Claire-Louise Bennett: Pond: Stories

She was in the garden and I stayed on the kitchen chair with my rucksack strapped to my back and my coat still zipped up to my chin and I must have had a cup of tea with me surely otherwise I wouldn’t have stayed there very long when in fact I stayed there a good while. I think I liked sitting there actually; I think I felt as if I’d just come home from school on a Thursday. Nobody was taking any notice of me yet there was a lovely comforting sensation that beneficent things were being done for me somewhere. I think, as human experiences go, that is one of my favourite ones.

What they’d done was this: they’d made a sort of collage of images on several different sheets of paper and I suppose the idea was that they’d somehow affix these sheets of paper down below in the garden room which was I believe the intended epicentre of the big day’s planned activities. The photographs were all contemporaneous — that’s to say they were all taken in the early 90s, 1990s that is, which is when my landlady and her sister obtained the site and commenced the all-out task of redeeming and reviving the various ailing properties and untrained gardens therein. And it is likely that some photographs were taken on one day and some more a few months later and yet more again after a year or two, that kind of thing, because there are changes, remarkable changes, and it is possible, from the photographs, to see what it was and what it became. And what it became, by the way, is not what it is now, and what it is now is not what it was either. She stands there in the mud, my landlady, which needless to say there was an awful lot of, yet it must be mentioned because I’d never seen mud quite like it — feudal and rich, almost igneous in fact, as if suddenly it would rupture and divulge a beast of fire or turn in on itself in a molten whirlpool of dark flashing water. It was quite mesmerising and I wondered what it must have been like, to go over it day after day. I’m sure she must have felt tremendous, really quite tremendous; which doesn’t always make things easy of course. She is wearing boots, naturally, and her blonde hair looks voluminous and very bright, in contrast to all the unearthed things around her, and behind her is the back wall, marbled with lichen and moss, of the building where I live.

The sensation that someone somewhere was doing something nice for me, such as placing a piece of breaded fish onto a pre-heated baking tray in a fan-assisted oven, dissipated the instant the sun left the room; the commonplace order of things reasserted itself with an inhumane brusqueness, and since nothing in my immediate locale belonged to me I felt useless and insipid. Although I was quite alone I had nonetheless managed to outstay my welcome. I got up and it may have been getting dark by then and perhaps I met my neighbour on the step on my way out and wished her goodnight. I would have to find my keys now. I would have to find my keys and open the front door. I would open the front door and march straight in, and into the kitchen I would go whereupon I would unbridle myself of the rucksack stuffed and shuffling with choice provisions and set it down upon the green cold tiles of the worktop and the contents would slump and settle again yet they would ere long be unpacked and divided but first I would ferret out the cheese buffered there between the pouches of ham and two tapered slices of the purest cheese I’d eat forthwith and this would briefly alleviate me of all other pressing duties so I would gaze awhile out the windowpane and I would not deign to get involved in anything, not one single blessed thing out there. No way. Cheese appeased and back on track I would smooth out the receipt of purchase along the green cold tiles of the counter and I would mull over this inventory of fine produce as if it had no fealty whatsoever to the many articles piled up around about me. Very good, I would say. Good job all in all. Thump thump. Praise be. And on it would go with little pieces of restorative cheese in between, until the surfaces and edges and handles and lids all fell to silence at last.

A few days before the big day a Portaloo appeared to the left of the shed as I see it out the kitchen window. There was, needless to say, very soon a sign stuck upon it saying toilet. I hadn’t seen it coming, that’s to say I wasn’t here when it was delivered — I had been notified of its necessity however so it did not come as much of a surprise to me when I looked out the kitchen window one morning and saw a Portaloo next to the shed. Other more salubrious indications that a big day was on the horizon included a scant but wholesome menu written in alternating colours on a slate board which was propped up for all to see — once they got here of course — next to the kitchen window of the main house. And of course there was a lot of walking to and fro so that I could hear, especially in the bathroom and up in my bed, the sound of gravel underfoot on and on from early in the morning to sometime later in the evening for days on end. Since my attitude towards the big day had been dependably inconsistent I was not prevailed upon to help with the many preparations underway and this was as well for everyone because a lack of enthusiasm for a project makes me very clear-headed indeed and I would in all likelihood have developed a keen sense of how it should all come together and would therefore have taken over completely. In the days before the Portaloo arrived my mind tipped back and forth, quite unable to settle upon a decision about whether or not I’d be around for the big day. All this vacillating came to a rapid standstill once the Portaloo had been installed, as such, whenever I looked across at the Portaloo I regarded it as an ally, an ally in from-the-hip decision making, and I felt nothing but gratitude towards its moulded and unerring bulk. Cool Portaloo! I called out to one of the crouched neighbours on my way over to the bins. My absence would hardly be conspicuous anyway since it was going to be a big day in many places that day due to the fact that all kinds of events had been organised all over the country so that all sorts of people could discover and participate in the cultural life of their particular region. That being the case, since I appear to be a very culturally-oriented sort of person, it is perfectly plausible that I was already under enormous pressure to negotiate a riveting panoply of worthy ventures further afield.

English, strictly speaking, is not my first language by the way. I haven’t yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things. I expect I will always have to do it that way; regrettably I don’t think my first language can be written down at all. I’m not sure it can be made external you see. I think it has to stay where it is; simmering in the elastic gloom betwixt my flickering organs.

From the photographs it seems that it was open at one end. The other end might have been open too but the photographs were all taken from more or less the same position and so it is possible to ascertain the original condition of one end only and even then it is difficult to really know for sure what that dark space is, and going back through the photographs again did not make things any clearer. It doesn’t matter very much. What the photographs all show over and over is quite plain — when they came here my cottage was just a pile of stones and a sprung tin roof. As a matter of fact I’d known about the photographs and other things right from the start — right from the time I moved in — and I think, at the start, I’d said something like yes, I’d love to see some photographs and read about the history of the place and, actually, I was quite sincere; at the start, when I first moved in, I was quite keen to see some photographs and find out about the history of the place. But I didn’t follow up on the offer; sometimes I fully intended to, but I always forgot. We might talk for a long time, my landlady and I, about all sorts of things pertaining to the hereabouts, and afterwards I’d realise that once again I’d clean forgotten to say anything about wanting to see the photographs and historical records. And then, after several months of this, I had to acknowledge that the reason why I continued to forget to ask about the photographs and historical records was because I simply had no wish whatsoever to see them. Somehow the time for that had passed; it had passed rather quickly in fact. And then, when I was told all about the big day and all that it would involve, I felt deeply unsettled — and sort of angry actually. Why are they bringing all this up, I remember thinking, outraged. I was outraged in fact. Why are they bringing all this up? I don’t understand the past — I don’t understand the way the past is thought about, I don’t know why but it makes me wild with anger, to hear the ways the past is thought about and made present. Enforced remembrance is, I think, a most stultifying thing. But then, as I have mentioned already, I am often alone and when I am alone it really is very difficult for me to gauge distance, and so, perhaps for that reason, I haven’t acquired a particularly distinct sense of the past. I just didn’t have the first clue about how to respond to any of this stuff if you must know because it seemed to me rather a peculiar way of coming at something that in any case still exists. In light of that I think it is quite understandable that my attitude towards the big day was of a fretful and somewhat indignant nature.