The Shifting Pools

by The Shifting Pools (epub)

  The dream had been so real. I shuddered. They were not usually so intense, so tangible. The morning was kissed with sunshine and I decided to walk to the park. I had a slow shower, hoping to clear the worst of the fogginess in my head, then dressed, wincing with shame as I remembered the vacuous sex from the night before, the cold wall of the alleyway behind the club pressing into my back, the urgency of trying to be in this world.

  I shouldn’t have gone out last night. I knew it was a mistake even as I’d got dressed up, put on all that make-up – I knew how awful I would feel this morning. But I’d needed to be close to something, to someone, even if it was all an act. All that ridiculous grunting and heaving; why do people feel closer to someone after that? I had never felt further away.

  The weather was fresh and blustery, dark clouds racing through the sky, allowing bright shards of sunlight to gleam through. The threat of rain was ever-present, but I liked the challenge the brooding sky laid down. I felt a ghost of something I felt always at the sea – a glimpse of the pain and pleasure that was being alive. I sucked it in.

  I walked briskly to the park, winding past puddles where fallen leaves were congealing and changing form. The thin November sunlight was just enough to catch at the remains of vivid colours, but it was an altogether bleaker scene than just a few weeks previously.

  Inside the park, the regimented ranks of handsome London plane trees that line the neat terraces and semi-detached streets of my part of West London morph slightly into more organic clusters of much older trees and shrubs. Unlike the elegant uniformity of the avenues outside, here, these different trees offset each other; yellows thrown forward by a deep red backdrop, clashing oranges and pinks, purple highlighting greens.

  I slowed to admire the remnants of the display of one fine French oak, ragged at the edges now, as if her play had been staged for just a few too many evenings. But the tree was reluctant to lose her finery, clutching the last few leaved branches to her chest, as if it were a well-loved dress, shy of the nudity to come. Soon, the tatters of her dress would carpet the earth, trodden down by passersby. And she would stand there all winter, exposed. The final curtain of winter was relentless.

  I watched quietly as my mind moved to other images, other conversations. Last week, I had told Claire about a tree. It meant something to me, this tree, and I had found it oddly important that Claire should understand.

  * * *

  I always looked out for it – felt the oddest sense of affinity with it. It was nothing, really, just a dead tree in a field that I saw from the train window every time I went to visit Paul and Vi. It was in a row of trees that lined the boundary between two fields, a natural cluster that had survived down the years of modernisation. The whole line was vibrant and thrusting, except for this one tree. I had first noticed it many years ago, standing out starkly from the green life around it. It was an old oak, its twisted branches looping back on themselves as if having continual second thoughts. It must have seen much as it had grown. And then it died, lost its glossy green adornment, and now stood there, bleak.

  The sight had jolted me that first time, and I had deliberately looked for the tree ever since, snatching a glance from the speeding train. It had changed a lot over the years. Within a year or so, its crown had been removed, pruned back into a safe shape, head slashed open to the rain and skies. The millions of villi it had used to sense the world had gone. And each year it had wizened further, hardened into this new state, darkening with each harsh winter. Yet somehow, as it withered further back into the backdrop of green running riot around it, it stood there, more pronounced, more quietly defiant. It moved me in a way I couldn’t explain. If it had stood there completely alone, I doubt I would ever have noticed it – just an old dead tree in a field. It was the jarring juxtaposition with the life around it that gave it such a sense of pathos. The sap, its essence, cracked and dry, not flowing, but retreating to a secret place within, hidden. The idea of holding yourself deeply apart. Each winter, the trees around it would join it with a temporary death, branches reaching in supplication to the thundering winter skies. For those few months, the line of trees would all look the same. And each spring I would hold my breath, half expecting the stumps of the old oak to start to show the same buds of life as the trees around it. But of course they never did, and I would slump back in my seat in the train, feeling a bone-deep weariness.

