Pond: Stories (11 page)

I believe that’s where I lost my heart.

Out beyond and way back and further past that still. And such was it since. But after all appearances and some afternoons misspent it came to pass not all was done and over with. No, no. None shally shally on that here hill. Ah, but that was idle then and change was not an old hand. No, no. None shilly shilly on that here first rung. So, much girded and with new multitudes, a sun came purple and the hail turned in a year or two. And that was not all. No, no. None ganny ganny on that here moon loose. Turns were taken and time put in, so much heft and grimace, there, with callouses, all along the diagonal.
Like no other time and the time taken back, that too like none other that can be compared to a bovine heap raising steam, or the eye-cast of a flailing comet. Back and forth, examining the egg spill and the cord fray and the clowning barnacle. And all day with no break to unwrap or unscrew or squint and flex or soak the brush. No, no. None flim flim on that here cavorting mainstay. From tree to tree and the pond there deepening and some small holes appearing and any number of cornstalks twisting into a thing far from corn. That being the case there was some wretched plotting, turned to stone, holding nothing. No, no. None rubby rubby on that here yardstick. Came then from the region of silt and aster, all along the horse trammel and fire velvet, first these sounds and then their makers. When passed betwixt and entered fully, pails were swung and notches considered. There was no light. No, none. None wzm wzm on that here piss crater. And it being the day, still considered. Oh, all things considered and not one mentioned, since all names had turned in and handed back. Knowing this the hounds disbanded and knowing that the ground muddled headstones and milestones and gallows and the almond-shaped buds of freshest honeysuckle. And among this chafing tumult fates were scrambled and mortality made untidy and pithy vows took themselves a breather. This being the way and irreversible homewards now was a lifted skeletal thing of the past, without due application or undue meaning. No, no. None shap shap on that here domicile shank. From right foot to left, first by the firs, then by the river, hung and loitered, and the blaze there slow to come. All night waking with no benefit of sleeping and the breath cranking and the heart-place levering and the kerosene pervading but failing to jerk a flame from out any one thing. No, none. None whoosh whoosh on that here burnished
cunt. Oh, the earth, the earth and the women there, inside the simpering huts, stamped and spiritless, blowing on the coals. Not far away, but beyond the way of return.

Over And Done With

The winds hereabouts had worked up such a remarkable storm it made the news in the neighbouring country and so one morning I awoke to enquiries from my family, my father to be precise, about how I was faring. I said I was very snug indeed, which was no exaggeration, and I added that since my house is tucked into a hollow it is reasonably sheltered and altogether quite safe. Then I said sometimes I worried that a tree might fall upon it because I didn’t want to reassure my father too much and thereby dispense with his concern entirely. I asked him of course what it was like there and he said it had just been very windy, just that. I’ve been up since five thirty, he said, which was no great surprise to either of us because his new children are supremely young and he told me in fact that the girl just then was eating a gingerbread man. Later on that day, or perhaps it was the following afternoon, I went out onto the driveway and not unlike the method by which an oystercatcher grazes the shoreline I bent down here and there to collect the many sticks and branches that had broken off during the storm—which kept up, on and off, for about a week I should think.

Hard to tell this time of year how long anything is going on for and for that reason I took it upon myself to intervene now and then, such as when, just two days after Christmas, I avouched enough was enough and promptly took down the decorations. I didn’t have a tree, just some things arranged along the mantel, holly and so on, but since it’s a large mantel it is something of a feature and therefore very noticeable and I’d made it particularly resplendent and was first of all very pleased with how it all turned out. Even so, it quickly became oppressive actually and the holly itself almost sort of evil, poking at the room like that with its creepy way of making contact with the air, no I didn’t like it one bit so a week went by and then it was all got rid of in a flash. The holly I flung directly into the fire beneath, and it was a young fire because this happened even before breakfast and as such the impatient stripling flames went crazy with the holly, consuming it so well, so pleasingly—I was enormously pleased in fact and shoved in branch after branch even though the flames were becoming really tall and very bright and the holly gasped and crackled so loudly. That’s right, suffer, I thought, damn you to hell—and the flames sprouted upwards even taller and brighter and made the most splendid gleeful racket. Burn to death and damn you to hell and let every twisted noxious thing you pervaded the room with go along with you, and in fact as it went on burning I could feel the atmosphere brightening. I won’t do it again, I thought, I won’t have it in the house again. And I recalled the sluggish misgivings I’d felt when the man took the money out of my hand and held up a tethered bundle of muricated sprigs for me to somehow take hold of in return. Standing there, with this dreadful trident, while his young son manoeuvred a small hand around a grim bag of change. The
whole thing was sullied and I remember at the time feeling faintly that I should just leave it but then I located the cause of that regrettably irresolute sensation to an area in me where snobbery and superstition overlap most abominably and I chided myself for being so affected and fey—what are you some sort of overstrung contessa I thought—certainly not, then wish them well and get going. And off down the street I bobbed, yet, anachronistic feelings of pity and repulsion notwithstanding, I had a very clear sense of having succumbed to something I was not entirely at ease with and it was at that moment perhaps that the first pair of red eyes partly opened and considered me with age-old contempt.

