Claire-Louise Bennett - Pond - Stories

It must have been the case that after the somewhat preternatural standoff with the cows I required a much vaster, more general, and completely disinterested picture to reassert itself because I began to extend a scoping look about me. A survey that might well have encompassed the broad and familiar panorama that is available from this vantage point had it not stalled upon the figure of the young man, who now stood facing north-west beneath the mast on top of the hill, his head perfectly bare.

There wasn’t much opportunity this time to get worked up about his appearance because almost immediately I saw him a line of smoke distended from his mouth and gave me to suspect he’d recently sustained some perennial and flawed grievance from someone close to him — a girlfriend, or his father — I couldn’t quite make up my mind which. This sobering impression did much to humanise the young man of course, and so I continued up the incline with my recently re-harnessed equability quite uncompromised and the more unchartered areas of my psyche hermetic and submerged. As I rounded the bend the atmosphere was very much involved in a customary process of change, and in fact some way past the Maamturks there was a sunset beginning. Beginning very ordinarily, it ought to be said, and then, via a series of protracted yet imperceptible increments, the sky imported the trenchant beauty and dubious brilliance of a new and unnamed world. And so it was I came to linger within the vicinity of another gate. I did not approach this one. There was no need. No need, now, to angle my elbows upon a gate and have my hands recline and disappear.

Everyone has seen a sunset — I will not attempt to describe the precise visual delineations of this one. Neither will I set down any of the things that scudded across my mind when the earth’s trajectory became so discernibly and disarmingly attested to. Peculiar things, yet intimately familiar. Impressions of something I have not perhaps experienced directly. Memories I arrived with. Memories that snuck in and tucked up and live on within and throughout me. None of this distracted or deposed me, not in the least, I was still very much where I stood and it wasn’t long I’d been standing there when I heard the young man walking the track that goes, more or less, from the mast down to a gate in the surrounding stone wall. I did not turn, but continued listening, waiting anxiously, I suppose, to hear the gate latch rise — because, as it turned out, I was not convinced that once he’d shut the gate behind him the young man would go right and carry on back down the hill, away from me.

I looked across to where some distant trees went black, and I looked at the mud and the rainwater that quaked minutely in the mud’s depressions — there, directly, in front of my boots— then I stepped a little way forward so that my arms came to rest along the top rail of the gate. So be it, I thought. Let him come this way. It might in fact be the very reason why despite feeling the way you are feeling you were drawn out of your house this evening nonetheless. Wearing only your nightclothes beneath a long thin coat. It might, in fact, just be the very thing you need. Let him come this way. By this time I had no difficulty acknowledging that the shock and aversion that had coincided with his appearance on the road had not been incited by fear of him but rather by the horror I had felt towards my own twisted longing. A horror which had now more or less receded, along with all fleshly reticence. It might just feel like the most natural thing in the world, I thought.

The black trees

The tilting sphere

The humid bovine nostril

The sprawling chandelier

The thin lace trim

My damp unbrushed hair

All of them tangible and increscent co-ordinates in an immemorial routine of force and transmutation, of which the twilit taking of me was perhaps the final and most assuaging element. Surely we are all occasionally called upon to become a function of this overarching and irresolvable hunger. Who knows really what came over me — I was ill, after all — my defences were down, I wasn’t quite myself; or, perhaps, I was myself more than ever. Perhaps I was stripped right down to my most vehement hidden currents: transparent and seen through, right there at the gate. On the way to the mast I met with my true body, dissolute and available — I saw it all, every aspect of its necromantic inclination — no, it was not fear that shook me, but rapture. Dissolute, truly dissolute. I heard the gate latch rise and I heard it fall back into place, and just like that something somewhere went slack and nothing further was issued. The gate closed and the young man turned right and made his way back down the hill. Away from me; head in hood, hands in pockets. It was as if the sifted moon, weak as chalk dust, had been abruptly discarded. Just for a moment everything gathered in dreadful suspension, my eyes gaped, cold and enormous — and then it all glided backwards into an atmosphere of broadening redundancy, intersected by a vertical and rather searing sense of abnegation.

Remote sensations really, hardly mine at all — nothing to take personally. Whatever singular intensity there had been sheepishly drifted off and the usual way of things resumed. I felt quite chilly in fact. The cows were still there by the gate as I walked on by, down the hill. I slowed down a little and thought of Jesus, I don’t know why. Perhaps you all think I’m Jesus, I said, and then looked over at the windows of a neighbouring bungalow. A light came on. There were cactus plants in trays along the sill. Soon enough I was outside my own cottage, admiring its green door and deep-set windows. Fancy that, I thought. What a very lovely place to live. Then I arrived inside and after stepping out of my soaked boots I went across to the desk and began slowly skimming through a book of photographs by Clarence H. White.

When my friend who lives nearby called over I was outside again on the steps this time taking the disposable barbeque I’d bought earlier in the day up to where there’s a stone alcove — I was quite sure he wouldn’t spot me straight away and seeing oneself being looked for wrenches the heart oh ever so gently and must be one of my favourite occurrences — I thought I’d get to look at him lean his bicycle on mine, which was in the usual place, and go into my cottage, where of course he wouldn’t find me. As it was he saw me immediately — before he’d even dismounted his bike — which rather spoiled things, and since I hadn’t expected that at all I was caught somewhat off guard which I swiftly concealed by holding the disposable barbeque out vertically, right out in front of my face, a peculiar reflex which more or less pulled me together. What are you doing with that, he said — putting it somewhere, I said, and that’s what I did.

He came on up the steps then and sat down on the stone alcove, near to where I’d put the disposable barbeque — we didn’t say anything about it, perhaps because I’d already mentioned it on the phone earlier on, in which case he already knew I’d nothing yet to put on it so there was nothing much to say. He said he was fed up, or something like that, and I said I was too — he seemed to think it had to do with how the weather had been the same for two weeks. I was inclined to believe it had more to do with how our lives had been more or less the same for much longer. I really despise having thoughts like that since I can’t ever reliably ascertain where it is exactly such ideas arise from, I didn’t feel like going into it anyway and supposed neither of us would benefit from it very much even if I were to. We looked at a massive dragonfly for a while, it was very easy to follow because of how bright and big it was and I was as good as mounted between its perfectly Edwardian wings when my friend asked me to make him some coffee, which was fine by me and down I went. He came inside to drink it and I lolled against the wall by the window rather sulkily — it was too late in the day for me to have coffee you see, so I resorted to making marks on the wall with my irked fingers and flashed him sidelong glances now and then. He asked me if my water was hot and I said I didn’t know, probably I said — his shower hadn’t been fixed, which didn’t surprise me in the least because when it stopped working before he didn’t notify the landlord and I’m not sure what would have happened if he hadn’t had an accident which meant I took care of things, including going around to his landlord and telling him about the shower and asking him to get a new sofa because the one that was there was old and lopsided and would probably be very bad for someone trying to heal a broken femur. Turn on the immersion, he said, which I did, and then I turned it off again and back on, then off, flipping the switch, on and off, on and off, on and on, and then I stopped and said now you don’t know whether it’s on or off do you, which cheered him up. It’s on, he said, and he was quite right.