  It somehow retained an immense dignity for me, that old tree. I saw it there, standing proud and dark against the fresh green, unable to be a part of what was around it. But still there, still valid, a sentinel of so much that could remain unspoken. It was the memorial to my family, to me, to my life, that I needed. I found far more of what I needed in that brief flash past in the train, than I did from an hour standing before the headstone in the leafy graveyard.

  * * *

  I decided to walk right around the park. Most of it was reasonably groomed, with manicured borders lacing down the sides of paved paths, protecting the lush lawn beyond. Suddenly the air chilled further and I caught sight of a cloud of dark curls running away down the path. The little girl wasn’t dressed for this autumnal weather, and my skin prickled in empathy. “Laila?” I called out, then louder “Laila!” as the little girl ran on. I ran after her, stopping abruptly as I turned a corner and realised that I had lost sight of her.

  This part of the park was unfamiliar to me. It had been deliberately allowed to go to seed, to provide more habitat for native wildlife. As if even the life that lived here had been squeezed to the very edges and left dispossessed. And now that injustice had been noted, and work was underway to provide it with a home again. I liked that.

  The area was immediately more vibrant, uncontrolled, with tangled stems clutching hold of ramblers that had been allowed to fend for themselves. Late-flowering roses studded the confusion of branches and limbs, mingling with winter jasmine. The grass, too, was higher here, tall enough to hide my shoes, tall enough for the wilderness to start claiming me back.

  I wandered through under a heavy bower of roses that threatened to pull down the old wooden support arch that I could still just make out beneath it. Through the arch, a riot of undergrowth and foliage rambled in every direction, highlighted by shots of colour from late-flowering plants. My hand tingled as I trailed it casually over the vegetation at waist height. There was something glorious in this abundance. Something that moved me in a way the manicured borders had failed to do. I found that a little alarming. I thrived on order and the idea of control; I found it safe. But places like this still drew me in, and I had the oddest sense of someone calling out to me, trying urgently to get my attention, banging on the glass. Little snatches of memory – of wild jasmine tendrils, abundant bougainvillea, jacaranda and lush pomegranate trees. I found it profoundly unsettling, but curiously invigorating. I felt the same thing at the sea, and it was what kept drawing me back, giving me the oxygen I needed. But I didn’t go too often; the emotional landscape it opened up for me was too vast and painful for me to look upon that frequently. It felt like opening up my chest at home. As I thought this, I had a sudden sense of that same action also holding true of opening up my own chest – and my hand inadvertently flew to my rib-cage, feeling it tighten.

  Before I left, I was taken with the urge to bring something from this place back home with me. I carefully picked a few of the wild roses from their mantle, forming a little posy of fragrance in my hand. They basked in my hold, little jewels, each one of them, creamy white petals blending to the warmest yellow in the centre.

  I took them home with me, placing them carefully in a little vase, which I set in the centre of the immaculate granite kitchen island. They looked odd there, cast adrift on this stone mound floating in the middle of my seamless white floor.

  But they made it more like home, surely? I recalled Claire’s request at our last meeting that I put down some thoughts about what home, and family, meant to me.

/>   What did family mean to me? It meant everything I had lost; how could it be otherwise? It meant everything I no longer had. It meant my mother and father, laughing in delight as I capered around the garden after my little sister Laila, it meant the gentle, reassuring arms of my beloved Hugo. It meant feeling safe, feeling a belonging to something more than myself. Feeling I wasn’t alone; that some protective ring kept me close to the fire of the familiar – of family.

  My mother had always said that home ‘is wherever your family is’. That had soothed my child-like concerns at the time, but where did it leave me now? Where was home? Was I forever homeless, until I made a new family? Or did it not work like that? Home seemed such a simple need – a primitive form of knowing your anchor-point. Once lost, can you ever get it back? Can you bang down a new steel staple into the sea-bed, and run up a line with a new buoy bobbing cheerfully as a surface marker? Or is it more like childhood: once gone, it is gone forever? I wasn’t sure. I only knew I existed without my anchor-point; cut loose from the line. The line had not been allowed to fray in the natural way of things; it had just been abruptly cut. Sometimes I looked at the blunt rope end that trailed behind me and wondered whether it would ever connect to anything again… Sometimes I thought it resembled nothing more now than a silent noose, tempting and repulsive.

