre in a star. I called – ‘Trouble, please! Trouble, no!’ – but he plummeted into the depths. A hand waved up, then was gone, as if the lake had
swallowed him, leaving only the deerstalker trembling on the waters.
    I opened my eyes. I felt feverish, shivery. For a moment I failed to recognize what was wrong. Cries came: I thought they were cries of joy, the usual exultations of wheeling skaters. What
alarmed me was Aunt Toolie, suddenly beside me, staring wide-eyed over the lake.
    ‘Christ,’ she whimpered. It might have been a prayer.
    As if my dream had been prophecy, a crack had opened in the middle of the ice, shattering the frozen surface. Screaming skaters struggled for