Pond: Stories (12 page)

Lady of the House

Wow it’s so still. Isn’t it eerie. Oh yes. So calm. Everything’s still. That’s right. Look at the rowers—look at how fast the rowers are going. Ominous—yes, like the calm before the storm. If you like. Look at the rowers! Two long boats and bodies—rowers—like rungs or something. Like notches or rungs—or struts or bolts—something. The sound of the machine drying the bathmat behind me in front of you, very low—a good machine. Time to leave you to it pretty much. Handwriting, here and there—little notes, as you go along, things not to forget. They move me actually. Along with the photo on your travel pass, they move me.

I didn’t put on my hat even though it’s as cold as forever and the hat’s right there in my bag at the bottom. My mascara came away in the night and for that hat to look any good requires a little recent eye adornment—I realise that. And I didn’t say anything, not a word, about the creature beneath the water. No mention of the monster. The flowers are lovely instead, especially the roses. Oh yes, you say. They’re high enough that I don’t see Mary getting out of her car. I don’t have to see her any more, walking by and going into her house—it’s nice actually.

Would it be a scaly monster with a tremendous tail, I wonder, or something wraithlike with straggly wings? Will it, in other words, be something dredged or something fallen? A decision doesn’t fix because the day is actually more nuanced than at first appeared—and anyway I don’t know where exactly but there is something shifting and suddenly the whole scene is quite altered. And yet, for all the world, it appears perfectly composed. As if hovering in fact. The whole vista hovers.

Some kind of trick obviously. I could remain like this all day I expect and not get any closer to working it out.

It wouldn’t be a big deal—the monster’s coming up from beneath wouldn’t be a big show. If it went on behind anyone as they walked along the river bank for example they might not even turn around. They could easily carry on walking in the direction of home and miss the whole thing. Actually for all they know this kind of thing is going on all the time just behind them without them noticing—though in some area of themselves they are aware, naturally, of what is going on—and this is why, from time to time, they behave in a way that, in the normal scheme of things, seems utterly irrational and unprovoked—because of this chimerically transcribed influence that they have zero conscious knowledge of. That could happen a lot I should think.

Up it would come, from beneath the water, of this you can be sure, without any ripple or wave. Just a little white showing. Air. Air tipping over in linked white collections.

I get so violently upset often. But now, look at this, not any more! This morning everything is fine with me. I even stay after eating some toast, which broke up pretty badly into very unequal pieces when you tried to apply some cold butter to it.

There.

And without looking at me you put the knife down onto the draining board sort of immediately and you scooted off along the worktop to where the kettle is. I would have been exactly the same. I would have done exactly the same thing and in just the same way. I hate Mary’s car by the way. I hate the cars your neighbours drive. All of them. What the fuck is it they are thinking of? Exactly? You have things like kitchen towel and coasters, and cats that aren’t yours. One of the cats walks with you up and down the drive—if the weather is good enough in the afternoon you walk up and down the drive. And you’ve got an electric blanket.

It had never before occurred to me that anyone might ever be afraid of me. And now, when I must accept that that is something somebody might in fact feel, I find it difficult to take seriously. For now it is all I can do to acknowledge the possibility—giving it credence is something that may or may not develop later. It’s not angry I feel. I am not angry. It’s easier for me to take a shower at home—which is still the case even when the immersion hasn’t been switched on since yesterday morning so that the water won’t be anywhere near warm enough for an hour at least. Maybe when I get home I won’t have a shower anyhow. It doesn’t bother me either way because I self-clean very well. As such, I don’t know why, when I went into your bathroom to put my tights and knickers back on, I turned the knickers inside out. That’s a new and very strange thing to do—I thought it at the time actually, as I was doing it, but I carried on anyway because perhaps I found it interesting or something. Perhaps I thought this deviation contained some sort of judicious insight. It seemed natural to go along with it—to not resist it, so, understandably, I wondered if it might lead to something—evolutionary passages have strange methods of harnessing palpability after all.