  And home? My flat was no more than a place to live, rest, dress and eat. It wasn’t home – not in the real sense. Yes, I needed the refuge it provided, the peace and the privacy, but I could leave it in a heartbeat and move to another. It wasn’t a sentimental place. It was modern, not overdone – quite conventional, really. Enough to conceal more than it revealed. Like the still surface of a lake, with sunlight reflecting off it. Everything had its place, and was clean and organised. No one would ever have guessed at the state of the clothes and bits and pieces crammed into the chest of drawers and cupboards in my bedroom; squashed in, hidden away from view. No one would ever see it, so it didn’t matter if it all needed a good sort through.

  Hours later, as I moved towards the curtains to close out the night, I jumped as I caught sight of the little figure reflecting back from the dark glass, just over my shoulder. I didn’t even turn around to look – I knew no one would be there. I knew I had just a precious few moments to look on her small face before she disappeared.

  “Laila,” I whispered, and stroked the glass where the image was. Like fingers drawn through the surface of water, the image shook, rippled and broke down into a thousand pieces, leaving nothing.

  Dream

  Torn fabric

  The vast canvas stretched from the floor of the art gallery to the ceiling. It was unbleached cotton canvas, not expensive, but with a tactility to it that appealed to me. It had been cut into two, from the top to the bottom, completely rent apart. Skilful hands had sewn it together, but the scar was ugly and uneven. The sides of the canvas were wonderful, lyrical, dense, but the scar was deeply troubling and drew the eye. I understood that it was the separation of two lives within one body. An unbridgeable gap. A shift, an immense unfathomable divide. I could tell that the fabric had been cut before the work was done on the second side: the colours were different, the patterns and whorls, all different. The cutting had come mid-embroidery. Life stuttered, then gradually took hold again, on the other side. But the link back to before was gone, making it dangerously distant. I understood that I needed to bridge it.

  London: the present

  Passages in the mind

  “Can you tell me about this little girl?” Claire asked. “You’ve mentioned her before, and it feels as if she could have an important part in all this.”

  “I couldn’t save her,” I whispered. “My sister.” I clutched at the arms of the chair, desperate for traction. “I tried to, but I couldn’t save her. I should have been able to. I was right there, and she was all alone.”

  I shook as I went back down the passage in my mind to the horror. I could hear the whining of the shells falling again, the dust rising everywhere, the crack and pop of small arms fire getting closer, and the smell of death.

  Home: 25 years ago

  Ashes

  The shells were falling again. They seemed to be falling almost constantly these days, and the dust hung permanently in the air. The family had spent weeks now, cowering inside, waiting for it all to be over. Eve huddled with her siblings on the sofa, listening to the noises getting closer.

  Her parents were in the kitchen, trying to scrape together some food and drink for them all. Her brother was sitting with his arms wrapped right around her, his chin resting on her head, reassuring her with his presence. Suddenly, Laila got up from the sofa beside them and darted towards the kitchen. That was when the bomb hit. There was an enormous noise. The end of the world in a second. She remembered a wave rocking through her, followed by a blast of dust and brick. Shards of reality went shooting off into the abyss. The air became a desert, hung with dust. Her eyes misted over and she fell into blackness.

  When she opened her eyes, she couldn’t breathe. She felt the cold sweat dropping down her body as she gazed in shock at the devastation. She struggled for a moment, before realising that her brother’s arms were still around her, but slumped now, and heavy with death. She lay there for several hours. Her back felt hot and sticky, but she couldn’t focus on that.

  The kitchen didn’t exist, obliterated by the explosion. There was sky above her head that shouldn’t be there. Her home, cracked open. After some time, she heard muffled cries coming from under the rubble near where the kitchen used to be. Laila. Oh god, Laila.

