Claire-Louise Bennett: Pond: Stories

While my friend was having a nice shower I took the bowl down to the compost bin and it was comforting to see just my blanket on the washing line in the shade. The compost bin is really filling up and I couldn’t get a good look at its contents like I customarily do because it’s got very lively in there. There were just way too many flies this time, and I suppose now it’ll only get busier and busier and some days I’ll hardly want to turn and lift the lid at all. On the way back I put the empty bowl on the bench near the pond and sat down beside it. I think I should probably have just kept it in my hands really and held it in my lap because sitting next to the bowl felt really peculiar and it took some effort on my part not to glance down at it and ask it how it was doing. My neighbour’s blanket was on that part of the ground nearest the pond where there is no grass just small stones, gravel I suppose, except I think gravel tends to make a noise and slide around a bit whereas this stuff is completely embedded and doesn’t make any sound at all. Evidently my neighbour’s blanket has been down on the ground for quite some time and throughout a lot of rainfall because it’s practically enmeshing the stones and in fact in places it’s difficult to tell the difference between the stones and the coarse and murky weave of the blanket, just lying there, like a flung off reptilian carapace. The sight of it gave me the shivers actually and it was soon obvious that sitting on the bench was not very helpful and would improve nothing so I picked up the bowl and went on up the path towards my cottage. It was as if there was nothing left for me to see. I looked at all the leaves from last year on the main steps which lead up to the gate where the post box perches and I don’t know how many times now I’ve heard my landlady’s sister comment upon them.

It’s quite true; I don’t do anything really. Any progressive human being with access to this much land would surely set about growing an impressive selection of vegetables right away. If I wasn’t so lazy I could be enjoying delicious home-grown produce for months on end. It crosses my mind now and then of course; in spring the supermarkets have a habit of putting shelving units full of grow-your-own gardening kits right in front of the automatic doors, you can’t miss them really, but in a strange way these packages deter rather than inspire me. They frequently have a lot of excessively cheerful writing on them and look so manufactured I just can’t conceive how anything natural and enduring could possibly spring from them. Sometimes I’ve gone as far as to shove a beginner’s pack into my basket but by the time I’ve reached the dairy section I’ve zero hope left that whatever it contains will amount to anything worthwhile so I take it out and dump it among the spot-lit speciality cheeses, which is probably very bad of me.

No weeding, no trimming, very little sweeping; when it comes to external upkeep I really am a relentless little lazy bones. Though when the thatchers were here they left behind such a mess, and straw or reeds or whatever they are kept coming into the cottage, which made me so cross I had to get out there eventually and clear it up as best I could. My prolonged indolence in this case was I think quite reasonable since it mostly consisted of disappointment in fact. The thatchers arrived to do the roofs around the same time I’d begun painting over my bathroom walls which were dark green in the beginning, so dark and porous looking that sometimes at night their surfaces seemed to disappear completely and it was as if I might actually be able to glide my hands and arms and the rest of me far into the wall and enter some other place that probably requires small sharp weapons and a hunk of kick-ass cheese. However, after a shower, when there was condensation running all over them, it was quite a different story. It was a real little squelch hole then, and I often suspected newts and frogs and big-bellied spiders were peering at my dripping nakedness from behind the clammy glistening beams. The yellow I chose in order to give the walls a more respectable dimension was very smart indeed, what I consider to be a Renaissance yellow, or, if you prefer, matador yellow. I presented a sample to my landlady and she nestled it into her new handbag so she could take it to her sister who hadn’t been feeling too well and they both agreed it was very striking. Imagine what it will look like with the grey slate floor, I said, and she agreed that it would look very stylish indeed with the grey slate floor. I got an enormous tub of it which was as well because I had to apply endless coats in order to cover up that green which just seemed hell-bent on showing through and I didn’t want so much as a trace of it remaining because of the beastly way it completely undermined the yellow and made it seem folksy and psychedelic, and of course that was not the effect I was after at all.

As might be expected I was in the bathroom all day every day for perhaps two weeks — I think I may have gone off somewhere for a few days before it was quite finished, so it could be that it was longer than two weeks even — and, naturally, given the odorous nature of my task I had the window open at all times. This meant I could keep a close eye on the thatchers, unbeknownst to them, and I often saw them gawking at one of the girls who was living in the main cottage at the time. I didn’t find their smutty high jinks the least bit surprising and thought the way my neighbours made such a fuss over the thatchers really very misplaced and naive. They seemed to be out there every five minutes, taking photographs of the thatchers and with both hands bestowing upon them great big mugs of tea — as if they were dauntless chieftains from days of yore. I don’t know why it is that people tend to assume that artisanal tradesmen who work with natural materials according to traditional methods are wholesome souls with salt-of-the-earth sensibilities. These two, as far as I could see, were a right dirty pair and I seemed to be the only one who sensed it which was interesting for the reason that they spoke Irish all day long so I was also the only one who, strictly speaking, didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. They came to the door one day with my landlady who wanted to talk to me about the struts, there on either side, which were in very bad shape apparently and needed replacing. After a bit my landlady leaned in and asked me what my Irish was like and the thatchers looked terribly pleased with themselves and began to chuckle. Well, I said, it’s funny you should ask — it turns out I can understand quite a bit actually. Is that right, she said, and the two of them soon zipped up their triumphal tittering, needless to say. And what kind of nonsense would this pair be talking, she said. Oh I couldn’t repeat it, I said, absolutely shocking— especially this one, I said, and nodded at the shorter one who went very red and slack and I knew he was as guilty as could be. They both shuffled about in the small space and began patting the shoddy struts with their hands while looking right up at the sky, as if it were the legs of a giraffe they stood between. Overall I had no truck with the thatchers — I hope you know what you’re doing, I’d call up to them now and then, which delighted the taller one and completely mystified the shorter one. Indeed, it wasn’t the crafty demeanour and furtive buffoonery of the thatchers that was a cause of disappointment to me; it was the origin of the materials they used to replenish the thatch that was the real letdown.

The reeds were in great big beautiful round bundles all across the driveway, and in the evening, before going home, the thatchers would cover them over so they’d stay snug and dry throughout the night. I’d inferred the reeds had been sourced from somewhere not too far away, along the River Shannon most likely, and that was something I liked to think about actually. I liked to think about all the little fishes that had nudged around and prodded at the reeds here and there. And I liked to think about the bigger fish, pike for example, that had occasionally swished past deep down and set them off nervously swaying, for miles and miles and miles perhaps. And the adrenalised coots spun out by the whirlpool of their own incessant rubbernecking and the hot-headed moorhens zigzagging to and fro. And the swans’ flotilla nests resplendent with marbled eggs. And the sly-bones heron in a world of his own. And the skaters and the midges and the boatmen and the dragonflies and the snails and the spawn, and who knows what else the susurrant reeds are raided with. Are these reeds, I said to the taller one one day. They are, he said. Where they from, I said. Turkey, he said. Turkey, I said. That’s right, he said. How come, I said. It’s cheaper, he said. Really, I said. Because to tell you the truth I couldn’t quite believe my ears and sometime later, weeks after in fact, I still wasn’t convinced so I looked into the matter and almost immediately discovered that the Shannon River and the many tributaries that flow into it had indeed been a prime source of water reed until about twenty years ago. Since then widespread use of intensive farming methods has increased the use of fertilisers and these run down from the fields with the copious rain and contaminate the waterways so that while the nitrates force the reeds to grow fast and long they grow too fast and too long and so are actually quite brittle and pretty well useless and in fact wouldn’t last very long at all up on a roof. And that’s the reason why.