Pond: Stories (13 page)

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.

It was very disturbing actually and it wasn’t until after I’d talked it over with a friend in her car on my driveway a few times that I felt sure enough of myself to not give two hoots about it any more. It’s all by-the-by now. Under the bridge and so on. Since we are going on a two-day outing tomorrow
I brought the phone down to the garden after lunch and called him so we could discuss arrangements. He was eating soup if you want to know. Tomato soup with a drop of milk stirred in. He asked me right at the start of the phonecall if I’d mind him eating his soup while we talked and I said I didn’t know, maybe I would mind, it depended on how much noise he made. I was teasing, of course, that had been the intention anyhow, but as it turned out there was also a trace of sincerity in my voice, which took me by surprise actually—I quickly counteracted this unattractive flash of knee-jerk resistance by laughing a little, which was very relaxing of course, and then I invited him to go right ahead and eat the soup.

Because it had been established he was eating soup we talked for a little while about soup—he eats soup almost every day whereas I seldom bother with it and it was actually as if he needed to somehow reconcile this difference, or at least understand it better. When he surmises that I don’t like soup I find I’m reluctant to agree—I do like soup very much in fact, but I don’t enjoy the process of eating it—all that lifting and lowering of the spoon over and over, it soon gets very tedious, so mechanical—no, it’s the dismal activity of eating soup that turns me off, not the taste. I’m rolling about on my sleeping bag near the washing line while these disparities are addressed—the weather has been so good the last two days I took the opportunity to wash blankets and cushion covers and small rugs. I tell him about the cycle I went for last night, how beautiful it was because of the way the lanes were moonlit. I told him I got upset and pissed off because of a dog that ran out at me and went on barking at my ankles even as my legs lost density and the pedals spun uselessly beneath their sudden cascade. He told me I should bring a stick with me so in future
I can belt dogs like that across the head and I point out that it might be difficult to take a stick on a bike and he says I’d figure it out. You need it, he says. Your shirts dried nicely I say, I’ll iron them a bit later—do you want me to bring both tomorrow? Yes, he says, bring them both. You’ll need another one, I say. Yes, he says, the one I’m wearing. Which one is that, I ask. I don’t know yet, he says. Oh, I say, you mean the one you’ll be wearing tomorrow—not now. Why don’t you wear the blue linen one, I say. The one with spots on, he says. Yes, I say—even though they’re not spots, they’re very small flowers. Okay, he says, I’ll wear it with the navy jumper. You look nice in that, I say. Then, at the end of the phonecall, he reveals that he’s been holding the soup bowl and drinking from it with one hand and holding his mobile and talking to me with the other the whole time.

You know, he says, if you were to drink soup like I’m doing now you wouldn’t have to worry about a spoon and you could enjoy it better.

To be honest I think I may have already experimented with taking soup directly from the bowl but as it turned out it wasn’t a practice I was particularly comfortable with adopting for the reason that it felt actually as if I was pretending to be from somewhere I’m not—I don’t know where, another continent, another epoch possibly—it hardly matters—it’s the sensation that’s relevant and the sensation, above all else, was one of displacement. Strange really. Besides which I often drink coffee from a small noodle-bowl and that just suits me fine if you want to know. I’ve four small noodle-bowls and it works out well with each, the terracotta one especially. And the green of course. I struggle to savour tea drunk out of anything that isn’t white and chipped in the right place—and that’s still
unwavering even though I drink it black now. When I was at school I was friends with a girl whose mother had no idea really when it came to housekeeping, the kitchen was especially unpleasant—deathly in fact. She had some pretty morbid ideas you see, such as storing teddy bears and owls in the freezer chest. Can you imagine? Fascinating really. From time to time she made efforts to introduce some warmth to the place, efforts that were so negligible that there was often something very untoward about the incongruous items they found expression through—embossed handtowels for one, and patterned mugs for another. Now, I’d already come across patterned mugs and as such was quite familiar with the concept—and although not preferable very occasionally they are perfectly passable. Nothing like these though—these were quite shuddersome on account of the pattern not being limited to the outside of the mug—as incredible as it sounds a single motif was discoverable on the inside of the mug too. She thought that was great, I remember very well her making a point of showing it to me. Do you think your mother would like these, she asked me, and of course I said yes even though she absolutely would not. In the same way, when he recommended drinking soup from the bowl there was really nothing else for me to say than that I would of course give it a go sometime.

