Claire-Louise Bennett: Pond: Stories

One morning when all this was just beginning the other one came over to me as I tightened the bungee cords on my bike rack and blithely informed me that my cottage had been more or less pulled from out the side of the hill. Did you know that, she said. Not really, I said. Which was quite accurate, because I didn’t really know it, but I’d known it nonetheless. She beetled over to her car quite satisfied and I vaguely watched her drive off. The bungee cords on my bike rack were tidy and very secure now so I went into my cottage and put a clean sponge under the hot tap and held it there for longer than necessary because the fast hot water was very soothing on my notched fingers then I squeezed the sponge out a little bit and took it upstairs so I could clean a neat dollop of jam off of the bed sheet. Perhaps if I’d done this immediately after I’d got jam on the bed sheet the jam might have come off — as it was the jam didn’t come off. The warm sponge was very effective at making the stickiness dissolve however so I was left with just a dark stain which didn’t bother me actually, and as I looked at it it occurred to me that all bird shit is is jam really, with a little bit of white mixed in. It wasn’t a particularly persuasive or significant idea but it cheered me up to imagine ashen professors stretching viscous strings of bird shit across thin slices of toast, which naturally they’d hold slightly higher than necessary between the pincers of their spindling waxen fingers, and I needed cheering up frankly because although I’d already known it I really didn’t want to hear all about how my cottage had been pulled out of the side of a hill. It seemed an incredibly indecorous way of putting it and regrettably whenever I recall the phrase all I ever see is a glazed and gangly calf wrenched sideways from out its mother’s dazed and quaking backside.

The large-scale changes in fact were of no interest to me at all; it was the small things that remained constant which sort of attracted me. For example, almost all of the stones that make up the cottage are of an equal size and a similar shape — they are by no means uniform of course, but overall there is an impression of evenness and continuity. However, around the back of the cottage, up high on the left hand side of the wall, there is an incongruously compact configuration of much smaller stones. And although this structural anomaly doesn’t have the appearance of a flaw exactly there is certainly something antithetical about it and I remember that when I first saw it, coming back from the washing line one morning in June, it stopped me in my tracks. All the other stones mutely fulfil their remit you see, whereas this, this arresting convergence seems to be saying something — something I have not quite been able to work out, yet its errant poignancy manages to somehow transfix me nonetheless. And of course when I looked at the photographs from the nineties there it was, a little dimmer perhaps, but yes, there it was, in the photograph, as plain as day — and, strange to say, it rather disturbed me. I hadn’t expected that, it seemed; I hadn’t expected it to appear in a photograph like that. It looked odd and frightening, and sort of active. It looked like a concentration of captured faces.

Then, just two days before the big day, I bumped into a man in town who is the boyfriend of one of my neighbours. They can’t get anyone to speak, he said. Who can’t, I said. The girls can’t, he said. Oh, I said, I thought the landlady’s sister was going to speak. She was, he said, but she’s changed her mind and they don’t want to do it themselves. That’s a shame, I said. You’d be very good at that, he said. I’m not doing it, I said. You’d be brilliant, he said. And what on earth would I talk about, I said. You’ve been there long enough, he said. Not really, I said, not when you think about it. Anyway, I said, it makes no difference — I’m not into it. Oh, he said, will you not be there on the day then? I don’t think so, I said, there’s so much on and I think I have to be somewhere else actually.

I love German by the way I really do — the sound — the sound of it I can overcome anything. Can see right through everything and overcome anything. I don’t need to confide and I don’t need to delve either — not at all. It all pretty well goes without saying. That’s right, listening to German I can remain so private, so very very hush-hush — I can feel, really feel, every single one of my secrets, when I listen to German. It’s as if they are buffed heirlooms — it’s as if they are emeralds and opals and Japanese freshwater pearls! Berlin, you see, doesn’t make things easy for you. If you want to get anywhere with Berlin you have to work at it; you have to slide down its walls a few times. And I remember suddenly what a sexy and beautiful thing it is to look at someone and decide suddenly and for no reason at all that I will for a while give them the cold shoulder. Of course it’s expressive — what could be more arousing than inexplicable disdain my God.

The stones are not uniform of course and there are close-knit arrangements here and there of smaller stones which appear like the smaller fainter constellations one sees up above on a clear moonless night. That’s how I’d begin. Indeed, I’d say, one’s attention is drawn back to these gatherings of smaller stones in much the same way as the minor constellations beguile the stargazer, and perhaps for the same sorts of reasons — because of a seditious force which they themselves do not possess but which they serenely represent. These peering tributaries are in amongst the other stones and stars, but they are not quite of them, I’d continue, warming to my minacious theme. Why such an aberration occurs in the universal sky is a consummate mystery, consequently the wonder one experiences towards this most stellar intrigue is abstract and finds no foothold. It is natural therefore to return through the door unaccountably gratified and pick up where one left off — it does not unsettle you as does the hedged outburst of granite, which, after all, was put together by a bare pair of hands in the space of an afternoon. Again and again one’s eyes return to it; these strange teeth, these melancholy prisoners, these motley iconoclasts, these encompassed crones, there in the bedrock of all that is hefty and firm. And one registers, on the level of intuition, that it is impossible for anyone to make anything without mirroring the nascent twist of cosmic upheaval. Yet it is but a commonplace to observe that every monument clenches the very element that will, eventually, overthrow it. Or perhaps, after all, the shapes of insurrection are only somewhere in my mind; a place that has become obscured in much the same way that the mounting formation of dissenting earth chuck is routinely concealed by the modifying application of concrete filler and whitewash. Pause. But there are gaps, of course. Here and there. Here and there there are gaps, of course. After all it is quite impossible to not let something in.

And I’d take a deep bow in order to fold up the elation that would surely come bursting out of me and then I’d straighten up, look very potent and solemn, and exit sudden as lightening with one magnificent stride and no doubt on the way back up to my cottage I’d see out the corner of my eye some skittered vagabond in velvet jacket surreptitiously pissing up against the side of the Portaloo. I saw no such thing of course: I stayed elsewhere and returned the following morning. Nobody was around, the girls had gone away in fact and so the balloons they’d tied to the trees stayed where they were and got smaller and colder and the Portaloo stayed put for almost a week. Once the Portaloo had been removed I took the scissors and cut down the small cold balloons. I left the bunting up because the bunting still flapped nicely now and then and I left the sign next to the pond for a long time because I thought perhaps they’d do something with it when they returned. I didn’t know what exactly, paint over it and use it for something else maybe, but they did not use it for something else when they returned and it remained next to the pond for a long time and then, one afternoon, on my way to the compost bin, I put the bowl of potato peelings I held down on a rock and I went over to the sign. There were some slugs along the edges of it, and some woodlice too. It was completely soaked and the plywood was coming apart. Pond. I lifted it up carefully and carried it over to where the ivy grows round and round and jiggled it in behind the entwined trunk of a tree. It will surely outlive the pond in any case. It’s not a very deep pond after all. I always believed they were endlessly deep. But when I took something down there one day that I needed to get rid of fast, a broken, precious thing, I dropped it into the water and it did not sink and go on sinking. It just sort of wedged itself and was horribly visible. And within moments lots of very small things, some of them creatures I suppose, collected and oscillated, slowly, along the smooth crevices of its broken precious parts.