Mr White points down at a faded area of the square, where the monument once stood. He must describe what he can see but what his young audience cannot. The problem mounts with the passing of each year. Today, his audience is a party of local schoolchildren. In his view, they cannot know if they are not told, and if they are not told then they will believe they were the first ones to inherit this world. With the passing of each year the variety of faces seems to increase. More colour, more ethnicity. It is a good thing, he believes, but still. His story must sound silly to a child whose parents emigrated from Eritrea. The Englishy looking ones screw up their faces. Little Lord Fauntleroys. They’ve smelt something awry. The Asian kids stare and give nothing away. Nowadays the words struggle to land. The words catch. As if these new faces are a kind of strainer on which his story catches rather than flows on through. At the time he was their age, no one told him anything about the monument. It was unclear what the stack of limestone was meant to represent other than what it was. No one said anything to the contrary. It was left to him to decipher the looks on the adult faces, to see if he could what exactly it was that absorbed them.
On the edge of the crowd a man in a suit had scribbled into a notebook. Mr White the child had sidled up to him, then lingered about, in case the answer should drop from his person. He was too shy to ask, too afraid his question would make him appear foolish, expose him for a fool. He settled for positioning himself behind the scribbling man to line up his own eye with the older and more bristled one. Of the crowd that day, quite a few faces were familiar. His father’s, of course. He had an idea his father was behind the monument. Jules White was fond of monuments. Jules felt the country needed more. Otherwise, there would be no trace left of those who had passed through. The local stonemason who drank in the hotel bar winked at Mr White the child. He smiled back, pleased to be noticed. Then cries of excitement from the crowd turned his attention back to the men wrestling the limestone into place. One of the men clambered onto the top, and there he knelt to reach down and haul another up by his armpits, that man had stood on the back of a man kneeling at the very bottom. Everyone laughed and Mr White the child had too. One of the rumours doing the rounds the next day concerned the air. It was believed to be quite different at the top of the monument – more aromatic of the sea. The perching seagulls in the newspaper photo seemed to agree. The monument was clearly modelled on something seen elsewhere but without attaining the clean lines of the original column. It surprised in the same way a nuggety gymnast does. However, no machinery was used, a virtue to his mind that he is keen to pass on to the schoolchildren. But the words to describe that virtue refuse to come to him. Instead he reaches in his pocket for the photograph. The young faces lurch forward, suddenly interested. At last, there is something to see. And there it is. A rope fastened around a block of limestone and the wooden rails is hauled up to rest against the limestone stack. Each man lashed on to a section of rope. Mr White can remember the exertion of their pink faces. He can see them so clearly. The schoolchildren can’t. They squint. They rub at their eyes. He hears himself say it was a remarkable day. A memorable day. A very important one. In his voice is a wistfulness he’s heard in others when asked to recall a world no longer around. He recalls the roar that went through the crowd as the last block of limestone was bullied into place. Men threw their hats in the air. Women too, though his mother was more circumspect with her pinched smile. As if, like him, she too was unclear what the monument was meant to celebrate. Unless it was its own stubborn presence. That thought had come to him only years later. When the monument might win back a face turned by a wayward thought to regard the horizon. Its message insistent in the most plain-spoken of ways. You are here. You are here.
Sensing a restlessness in his young audience, Mr White held up a second photo. This time, the children jostled forward to see the men leaning on the rope ends, like weekend sailors. He returned the photograph to his pocket. Now he smiled in advance of his invitation for the schoolchildren to join him inside of the monument’s faded footprint. They broke like foam around his legs, pushed each other out the way to stand where the white glowing column of limestone had. Until there was no room for Mr White. He stood at a short distance. Marvelling at the young faces, at their variety. It was quite funny. Though he could not have said why it was. But funny is the word that popped into his head. That is the word his expression responded to. It was funny to feel as he rarely had, and that is very white. A shiny and weathered piece of driftwood someone had placed a bowler hat on for a joke.