Pond: Stories (7 page)

In any case, gigantic joints of meat notwithstanding, there’s not much room in a Baby Belling oven so I should think the possibility of comfortably shoving one’s head into it is pretty slim.

I certainly couldn’t get my head into my cooker without getting a lot of grease on the underside of my chin for example— and it stinks in there. It stinks of carbonisation I suppose and that’s only to be expected because I’ve never cleaned it out, not once; I just don’t feel there’s much point if you must know. It’s not even a Belling, as it turns out; it’s a Salton, whoever they are. The name strikes me as dubious—downright chimerical actually—and my hopes for acquiring replacement control knobs start to etiolate and turn prickly and I know, as I lift up the mirror so that I can get to the back of the oven and find the model number, that this oven doesn’t really exist any longer and this is just a fat waste of time and the persistence with which I am trying to remain undaunted by these two facts means that either I am uncommonly desperate for a concrete diversion or that my typical inexcusably blasé attitude towards most things is starting to make me feel sort of panicky and ought not be allowed free rein over nearly everything any longer. I make a note of the model number which is on a sticker, one corner of which is peeling away from the oven. There are bits attached to the underside of the label where it’s come unstuck and on the place where it was which must mean there’s still some stickiness in both areas and as such I wonder how they ever came apart. The number is something like 92711, but I don’t suppose I remember exactly, probably the digits are prefixed by two capital letters, but I have no idea what they are either. This is not an occasion to formulate detailed and lasting memories. There are of course a number of regions in any abode that are
foremost yet unreachable. Places, in other words, right under your nose which are routinely inundated with crumbs and smidgens and remains. And these ill-suited specks and veils and hairpins stay still and conspire in a way that is unpleasant to consider, and so one largely attempts to arrange one’s awareness upon the immediate surfaces always and not let it drop into the ravines of smeared disarray everywhere between things. Where it would immediately alight upon the dreadful contents therein and deliver the entire catalogue to those parts of the imagination that will gladly make a lurid potion from goose fat and unrefined sea salt.

There were grains, of course. Grains and seeds, and a swan in fact. A tiny white swan, with beak and eyes hoisted as if regarding four or five swans walloping through the clouds above. Poor little white swan, so realistic and wistful, I’ll put you back where you were. Which was, I believe on the corner of the mirror frame. How did you get here little white swan? I turn you about between my thumb and forefinger and cannot remember for the life of me where you came from.

South Africa. South Africa! Can you believe it! It turns out my little stove comes all the way from an incredibly distant continent! I can see chickens with extraordinary manes stalking atop the flaking hob rings, pieces of caramelised corn wedged in the forks of their aristocratic claws. And all these big root vegetables with wrinkles and beards and startling fruits and rice hissing out the sack like rain. Everything red, everything yellow. I know nothing of course; I remember standing chopping vegetables for a salad in a kitchen in south London very many years ago and a man from South Africa stood beside me and showed me how to prepare the cucumber, that’s all. I remember he scored the cold lustreless skin lengthways with a
fork several times so that when he cut it at an angle there were these lovely elliptical loops of serrulated cucumber, and I have sliced it that way every time ever since. It looks particularly chi-chi in a short tumbler glass of botanical gin.

Dear Salton of South Africa my cooker is on its knees please help. Perhaps send the parts I need upon a cuckoo so they arrive in time for spring—on second thoughts a cuckoo is a flagrantly selfish creature so feel free to select a more suitably attuned carrier from another imminently migrating species— but please not a swallow because they don’t get here until sometime in May, which will I fear be far too late, and anyway I’m sure they’re far too dextrous and flash for such a quaint assignment. I live on the most westerly point of Europe, right next to the Atlantic Ocean in fact. The weather here is generally very bad, compared to the rest of Europe that is, and that might be a reason why not too many people live here. The fact that the population is quite low might in turn account for the fact that the country’s basic infrastructure is very uneven which means, for example, that the public transport service is stunted, sporadic and comprehensively lousy. Fortunately despite all this, and its history of starvation which did in fact take many hundreds of lives hereabouts and beyond, the exact spot where I live is pleasant overall and taxi drivers often remark upon what an unexpected piece of paradise it is and how they never even knew it was here. I mention the famine, Salton, not in order to establish any sort of sociohistorical affinity, which would be a very crass contrivance indeed, but simply because my mind is currently more susceptible to images of hunger than it has ever been on account of the fact that I am running out of matches, so to speak. This is not the time of year to be eating granola and salads and caper berries, let me tell you. Oh Salton of South
Africa, do you even exist? I rather fear you do not, the attempts I made to discover your headquarters merely disclosed a host of online platforms from which hundreds of second-hand models are bought or exchanged. You are producing nothing new it seems, and are no longer on hand to assist with the upkeep of the kitchen devices you once put your illustrious and rather intimidating name to. No doubt I’ll have to resort to clamps or something like that.

