Claire-Louise Bennett - Pond - Stories

And so it comes at you directly, right through the softly padding soles of your feet, battering up throughout your body, before unpacking its clamouring store of images in the clear open spaces of your mind.

Opening out at last; out, out, out

And shimmered across the pale expanse of a flat defenceless sky.

All the names mean nothing to you, and your name means nothing to them.

It is raining now and a bra strap has slipped down which is perfect. The sound of the frogs now seems completely perfect at last. Like the sound of a vagina, because, after all, we would be cavorting now. It would be one of those times when I luxuriate completely and drew out everything — it is strange to absolutely know this, to feel this absolutely, and to do nothing but watch somehow as it goes by so very closely. The leg holes of my knickers are vacant on the floor right by the bed and I go on with finishing the Cremant. All the windows are open and all the shutters are folded back and I can hear the rain and I can hear the frogs of course — they don’t sound much like you think they would, not at all — I would never have been able to find a way to explain to you this sound they are making — but now it is perfectly obvious, it is the sound of my vagina. God in heaven it is raining so hard now — straps are beautiful, just hanging in fact, off a chair by a pale unclean bathtub. It passed — I came off the bed and I walked to the window and blew two or three toenails out upon the wet roof of the very room where recently a dinner party to celebrate a birthday had occurred. The zip on my dress was long and gold, you see.

This is being written with green ink — though in fact it is not, not yet. Quite some time has passed since this pen was last used — and, compared to the other fountain pen I have, which is used very often, it is indeed rather unwieldy — and perhaps for that reason alone I am finding it quite difficult to just get on with something.

It would seem the last time it was used the ink running from its nib was blue black. In fact it still contained the old cartridge, more or less empty, and I wonder — I can’t help it— where all the ink from that cartridge went. Quite some time has passed you see since this pen was last used and actually I have a fair idea where most of the ink from that last cartridge went because the pen itself had been a gift as a matter of fact, and since there was a notebook along with it too it’s reasonable to suppose that the two things combined, just in the way the person who made the gift had intended.

How very diligent of me.

Even now, this far in, the words here are still coming blue black — and give no indication of changing. Not so much as a hint, which I think is unusual. How can that be? I don’t see anything odd or ridiculous about writing in green by the way; but, alas, it is not really something you can go on with once you’ve come across those unkind and boorish remarks and recognised the stigma attached, and then of course one just feels very embarrassed as if caught out and doesn’t do it any more and sort of pretends they never did. The reason why it’s happening again now, or soon will be, is not because I have recently returned to green ink but because recently a cartridge of green ink was discovered in the bottom of a shopping bag I haven’t used for a very long time. The reason I haven’t used this particular shopping bag for a long time is because it has wheels, and while it was very useful to have a shopping bag with wheels when I lived in the city, it is completely impractical now that I no longer live in the city, and so the last time I used it was when I moved from the city and I filled it up with things from the kitchen cupboards in the house in the city I was moving from, and even then I didn’t put it to its proper use and pull it along on its wheels from the house, a man carried it over his shoulder from the kitchen to a van that was quickly filling up with my stuff from the house I was moving away from in the city. Sure enough the shopping bag with wheels was stuffed with bubble wrap, which I’m sure I will need again one day, but I’m sure I don’t need to hang onto this particular bundle, so I discarded the bubble wrap actually, and then, at the bottom of the bag, well not very much really.

A battery of course always a battery, a very small whisk, and a Sheaffer cartridge of green ink. I always assumed Sheaffer was Dutch or Danish or perhaps Swedish — who wouldn’t? As it turns out Walter A. Sheaffer was born in Iowa and his fountain pens were incorporated in 1913, which means this year marks the 100-year anniversary of Sheaffer fountain pens and I’m sure there are some very fine special editions available to commemorate the occasion. Parker pens, again to my surprise, was also founded by an American — Mr George Safford Parker, in 1888, which means Parker are currently celebrating their 125th anniversary, in rather more understated fashion than Sheaffer I would think, whose current output is, in my opinion, a little ostentatious. Paper Mate, I believe, manufacture ballpoint pens — but that is not the overall reason why I have no interest in them and will say about them nothing further.

Time was I’d have any number of fountain pens on the go at the same time, but they were not interchangeable for the reason that they each contained a different coloured cartridge and therefore each had a specific and distinct function. I would negotiate both high-minded matters and bureaucratic downers with the steely blue black, flourish the gold for noteworthy turning points and milestones, and switch over to green perhaps for more clandestine dealings.

Yes, secretly, I wrote occasionally in green right up until quite some time ago — even after I learnt about the stigma associated with it — perhaps in fact I appreciated there being a stigma and felt duty bound to develop it further. Added to which my fountain pens were stolen — what I mean is, I stole them — quite easily — so that at all times I never had less than three fountain pens in the top outside pocket of my Crombie. I did not have the clips of the pen lids fastened over the pocket, ever, by the way. Certainly the tops of the pens were just about visible over the pocket but since that was just how it went I had no doubts whatsoever as to whether this was acceptable or not. In any case it was a particularly shabby coat, with a straggly length of thread where the top button should have been, and pockets that fell into the lining and a somewhat hardened hem, bent all out of shape, so really it would have been nigh on impossible to look highfalutin in it which was just as well because the last thing I ever wanted was to look highfalutin. I still have it in fact but in recent years it seems the only occasions I take to wearing it is when someone has done me a complicated and mostly unforeseen unkindness; it’s a coat I can wear lying in the long grass with my arms folded even when the long grass is wet through you see.

I shall admit that I have always had an innate weakness for shabby clothes and so inured am I by now to holes and so on I have become quite impervious to the offense or alarm or unease or pity such thread-worn garbs might occasionally cause in others. I remember once years ago seeing a French girl in Dublin wearing a light coloured corduroy coat which had large stains down the front of it, on both sides of the zip, and the stains were very dark as if they had come from the pulp of a dark fruit such as a damson or perhaps some elderberries and when I was first introduced to this French girl with the filthy corduroy coat I couldn’t take my eyes off these decadent blossoms of deepest crimson that thrived on both sides of the zip and whenever I met her on subsequent occasions I’d always feel a bit put out and slightly bored if she wasn’t wearing it. I thought those stains were quite exquisite and exciting somehow — as if she were brandishing a glimpse of herself in process; they were so vivid and unashamed. Even now the ink has not changed and goes on and on blue black — I thought perhaps I was just seeing it all wrong so went over to the brightest lamp, there in the left window, and even there, there especially, the words are uniformly blue black, with no hint at all of green — not so much as a whisper.