Claire-Louise Bennett: Pond: Stories

No, I’m not there, never there to greet him when he arrives. What does he look at while he stands waiting I wonder, and what thoughts pass through his mind? It is not immediately that he calls out to me and I cannot help but feel he must be looking at something and often the feeling that he is looking at something becomes so abrading I eventually tip-toe, lopsided, from out my hiding place. I come down the stairs or out of one of the adjacent rooms, always holding something, such as a towel. A towel, a newspaper I haven’t been reading, a piece of laundry, a glass. Like something reclaimed and brought back from another world. And I don’t stop. I pass right through and vanish into another part of the house. As if the item I’m holding needs to be presented somewhere as a matter of sacred urgency.

Such domestic fluttering is always interpreted as a cue, to move a little further in and set their bag of things upon a chair. I can hear it all from the kitchen; I almost always end up in the kitchen. Looking at the dishes and the knives in the plate rack, then down at the worktop, listening. Listening. In the kitchen, near the sink, some aspect of me is waning, and I cannot pin down exactly why. I feel utterly flimsy, yet I don’t look in the mirror, nothing like that; I just stand for a moment, my back to the door and my tapering hands side by side on the worktop, pressing down. Pressing down with the concentrated effort of trying to give myself a little more density. I go to the doorway. I go to the window. I go to the entrance and push closed the top half of the door. And then I move across to the fireplace; sometimes I put both hands flat against the oak beam, and then I turn, and then I finally turn.

But no, that is not it. I appear to have turned but I have only twisted in fact; some of me has turned, and some of me has remained away. And yet it is an adequate gesture, enough to create a general impression of having turned fully and thus of being engaged and unopposed, even of enjoying the conversation perhaps. I do not have the courage to take the risk. To risk turning entirely and coming to face something very ordinary. I couldn’t stand that so I stay twisted. And then I reach for my glass and I drink. I drink in order to — what? — become untwisted? Isn’t that perfectly commonplace? Isn’t that what’s proverbially known as drinking to unwind? But no, that’s not it. That’s not it either. It’s the location, actually — appearing to be located, to be precise — that’s what I object to, and somehow wish to dispel. I want to shove the walls away and for the stone floor to turn to sand. I say such silly, merciless things indoors, the walls and floor and ceiling press so much acidic nonsense out of me — I become defensive, critical, intractable and remote. Impossible! No, there are times when men and women don’t belong inside rooms.

We’d be better off silently overlapping each other; next to a river or beneath the clouds or among the long grass— somewhere, anywhere, where something is moving. Isn’t that right? Shouldn’t we be somewhere where something is moving? It’s the treacherous stillness I can’t stand. When so much is at risk what sense can it make to be somewhere where apparently nothing is moving? There is music, of course, but selecting it is such a colossal anxiety — so often it comes out wrong and warps things, like a poison, casting me in some dimensionless and highly-strung role, an eternally spurned revenant in fact. Preposterous really, yet barely surprising. They sit there, you see, biding their time, these awful and accustomed entities, clueless, quite clueless anyhow, it seems, to the music, to the compressed hands and sipping breath, to the craning shadows. Perfectly composed and biding their time. Awaiting that kiss which somehow settles everything. And I have to try, so very hard, not to say something imploring and unsophisticated, such as: I only wish you could just spend five minutes beneath my skin and feel what it’s like. Feel the savage swarming magic I feel. But an invitation of this sort achieves nothing, worse than nothing: it comes to them as a threat. A threat they scrapple to keep at bay by tethering worn out schemes of placid cosiness about the place. They move about your home depositing things here and there, making ordinary noises along the way, like it’s perfectly acceptable. It’s ridiculous and quite untenable to become enraged and put off by such gentle armaments as these, yet I cannot settle, and so I drink. I drink to you; I drink to me. I drink to plough and fortify a one-track mind and suddenly, briefly, the blood surrenders, shuffles through the old channels, and there is no such thing as a false move.

A leaf came in through the window and dropped directly onto the water between my knees as I sat in the bath looking out. It was a thoroughly square window and I had it open completely, with the pane pushed right back against the wall. It was there, level with the rim of the bath — I didn’t have to stretch or lean; it was almost as if I were in the coniferous tree that continued upwards, how tall. There was a storm, an old storm, going around and around the mountain, visiting the mountains again perhaps after who knows how long, trying to get somewhere, going nowhere.

And to begin with nothing, just a storm, nothing original, nothing I hadn’t heard before. I went about my business for a while until it struck me I should disconnect the cables and thus the lights went out on those small matters I endeavour to attend to and I didn’t mind very much because the matters were straightforward and already composed and yet were at the same time quite beyond me at that moment. It was of no great consequence really. I got into the water which had been waiting for some time, the temperature loosening, and then I had the idea about opening the window wide, which I did with no difficulty despite the rigid appearance of the clasp.

And then, from there, it was possible, unavoidable really, to listen to the storm going around and around, and I knew it was an old one that had come back — it seemed to know exactly where it was and there was such intimacy in its movement and in the sound it made as it went along and around and around. Yes, I thought, you know these mountains and the mountains are familiar with you also. No — it was not raging, it was not simply raging — I heard no element of anger in fact. How loud it was and yet so fragile, stopping and starting for a long time— it didn’t know where to begin, but it was by no means frantic, either, not at all. I moved a web of lather about the roots of my hair and became immersed in the body of the storm; I knew its structure, saw its eyes, felt its past, and I empathised with its entreaty. It had style, it was experienced; and it came back, and it came back again.

Going around and around, trying to get somewhere, going nowhere. And even though the mountain did nothing the mountain was not impervious to the storm and in fact dreaded its retreat and longed for it always to come back, and to come back again. Then it turned in closer still and the rain came in slants through the wide-open window so I slipped further down into the clouded milky water and held my book way up. It was a book that made me long for men so so far away. The storm carried on into dusk and I stood in my bathrobe at the big window and held onto a cup and saucer with both hands. I knew exactly what was going on. I reconnected the lamps and eventually confronted the row of dresses that hung so very readily along the Japanese screen.

Walks up back road, holding onto hat, what he calls a skimmer, sees first one horse then another. Walks on. Climbs gate, jumps, lands wonky. Heart is huge. The lake captivates a loosening rain cloud.