As a matter of fact I read somewhere that as many as two thousand stricken bodies were pulled out of ditches and piled onto carts then wheeled down the hill to the pit at the churchyard below. But I think to myself, not all of them were pulled out of the ditch. By the time they collapsed and dropped down dead into the ditch some of them would have had no form really, no flesh left at all. Nothing to keep the bones raised, nothing to keep the skin bound, and so the bones would slot down deep into the gaps and the skin would slacken and mingle with rainwater and sediment and the eyes would soon well up and come loose and sprout lichen and the fingernails would untether and stray and the hair would ooze upwards in rippling gelatinous ribbons and the teeth, already blackened and porous, would suck up against the sumptuous moss and babble and seethe. There would hardly be any trace of them, nothing to take hold of. Imagine that, Salton—already so wasted away there was nothing remaining to pull out and carry off.

Then I came across a company in England who supply spares, parts and accessories for all kitchen appliances, including the cooker, dishwasher, extractor hood, fridge and freezer. However, despite an impressively extensive catalogue of replacement cooker knobs my particular model is nowhere to be found in the existing options and elicits zero response
when I enter it into the site’s search facility and so the only remaining course of action is to fill out an enquiry form which I do because as far as I can see this is the end of the line and I may as well get to the end of the line and accept my inevitable defeat fully. Sure enough, approximately three hours later I receive an email from the company web support team informing me that unfortunately on this occasion they have been unable to find the item I require. They assure me that even though they haven’t been able to deliver on this occasion they will continue to attempt to source the item—‘If successful we will add it to our range and notify you at once’—I don’t expect to ever hear from them again. I always knew, in the heart of my heart, I would not have any success whatsoever with locating replacement control knobs for my obsolete mini-kitchen.

I feel quite at a loss for about ten minutes and it’s a sensation, I realise, that is not entirely dissimilar to indifference. So, naturally, I handle it rather well.

A week or so before Christmas I was standing at the kitchen worktop in my friend who lives nearby’s house, maybe we were sharing some kind of toasted snack, I don’t remember—I was wearing a hat, I remember that, and perhaps I’d intended to go somewhere that day but due to some humdrum hindrance didn’t really go anywhere. He was getting some things together but was attentive and forthcoming nonetheless. Because he works from home and his work involves materials and equipment and his home is quite small there is always a lot of stuff on the worktops and table and even across the sofa and often while we talk I’ll fiddle about with some item or other and may even pretend to steal it in a very bungled and obvious fashion. Oh I remember now. A few weeks before, he’d found a
make-up bag in the road and he wondered if I wanted anything from it. That’s not the reason I called on him though, as a matter of fact I’d seen him several times since he’d found the make-up bag and I’d almost clean forgotten about it but then, as I was coming out of his bathroom, I thought of it and asked him if he still had it. When I opened the make-up bag there was that deep-seated scent of sweet decay, and the cosmetics inside were very cakey and dark. What’s that, he said. Concealer, I said. And this, he said. I think that’s a concealer too, I said. Do you think it belonged to someone older, he said. No I don’t, I said, the opposite. How come, he said. Check out this lipgloss, I said. There was nothing in the make-up bag I wanted—bar a pair of tweezers. That’s all you want, he said. Yeah, I said. Then we put everything back into it and he put the whole lot in the bin and then I noticed the pair of pliers on the side. Where did you get those, I said. You can have them if you want, he said. Can I, I said. You probably need it for your cooker, he said. Yeah I do, I said, big time. And I was about to reach for them when he said they needed sterilising first. Put them in boiling water for a few minutes, he said. What for, I said. They’ve been down the toilet, he said. And he wrapped them up in a clear plastic bag and I put them in my pocket, along with the expensive looking tweezers. Give me a shout when you get back, I said. Might do, he said. Have a good one, I said.