The sticks, in case you wondered, make very good kindling of course and I thought it a good idea to collect a nice lot of them before any rain fell and made them damp and less inclined to combust. It was a nice thing to do anyway—going about the driveway like that, picking up sticks, was a nice thing to do. In I came, two or three times, and deposited bundles of sticks into the basket in front of the shorter bookcase. It surely was the afternoon by then and the atmosphere had really brightened, everything was good and nice again because of all that wonderful fluttering industriousness that keeps everything buoyant and encompassed. I’m referring primarily to the birds of course who had naturally always been there. During those two days that are decorously ceded to Christmas whenever I looked out at them it was not the same thing in the least as when I look at them on all the other days, and so, though I’d only done what I took to be the bare minimum, I acknowledged that I probably didn’t ought to have gone along with the putative festivities at all this year, even to the slightest degree. And anyway, you do it or you don’t—all I’d managed
to bring about with my reluctant tinkering was a subtle yet agitating distortion. One has to have illustrated links with the fair to middling ranks of reality I should think in order for something like Christmas to really work out otherwise it just seems odd and sort of accusatory and one feels turbulent and extrinsic and can’t wait for it all to slump backwards into its shambolic velvet envelope and shuffle off down the hill.

No doubt about it, Krampus was in tow this year, and when I looked at my lovely sticks piled so neatly in the basket in front of the shorter bookcase it seemed not for the first time something of a lapse indeed that I don’t possess the first idea of how to go about casting a spell. Just say a few words, I said, as the sticks are burning, but that wouldn’t be right at all and anyway what words would I say and I’m sure they should rhyme now and then at the very least and I’m hopeless at making up rhymes. It doesn’t matter actually because it’s all over with and there’s no trace of anything now. Besides, there’s never any need of course for me to be messing about with twigs and verses and chants on account of the fact that my technique for moving matters along is really quite advanced by now. I’m quite sophisticated in all sorts of ways you see and hardly ever need to dwell upon anything. That’s right, I don’t go into things too deeply any more—as such, when they ask, and they will ask, how it all went, and had I a nice day, I shall say it went just fine, thank you, I had a very lovely day indeed. On its own that’s a little pacified perhaps and might well be considered evasive and could, thereby, be misconstrued, so I’ll do my bit and say a few tantalising words about the dinner itself—we had pheasant, I’ll say. One apiece. Wrapped in thick rivulets of streaky bacon and the whole thing gussied up with such deliciously tart and exuding redcurrants. Oh how nice, they’ll say, was it nice? Oh
yes, I’ll say, it wasn’t bad—tender overall, but perhaps a little dull in places. Is that so, they’ll say, do you think you’d have it again? Sure, I’ll say, sure I’ll have it again. Though next time I’ll do it slightly differently. Next time I’ll break the bugger’s backbone and do him in the pan.

Words Escape Me

Something came down the chimney fast, swerved, hit off the coal bucket. A small thing, and sharp maybe—the sound it made when it hit off the bucket suggested it was a small sharp thing. I don’t know where it landed, or if it even landed at all. I think it probably just disappeared. After hitting off the bucket I think it vanished, or was absorbed at least, withdrawn, anyhow, from all visible possibility. A little later, a long time after in fact, there was some thumping, as if inside—as if, again, there was something half-tucked inside the air perhaps. I didn’t like it very much, the thumping, but this didn’t develop into a difficulty for me because it too disappeared, or returned fully, whatever it was. I could hardly see by this time, my eyes were quite unable to focus—sort of unpractised and inept—as if they’d had no prior experience of form and perspective. They just slid around, nothing was organised—it was difficult then to locate where I was, for the reason that I just wasn’t able to establish any stable coordinates, so then I closed them. In an effort to attain some feeling akin to stillness I closed my eyes but this didn’t alter anything, it was as if, in fact, they were still wide open. Indeed, I felt them to be open and alert and searching. They went on with their palpating
activity for some time, sometimes I twitched—but not because I was asleep—I wasn’t asleep. How could I have been? My blood was teeming, or ensorcelled, and my heart despised me, or wanted to divulge something, whichever either was at, the overall sensation was quite calamitous. I got that feeling again that I was some sort of funnel, for want of a better way of putting it—though a funnel isn’t accurate at all actually since the direction is wrong. I didn’t want to dwell on it anyhow, for the reason that that’s precisely what it wants you to do. As much as possible I turned away from all that—I could hear the flames turning the logs white, a kind of tinkling sound, as made by icicles and Gothic snow.

