Kite Flying at World's End: An artist is inspired by rumours of the apocalypse

BACK COVER BLURB

An artist is inspired by rumours of the apocalypse

When the disease began to spread around the world, and also in the big South African city where Gregory lived, everyone was ordered into their houses and told to stay there. On the last day of freedom, people scrambled into the supermarkets and bottle-stores and, after standing two metres apart at the tills, emerged heavily laden.
'Which of those four horsemen are at it this time?' a man in one of the queues had quipped through his mask. 'Isn't there one of them - I think he's on a pale horse, probably a Lipizzaner gray - who's supposed to bring plagues and pestilences and horrible deaths? Now the whole world has gone indoors to wait for the gruesome endgame.'

NOTE ON ANCHOR CHARACTER

Gregory, a 59-year-old bachelor, is an Art History lecturer and painter. When the lockdown is imposed, he retires to his Johannesburg townhouse with the idea of painting a triptych depicting the end of the world at the destructive hands of the horsemen of the apocalypse. The windows in his studio provide a fine view of deeply wooded suburbs reaching away and, in the foreground, of the wash lines in the service yard of a neighbouring block of flats. In the extraordinary atmosphere of the lockdown, he begins to notice the women who frequent the washing lines. He begins desultory conversations with them, and finally, he invites one for coffee one morning. This is Maria April, a descendant of Javanese people brought to the Cape in the 18th century as slaves. Maria comes with her two children, but always adhering very carefully to the guidelines imposed for the lockdown. So the two stories unfold simultaneously: that of the planning of the triptych, and that of Gregory's relationship with Maria and her children, the one-story tending to fuel the other. Just as Gregory is about to start his painting, Maria falls ill with the virus and is hospitalised. Gregory finds himself looking after her children. Everything feeds into his obsession to paint the triptych. He paints to free himself of his ghosts. As he paints, so her condition worsens, and the stage is set for the surprising climax. She doesn't die, but she has to return to her family in Cape Town to convalesce. Gregory is left to savour his achievement - and his enrichments.

ADDITIONAL NOTE

Is a triptych the right vehicle to describe the exploits of four horsemen? Wouldn't four painted panels have been more logical? Right from the outset in the bottlestore queue, Gregory had envisaged three panels to deal with the havoc wreaked by the riders on the black, pale, and chestnut horses. The chap on the white horse seemed to be the odd man out. Famines, epidemics, and wars: these were events that could be visited upon people, to make them suffer and to punish them. But the white horse seemed to Gregory to be offering not so much a punishment as an opportunity. Compared to the other agendas, 'conquest' stood out as a positive action. But who would do the conquering? Was it Jesus Christ, when he returned? Some believed it might be the anti-Christ that, according to prophesy, would rise at the end times. It occurred to Gregory, though, that it could also be humanity itself, fighting back against famines, epidemics, and wars, all of which seemed to be within its power to control and even eradicate. It was as he pondered these things that Maria April's two children had asked him to help them make and fly their kites. This was the breakthrough he had been waiting for.