Sometime! Never say sometime, for the reason that, unfortunately, with each day that passes that I don’t drink soup from the bowl I feel terribly remiss, as if I am spurning him in fact, which is, naturally, an awful way for me to go on feeling. He was pleased with the suggestion you see, I could tell. I could tell it had been coming together in his mind throughout our conversation. He’d solved the problem you see—and that’s the way some people are. They are ceaselessly finding ways
of getting to grips with the world, of surmounting certain antipathies so as to apply themselves to it that little bit more. It’s quite admirable really, how they refuse to let anything come between them and the rest of it—Oh, the rest of it! Sort of there, sort of hovering there all the time. Different ideas come to me now and again—strategies I suppose that might inculcate a little more compatibility. I just don’t know if I’ll ever get the hang of it if you want to know—as a matter of fact I think I’ve left it a little too late to cultivate the necessary outlook.

And the outlook, it seems, is everything. It’s very difficult for anything to mean anything without that because without an outlook there is, obviously, no point of view. I open out the ironing board for the first time ever and set it up right by the window even though it’s more or less completely dark outside by now. I find his two shirts in the laundry basket and decide I’ll iron the darker one first—why a decision such as this came about at all I don’t know, since both shirts would surely be ironed, and yet, inexplicably, it must have seemed as if one ought to be done before the other because when I laid both shirts across the ironing board I stood looking at them for a while trying to figure out which one that was. And actually I think the right choice was made because it wasn’t long after I got started on the darker shirt that I began to feel very happy indeed and if you must know I was soon wishing there were more shirts of his for me to iron. I stood at the window ironing his two shirts for tomorrow, the darker one first, and I knew damn well how easily I could be seen. I don’t know what’s out there—I never could quite work it out—and all that time I spent behind the green curtains in the dining room at home, not getting any closer to it. And why shouldn’t I stand at the window like this? Why shouldn’t I be seen? I’m not afraid.
Not afraid of any monster. Let it stand in the moonlit lane and watch me. It’s been watching me all along, all my life, coming and going—and I don’t know what it sees as it stands there, I don’t know that it is not in fact becoming a little afraid of me— and I have to be doubly careful I think, not to frighten it away, because between you and me I can’t be at all sure where it is I’d be without it.

Old Ground

She closed the earth over the green papers, packing it down with her fists, more of a kneading action than a pummelling so that she became quite entranced. Entranced by the movement, by the impressions her knuckles made, and by the way she felt when she pressed down. Love can be surprising. She couldn’t locate where that idea had come from, it didn’t originate from anywhere inside her. But it pleased her, and she leaned right into her fists and pushed hard against the ground. Love can be surprising, she said, enjoying an unforeseen light-heartedness. And then, modifying the mantra slightly, she put her skin, eyes, and lips close to her curled and muddied fingers and whispered into them: ‘Love must be surprising.’

She swung her boots by the laces and hit them off the wall, loosening neat wedges of dirt. Her mother opened an upstairs window with a gloved hand and called down to her, but she ignored her mother, loathed the boots, and flickered soundlessly round to the back of the house, her mother’s voice chiming like uncertain fragments touching one against another in the breeze.

A red apple sat up on the lawn. Her brother stood at a distance from it, clattering garden snails together in his left
hand which he lobbed one by one with his right, underarm, into the sky, with the aim of hitting them off the apple on their spiralling descent. He threw a snail at his sister. She peered up at it twisting through the air, issued a mordant ow sound as it landed several feet away, and dropped her eyes to fix on the well-trained apple. The stupid apple. Leave it, he said. She stayed still and continued to frown at the apple. The stupid, stupid, apple.

She only imagined swooping down upon the apple, snatching it up in a vexed hand and hurling it against the side of the house. She only imagined the sound of its pips rattling, and the awful flat sound it makes when it hits the wall and falls apart. She only imagined these things but conceded, nonetheless, that her imaginings had to become more cautious, more subtle, perhaps, now that the blank card had come.

After a short time there was a shift—the apple held her in its fluent green gaze as all thoughts and awarenesses in her began to softly trickle out across the garden. The windowpane flinched beneath its white sash. And then, of course, it was time for them both to go indoors and wash their hands.

Morning stands on its high swing and waits, shunting the dirt back and forth beneath its nails with a bare piece of card.