I hadn’t gone anywhere. Earlier I’d sat on the bed and faced the window. There was a male blackbird on the shed roof, his head was turned very much, so in fact it looked like he had shoulders. I think it may have been getting dark. That’s right. I lay back then and carried on looking at the window, which was in a difference place now, in relation to what it showed you of the outside I mean. Now the tree filled it entirely, not the whole tree, obviously, but that section where the tension between the aerial and the subterranean is most palpable and there are all these knots and orifices, and it could have all got a bit over-wrought, one would have thought, if not for the occurrence of branches—and isn’t it remarkable, and a bit repugnant, how the ivy always knows where the chaos is and wraps about it, siphoning off and getting greener with its potent volatility?

But such large beautiful impervious branches, they exceeded the window, and the sky appeared distantly available between them. I think the light was going, and I thought, soon that star from before will resurface—and that is exactly what happened actually. Just in the way I’d seen it. The sky was the darkest nearest blue then. At some point, I don’t recall if it was before
or after, I opened the top half of the front door and lent across the lower half. There was no rain now and I couldn’t quite place when it was I’d last seen any but everything was soaking and dripping. I wished I could suck at something, it seemed like you ought to be able to—it was difficult, actually, to subdue the craving I experienced when I looked at the stones piled into a wall and the sopping moss spread across them. I don’t know why I came to stop standing there and shut the door. Or maybe I didn’t shut the door. That’s more like it. I came to stop standing there, but I didn’t shut the door because—I remember now— being at the desk—I was sitting actually, sitting at the desk— sitting and looking out—it’s quite clear to me that that’s how it was. And perhaps what I thought was, it all looks so very alive it might move—wouldn’t that be right—it will all move down this way and come in through the door, and perhaps in through the windows too. Perhaps I thought something like that, sitting there, at the desk, looking up at the outside.

And perhaps it was the case that things did begin to move down this way, I don’t know, but that was not the reason why I did in fact get up after some time and came to close the door. Or maybe it was, I don’t remember in truth—I think actually I’d forgotten the reason that had caused me to open it in the first place and because I could not recall the reason for it being that way I could no longer see the point of it being open. I just no longer knew what the purpose of it being that way was. There were other things, after that—I moved around like this for hours in fact, liking the bathroom least of all, possibly due to its cotton buds and south-facing nozzles, who knows. There was no end to it really, not one I could fathom. I should have gone outside, but by now it was quite impossible—even in the dark. You’re terrified, I thought, and you probably have been all day. What’s all this been about if not panic? What other way is
there of describing it? Terrified, absolutely terrified. That made sense, actually, and I felt a bit easier then, realising that. Then it occurred to me that perhaps I’d been terrified for longer than all day, and I had rather mixed feelings upon realising that—I wasn’t much keen on the idea that I had been terrified for years, but it seemed possible. Well, I knew it really. I damn well knew it, have known it all along—and couldn’t figure out what all this present fuss was about. Why it should be that my blood was rampant and my heart scouring for a way out. Why should it all be getting on top of me, as they say, on this particular day? I was suspicious really and thought it best to not get too involved with any ideas that came about, after all, being terrified seems quite normal, one learns to live with it—possibly you forget, or it tilts. And then, from time to time, such as today, it reappears, just to remind you, perhaps, what you are living with, even if you almost always forget. That seemed like a sensible explanation and I was quite satisfied with it, I didn’t need to go any further. I thought again about that small sharp thing that had come down the chimney like a dragonfly first thing. And even though it was almost completely dark by now I opened a notebook by the fire and wrote some things down.

There were lines across the pages but they were imperceptible because of how dark it had become and once a word was written it was quite irretrievable, as if abducted. I went on, sinking words into the pages, perhaps wondering what or who was taking them in. And then, for the first time that day, just as it was ending, I knew where I was—I was beneath the ground. I was far beneath the ground at last, and my blood thronged and my heart flounced back and forth bewitchingly. The pen came to settle in the seam of my notebook. Sooner or later, I thought, you’re going to have to speak up.