Nothing, anyway. Just an uncomfortable sense that my smell was being worn on the outside and smothered by tights. I look at but don’t touch the earrings on the windowsill above the toilet cistern because I think maybe it will be nice if I leave them for you to notice later on, when you get back from shopping perhaps, or in the night, when you have got up to take a wee. What about this monster? Nothing more spectacular than a big bad-ass pike if you want to know. Shunting back and forth beneath the rowers, doing that shark thing with its eyes. That shark thing it learnt off the shark in the cartoon. So, in the end, here’s a pike that imagines it’s a shark. Leave it. I hate the colours of things today—the lack of deportment to be more accurate. Everything looks pissed upon. Like cats everywhere have just been endlessly pissing on everything all night. Drenching all the grasses and stone tracks and the leaves from every year that lie about. I hate cats if you want to know. I hate coming across photographic records of putatively outlandish cat behaviour and I hate hearing about cats. I hate hearing about how the cat walks with you, up and down the drive in the afternoons, when the weather is good enough—often the weather is not good enough. I sit in my place and look out at the weather and weigh it up too—and that’s not as straightforward actually as might be supposed. Some days I think, no way, there’ll be no walking up and down the driveway today—and then there comes a little light maybe, or, more likely, some sound, such as cows or birds—something really nice and uplifting, some indication that the world is really getting going again, despite the impression it tends to give. I don’t mind the impression it ordinarily disseminates for the reason that I understand it—then again this is a somewhat curtailed claim because truth be told there does come a point when I hate its ongoing despondency
so much. It’s as if the sky some days is just hanging around. Moping—just moping. Moping and slouching and indolently seething. I’d like to shake it hard. Fuck you. Fuck you too. Man alive. Anyway, it was just a little idea, this monster. And now when I consider it that was the mistake, because if you want to know it started as an involuntary image—that was all. Just one of those visions that occur without prompting when your mind has retracted and is alert, or—the other way—when it spreads out and is almost completely oblivious. I can’t be sure which state it was my mind was at when the monster came about—if I say the first I immediately know it is the other and then if I say the other it is obvious that in fact it was after all the first. What a lot of nonsense really, but then why on earth not spend some time in the evening this time of year trying to recover the landscape of some substratal figments? If you must know when we’re side-by-side he and I rarely exchange any affiliated comments pertaining to our immediate surroundings. About what is actually right there in front of us—no, I don’t suppose we ever occupy the same place at all. Side-by-side we’re in completely different worlds. This then was a rare thing. To establish by empirical increments a shared perspective was a rare thing. So of course, when the monster came, all by itself, I almost shot a finger out excitedly towards it. Because, naturally, it seemed entirely possible—logical, actually—that the monster, in a different incarnation notwithstanding, had happened to him too.

Later on I cycle to the out-of-town supermarket and as I get onto the second road I notice that both cars which pass me in opposite directions have their lights switched on to the max. It seems darker here than it did two minutes ago outside my house when I was putting on my gloves and then sort of swiped
at the bicycle saddle with my left elbow in an attempt to make it dry. I have no other choice but to turn around and go back for my body lights. It’s a load of shit that I didn’t bring them with me—I even took them out of my rucksack to make more room for the groceries I was heading off to buy—what a load of shit. Where is my fucking sense of eventuality exactly? When I get out onto the second road a second time it’s really obvious how quickly the last bit of light is getting used up, and of course there is so much rubbish all over the small fields I pedal alongside of. Entire household sacks filled completely up and knotted tightly and stowed into the back of the car just so and driven here. Not exactly spur of the minute then—but there’s very little difficulty in rationalising the implementation of even very appalling activities. That’s just something anyone can do very effectively and on the spot in fact. I notice the fullness of the moon when I come out of the supermarket—it’s right there in front of me when the automatic doors retreat. The sky isn’t yet black so the moon has a sovereignty it doesn’t often possess—but in a way it looks as if it is coping with stage fright. Yes, it is as if the curtains have just opened on it! And so low is it that it seems only natural and forthright to reach out to the cowering moon. Pssst, take it easy, fix your gaze on something and get your balance babyface—that’s right, I’m bucking up the moon of all things—and yes, look, it’s as if in fact the moon has closed it eyes and is taking a slow inhalation.

A deep breath before the rise and shine. I really want to communicate all of that, to tell you about the moon and its dithering autonomy and how I encourage it to get a grip and shape up, but I’ve already put my gloves back on and so I leave it, as inflexible as that seems, and when I get home, even though I take my gloves off right away, I don’t text you immediately
about the moon—I hang up some coats that were looking very untidy on the back of the armchairs and I light the fire and I take a bin liner from beneath the sink and dispose of some perishables that were left on the worktop and I go back outside to take the main shopping bag off of the back bike rack, and I think I also eat some cheese before I text you about the moon. As it turns out you’re in the cinema so empathising with the moon’s wincing fullness isn’t on the cards for you at all right now. The moon of course will still be there, or thereabouts, when the movie has finished and you leave the cinema—but naturally I can’t vouch for what condition it’ll be in by then. The sky by then you see will undoubtedly be absolutely black—and a bit avuncular too I expect. It could actually get a little camp tonight if you ask me. Keeping the moon up with its camp and conspiratorial antics. Keeping the moon up all night long! Look at that, look at the moon yawning its head off all night long! You’re not enjoying the film, in fact it’s terrible, and I have a hunch which film it is and you ask me how I knew and I say I was talking about it in the week with a friend—which is true but doesn’t answer your question—and I add that despite wearing gloves my hands got really cold while I cycled back from the supermarket. I was surprised actually, at just how cold my hands got, given that I was wearing gloves, and a little bit later on, while talking on the phone to my friend who lives nearby, I mentioned to him how cold my hands had been, despite my wearing gloves, and I asked him about a pair of thermal gloves a friend of ours had lent me and which I’d subsequently lent to him one evening. We’d made jokes about those gloves the evening I lent them to my friend for the reason that they are the sort of gloves you’d wear in Siberia and wasn’t it just like our friend to have the sort of gloves you’d wear in Siberia, but now, since the wind is
supposed to be coming more or less directly from Siberia, they are not quite so funny any more.

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.