Claire-Louise Bennett: Pond: Stories

I also watched a really terrible film, yet there was something so kindly about it that it was a while before I could admit how awful it was, by which time its awfulness was somehow indivisible from its kindness, so I carried on with it, right up until the end — which of course I do not recall. Now and then throughout each thing that passes I see something like a lopsided Godzilla sticking up through the water — it’s so revolting, the way my mind keeps on turning it over, trying to substantiate it. I must have really needed an idea to get hold of. I must have been really desperate to have something relatable to work with. Something with girth! Not a metaphor, nothing like that — I’d never want the monster to stand for something, that’s for sure. At the very most I would have maybe said something about the house nearby, which, by the way, did seem a bit susceptible. Just having it in my field of vision felt uncomfortable if you want to know, as if I was a pent up pervert in fact. Even looking away was calculated. Even looking away was looking. The first time I got home I turned on the immersion just like I knew I would, but I didn’t take a shower, and even though I took my tango dress off and dropped it into the laundry basket I did not remove my under garments so if you must know I’m still wearing tights and my knickers inside out. The smell of me like a young mouth to a compound fence. It’s better anyhow to leave things alone. I’ve decided that once and for all. I don’t want to be in the business of turning things into other things, it feels fatal for one reason. As if making the world smaller because of all the intact explanations that need to occur in order for one thing to become another thing. Secretly, deep inside, I accept I’ve no option but to retreat from a vocation I’ve never achieved any success from and my plan now is to really throw in the towel and go to Brazilmysorebalimontanatrondheimnyonsbristol, as soon as my lease is up. And there’s no fear of my lease being renewed by the way because my landlady has had to put all three cottages on the market.

She’s more or less been forced to if you want to know. When she came around to tell me she was with her sister who was wearing a very peculiar hat with a wide furry brim which I couldn’t deduce the point of at all. I hated the hat to be perfectly blunt, and I also hated, maybe even more than the hat, the pale frosty lipstick she had selected to wear. Whatever was the point of all that? Exactly? She kept looking down at some metal things I have resting near my door and then back up at me as if all of this was a question I would feel pressed to answer, but I easily ignored her and asked my landlady how she felt about having to sell. I could sense her response was regrettably hampered by the presence of her sister and the impatient brim of her peculiar furry hat, which took up a lot of space actually so that it was quite a job for the pair of them to stand side-by-side in my doorway. She said it would be ages yet before anything happened, and in any case they’d have to give me two months notice because of how long I’d been living here and I said that was just fine. As a matter of fact I’ve been thinking about taking off somewhere I said. Is that right, she said, anywhere in mind? Oh, Brazil, I said. Brazil, she said. My landlady’s hands were very apparent for some reason and in order to stop looking at her fingers especially I found I looked down at my own hands, which upset me very much actually, so I said that’s fine again and keep me posted then I went into the kitchen, and not long after, while I stood at my kitchen sink swilling out the teapot, two men arrived who I presume were estate agents because of the kind of folders they waved about and did nothing with.

It’s a devil to know what to take seriously.

I don’t know why it was I got talking about Martin’s Hill like that — I don’t know what exactly I was getting at with that little reverie on the arm of the armchair this morning. Has it really become an inclination of mine to reminisce in such a gratuitous way? And since when? Because if you must know I don’t recall ever regarding anything I may remember from my past as being particularly interesting or poignant, or even especially reliable actually. On account of my radical immaturity — characterised by a persistent lack of ambition — real events don’t make much difference to me, as such the impact they have upon my mind is either zilch or blistering, and so, naturally, I have to question my facility to form memories that have any congruity at all with what in fact took place — landmark events and so on included. Having said that my dreams demonstrate a rather impressive mnemonic flair — I don’t dream about the past, not the outside past, but quite often I will dream about, for example, daydreams I had when I was much younger — beside trees, behind curtains, that kind of thing. You see? Even so— despite my generally dubious mode of relation — I seemed rather determined to make something out of Martin’s Hill.

It might be the case that I thought my somewhat poeticised rendering of its central catastrophe made me sound perspicacious and grown-up, and very aware of how one’s life develops according to the uncanny distillation of subtle kairotic shifts. As a rule of thumb I don’t have much enthusiasm for inventorial reflection, however, on this occasion I transgressed my thumb multiple times — I even went so far as to say we had chicken. Now, I can’t be sure at all that we had chicken. It’s very likely we had chicken because it happened in the mid-nineties and everyone knows that a staple component of an English picnic in the mid-nineties was cold roasted chicken, along with some sort of pasta salad, and French bread and satsumas, and a six-pack of chocolate mini-rolls. Martin’s Hill of all things! Oh yes, I really went into some detail and highlighted quite the prelapsarian scene this morning after broken toast while prodding the arm of the armchair with my pernickety sit bones his head more or less beneath my chin both looking out right across everything. The lake, the river, the ruined castle, the shrubs, the tall trees, the dismal clouds, the pissed upon reeds, the rowers and their boats, the monster, the house nearby, the children, their mother, the garage, the garden tools, the drying clods, the hallway, the stairs, the doors, the keyholes, the bed, the underneath, the terror, the cold floor, the ankle-straps, the perpetuating dust. And one side of Martin’s Hill was very steep, I explained — I think I may have used the word gradient if you want to know — and I think my brother’s ball must have rolled down it you see, there must have been something anyway that lured him to that side of the hill because you wouldn’t normally go that side ever — it was very steep you see, and overgrown — steep, uneven, and overgrown. Orange. Blue. Orange. Blue. Orange. And he was alright for the first few steps, then he couldn’t keep pace — he lost control and he fell actually. Fell all the way down to the bottom of Martin’s Hill. All on his own with me just looking, and there was the proof I suppose that I was older at last.

I hated feeling that actually yet it was sort of attenuated by the anticipation I had towards the evening to come and didn’t those two sensations, first loss and high hopes, combine to produce possibly my initial experience of melancholia. And didn’t I immediately discover that melancholia brought something out in me that felt more authentic and effortless than anything I’d previously alchemised.

Look here, it’s perfectly obvious by now to anyone that my head is turned by imagined elsewheres and hardly at all by present circumstances — even so no one can know what trip is going on and on in anyone else’s mind and so, for that reason solely perhaps, the way I go about my business, such as it is, can be very confusing, bewildering, unaccountable — even, actually, offensive sometimes. It’s easy to be suspicious of a drifter like me and it frequently happens that I am accused of all sorts of impertinence. This time last year for example someone I know in a sort of professional way arranged to meet me in a hotel conservatory around lunchtime purely for the purpose of relaying an unflattering compendium of controvertible opinions pertaining to my character and outlook — an apocryphal catalogue of puerile anecdotes, with which, by the way, he’d quite obviously had some assistance piecing together — and all this for my own good apparently! Well let me tell you I found the whole ordeal very off-putting and I had no instinctive way of responding to it — it was just about beyond me. We’d ordered buns and the buns were on the coffee table and there were those stupid fruitless cartons of vapid jam I hate so much next to the buns. I tried to be gracious, be gracious I thought, but that was a confounding prescription for the reason that I could not at all determine whom out of the two of us I should be gracious to.