By the way it turns out I depicted a number of things quite inaccurately when I was discussing that book about the woman who is the last person on earth—for example, the dog, Lynx, belonged to Hugo and Luise, the couple whose hunting lodge the woman was staying in when the catastrophe came about. The dog is actually a Bavarian bloodhound, which is more or less what I had in mind anyway, but he didn’t just turn up, like
I said, he and the woman already knew each other. There are other mistakes too, elisions mostly, but I’m not going to amend any more of them because in any case it’s the impression that certain things made on me that I wanted to get across, not the occurrences themselves. Maybe if I’d had the book to hand at the time I would have checked the accuracy of those details I relayed, but perhaps not, at any rate it wasn’t possible to check anything because I’d lent my copy of the book to a friend. My friend, who is a Swedish speaking Finn, had been feeling unwell for some time and I thought this particular book would be the perfect book for a poorly person to read and when eventually I met her to collect it she put her whole hand on it very neatly and said it was an amazing book. We were both sitting at a small round table in the afternoon and we each had a glass of red wine. She had recently returned from Stockholm where she had been celebrating her mother’s ninetieth birthday. She was feeling much better and talked excitedly about the trip—the hotel they stayed in, she told me, served breakfast until two o’clock in the afternoon! That’s very civilised, I said. Yes, she said, and there were tables and tables of the most delicious things. Melons, she said. There’s something from Stockholm inside the book for you, she said. Oh, I said, wow, and I carefully opened the book and inside was a tiny knife with a bone handle. That’s beautiful, I said. I had to post it, she said. Oh yeah, I said, rotating the knife slowly. I like little knives, she said. Me too, I said.

The road home doesn’t have any cat’s eyes or stripes painted on it anywhere. There is no pavement and the cars go by too close and very fast. On either side of the road is the ditch, the hawthorn trees and any amount of household waste; including, actually, dumped electrical items. And as I walked
from my friend nearby’s house along that road towards home a week or so before Christmas I stood still at the usual place and experienced a sudden upsurge of many murky impressions and sensations that have lurched and congregated in the depths of me for quite some time. If you are not from a particular place the history of that particular place will dwell inside you differently to how it dwells within those people who are from that particular place. Your connection to certain events that define the history of a particular place is not straightforward because none of your ancestors were in any way involved in or affected by these events. You have no stories to relate and compare, you have no narrative to inherit and run with, and all the names are strange ones that mean nothing to you at all. And it’s as if the history of a particular place knows all about this blankness you contain. Consequently if you are not from a particular place you will always be vulnerable for the reason that it doesn’t matter how many years you have lived there you will never have a side of the story; nothing with which you can hold the full force of the history of a particular place at bay.

And so it comes at you directly, right through the softly padding soles of your feet, battering up throughout your body, before unpacking its clamouring store of images in the clear open spaces of your mind.

Opening out at last; out, out, out

And shimmered across the pale expanse of a flat defenceless sky.

All the names mean nothing to you, and your name means nothing to them.

Postcard

It is raining now and a bra strap has slipped down which is perfect. The sound of the frogs now seems completely perfect at last. Like the sound of a vagina, because, after all, we would be cavorting now. It would be one of those times when I luxuriate completely and drew out everything—it is strange to absolutely know this, to feel this absolutely, and to do nothing but watch somehow as it goes by so very closely. The leg holes of my knickers are vacant on the floor right by the bed and I go on with finishing the Cremant. All the windows are open and all the shutters are folded back and I can hear the rain and I can hear the frogs of course—they don’t sound much like you think they would, not at all—I would never have been able to find a way to explain to you this sound they are making—but now it is perfectly obvious, it is the sound of my vagina. God in heaven it is raining so hard now—straps are beautiful, just hanging in fact, off a chair by a pale unclean bathtub. It passed—I came off the bed and I walked to the window and blew two or three toenails out upon the wet roof of the very room where recently a dinner party to celebrate a birthday had occurred. The zip on my dress was long and gold, you see.