Title: Starling

Author: Elizabeth Knox

In: Sport 28: Autumn 2002

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, March 2002, Wellington

Part of: Sport

Conditions of use

Share:

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Sport 28: Autumn 2002

February 1981

February 1981

Next Wednesday it will be three years since we killed C.J. One Too Many Lives should have continued after the death bed. Sunday, Fiona begins to write the story of his death, working from a tape they made of the event. Monday she goes to work and into delayed shock. Monday night she dreams she lays her head in C.J.'s lap and he forgives her. On March the first it is Vivien's birthday. Vivian is happy, fatuous and unmarked. Months pass, the girls stop speaking. Fiona keeps trying to save time, take everything in before it disappears. She gets a pair of glasses. The game continues for two of the girls in a narrow and intense fashion. The travellers, the exiles, are in an unfamiliar city. The girls are inventing the streets as they are walked. I keep writing these notes—the only thing I'm writing now—because I'm moved by how everything has changed but how little my feelings have. I still feel that no one has written the story. I have, and I haven't yet.
(Tim Armstrong in the next bit was a friend of my cousin Vicky. He went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. I hadn't been to University in 1981. I was a temping computer operator at this point, saving up to take time off and write another novel. We, Sara and I, were living in a flat in Reuben Avenue, Brooklyn.)