ARIADNE'S THREAD

When they discovered that I could walk they sent me back to Voortrekkerhoogte.

It was a Sunday afternoon. Three of four people who hadn’t been on the shooting trip, or who had survived the accident unscathed, were washing their clothes in fire-buckets outside the front the barracks. Forces’ Favourites trickled from a distant radio.

It was dark inside, and strangely quiet. I sat on the edge of my bed.

We are led to believe by movies and books, and especially by biographies of famous people, that our lives have a shape to them, that if we look hard enough we’ll discover an arc of destiny running through them, like a river or a rainbow, or a path through the bush that leads to a glade of unicorns.

We think that if we can find the end of Ariadne’s thread it will reveal the pattern of the maze that is impossible to discern when we’re lost inside our shapeless days: that it will translate our vague desires into precise ambitions, obscure accidents into recognisable acts of will, that it will guide us from these dank and claustrophobic passages stinking of Minotaur sweat and our own irresolution into the crisp air of certainty, etched in the sky over Crete or Heidelberg or Boschhoek or Lohatla or Riemsvasmaak for all the world to see, coherent, considered and complete.

Zyn Dry, this is your life.

But for most of us, I suspect, the shape remains elusive and obscure. The hero doesn’t get the girl. The phone doesn’t ring at the critical moment. The bad guy disappears into the crowd. We understand, much too late to matter, that most co-incidences simply never happen.

Perhaps, after all, only the elite can be redeemed like that, while the lives of the preterite are written in dust or water.

I have a feeling that Ariadne’s thread slipped through my fingers as I sat on the edge of my bed that Sunday afternoon. Or perhaps, still addled by pain-killers and the confusion of the accident, I let go of the end that led out of the catacombs towards the bright blue sky, the sun shimmering on the sea, a flotilla of triremes heading towards Troy, and clutched instead the end that led back down towards Grendel, the Beast and Odyas Mallow.

It’s just a metaphor. Don’t leave me now. I will tell you what happened in plain Ingles.

I made a terrible mistake. I decided I didn’t want to be in the army anymore.