  Pulling herself free of her brother’s arms was the hardest thing she had ever had to do. Once upright, she clambered in among the wreckage to find her sister. Her own hearing was muffled and whiney; a high-pitched white noise was running through her head.

  Pushing away the chunks of rubble, she gently uncovered Laila, trying to wipe off the whitening dust that covered everything, settling on a new reality. The little girl was hurt, her leg at a funny angle. Eve clutched her to her chest, trying to whisper some soothing words.

  “It’s OK, Laila. It’s OK, sweetheart. It’s me, I’ve got you. Come with me, sweetie.” Carrying Laila in her arms, she started down the stairs. Then she saw the soldiers in the street. They looked straight at her, raising guns to their faces. “They look like strange beaks” was the only thought that could enter her head. Eve had not known real fear until that point. Now she could taste and smell it.

  The soldiers came right up to Eve, two disappearing up the stairs behind her to check the building over. A moment later, they came back down the remaining steps, and stayed behind her. Eve felt the cold push of a rifle tip in her back, nudging her forwards. One of the soldiers pulled Laila from her arms and held her out at arm’s length. Eve remembered their words precisely: “We have no use for this one. Leave her here.”

  “No!” Eve shouted, before receiving a warning blow in the chest from a rifle butt.

  “She’s mine – she’s my sister! She needs help. Look at her leg! Please! Please!” she sobbed.

  “She’s staying here. Come.”

  The soldier dumped Laila on the ground in the rubble of her home, twisting hard on Eve’s arm to pull her away from her sister. Eve knew that Laila’s screams would never leave her.

  They didn’t rape her straight away. She was made to walk for several minutes before they came across a piece of open land with a wall on one side. She knew that it had happened, but she couldn’t recall any of it now. She had often wondered why her mind had remembered so much in such agonising detail, and yet had chosen to cover over some other parts so completely. She knew that inside her it was laid out somewhere, waiting for her to lift the blanket away, but she never had.

  A few weeks before she had been playing tennis against this wall with her siblings, laughing as they tried to keep their tally up above ten each time. Now, she heard the
soldiers’ laughter instead. “It doesn’t matter,” she told herself. “It really doesn’t matter.” Whatever the soldiers were looking for inside her, couldn’t they see that there was nothing left there any more? Nothing at all.

  Enanti: long ago

  The shearing of worlds

  When, after several weeks, they saw Eferon’s grief undiminished, the council members who had organised Quella’s disappearance realised their mistake. Fearing his anger, they rode out of the city at night, fleeing to different corners of the world. They left a letter telling Eferon how he could find Quella. He set off at once, galloping through the night, changing horses at every inn along the way.

  Meanwhile, Quella’s guard in the cave, Eferon’s handsome but vain younger cousin, had plans of his own. Resentful of his older cousin, and consumed by jealousy for Eferon’s beloved, he had backed the plan for his cousin to marry the princess of Teo in the hope that this would deliver Quella into his own arms. When she continued to rebuff him, he told her that Eferon, far from being distraught at her disappearance, had been relieved that his moral duty to her was over, and had readily agreed to marry the princess from Teo. He claimed that all Albedo, and the Citadel itself, was humming with joy and excitement at the impending nuptials.

  When this news, too, failed to give him his desired outcome, something in his mind snapped. Angered at living in his cousin’s shadow for so long, he strode down the steps into the cave at dusk, and raped Quella.

  Once his rage was spent, he looked down at her, and realised what he had done. As he clambered off her, he took the chains from her wrists,before fleeing into the night. Some say he became the first of The Craven, although not all agree.

  When Eferon finally raced down the stairs into the cave, Quella had gone. He found her body, lying vacant and lifeless, rocking in the surf that washed into the cave entrance. Unable to bear the agony of what his cousin had done, or the pain of knowing her lover was marrying another, she had chosen death as the release she craved. And she had walked out into the waves.