~
A smell engulfed Lucy. She remembered that smell; not a dank, musty fallen tree rot odour but the sweet aroma of new-mown grass and wood-chippings.
Familiar noises coalesced around her. A persistent squeaking as if someone was torturing something small, fluffy and cute got louder, creeping up from her memory’s depths like a long-forgotten kraken. It was the rusty, painful, squeak of an unoiled swing.
More commotion seeped into her ears, like water through a sieve—a dull, insistent murmuring hum. Then a shriek of delight leapt from the constant background, and she recognised the sounds of children at play. A warm spring breeze brushed her cheek. It had the feel of the last days of spring. In front of Lucy’s eyes, the metal and rope, bark chippings and bright paint of a children’s play area materialised into childhood imaginings of pirate ships, tree-top villages and castles. The play area was alive with children, all screaming and yelling and playing.
Why had she come here? This was not a happy place for her. It was one of the worst places, a cancerous, sore tooth of a place. Dredging this old, mucky memory from the canal of her life was going to do no good. She’d suppressed this for a reason; now she had to share it with Conscience.
How old were you when this happened? asked Conscience’s voice, from behind her.
“I was six,” she said. She was losing herself in the remembrance. “My parents had a massive argument, and I started to cry. I didn’t want them to be angry at each other, but I couldn’t sort it out. I was only six. Instead of losing their temper with me, my dad calmly turned to my mum and said ‘I’ll take her to the park,’ and we left.”
What happened then?
“I…I stopped crying, I think. We came here. I knew he had something to explain to me, and he wanted to do it here. I think he wanted to temper the bad thing with the good thing of being at the park. Kind of, cover the unhappiness with a happy memory. Does that make sense?”
Sort of. Where are you now, then?
“I’m not here yet. Me and my dad should be here soon.”
Ah, good—bark!
“Bark?” she asked, as she turned to face Conscience.
A small dog stood at her heel.
“You’re a dog?” she asked Conscience.
The fur gave it away, didn’t it? replied the dog.
“Why are you a dog? If fact, why are you at all? Aren’t you a voice in my head?”
That’s not a very nice way of putting it, but we are in your head. Woof, he said, scratching himself behind the ear. Why I am a dog, is rather up to you.
“I think of you as a little, fluffy, cream coloured dog?”
At the moment, it would appear so. Why? Don’t you like it?
“You look like the head of a brush,” she said without thinking.
Conscience looked crest-fallen. His long ears drooped. His face fell, like a cooling soufflé, and his bloodshot eyes stared up at her with so much sadness it would have melted the heart of a rock.
Lucy felt intense pity for the little dog…spell…thing. Here he was; he’d only had a physical body for a few minutes, and she was already making a mockery of it. He had a very fragile ego. She bent down and scratched him behind the ear.
That’s nice, said Conscience, then he came back to himself. No, stop it! I don’t want your pity. If I look like a brush’s head, then maybe I should be something else.
“Do you think you can change?” she asked, guessing since they were in her mind, he probably could. After all, he was a spell in her head and not bound by any physical laws.
It is your imagination. You’ve sculpted the land and me along with it.
“Ummm okay,” she said, “what do you want to be?”
Something dignified.
Dignified? She couldn’t begin to think what constituted dignified in Conscience’s mind. She closed her eyes and tried to think dignified. A lion: no, too obvious. A frog: too easily stepped on. A cat: he did have a cat’s pride.
“Lucy, don’t run. Wait for me.” The commanding voice startled her. It was a voice she would always obey. A voice that would never let her fall—could never let her fall. She felt safe with that voice. A voice that would wrap around her and tell her stories; a voice she loved.
Her head snapped up to observe her small self running across the park to the play area filled with other children. She was six. Her short brown hair was tied back in a ponytail, the same as she wore it now. She wore a pair of blue, bib dungarees with three intertwined circles emblazoned on the front. Her little legs pumped as she ran towards the brightly coloured playground through the lush grass.
There, following in the wake of the little Lucy, was her father, Ethan Gayle. He seemed slightly shorter to her now, a little over five ten, yet he moved with such grace.
She loved him instantly again, and it felt like a stabbing pain in her chest. Her heart thumped harder. Her breath caught, and she was virtually in tears already.
His dark-brown hair was cut short. He wore deep-ocean-blue jeans and a faded leather coat. The keys in his pocket jingled as he ran to keep pace, like magical footsteps.
“Look!” shouted Lucy, excited. “Look! It’s my dad. Oh look, Conscience.”
She turned to where the dog had been and saw only a ball of fur.
“Conscience?”
Hurry up and finish imagining me. This hurts, said a muffled voice from within the fur.
She snapped her eyes shut and imagined the first animal that jumped into her head. She opened her eyes to watch the results.
The ball was in motion, hovering six inches off the ground and revolving on an invisible axis. It turned black and began to grow with a sickening cracking sound.
Conscience’s voice emanated from within the fur.
Arrrrgh! This really hurts, he screamed in pain.
The sphere had reached the size of a beach ball when it made a loud popping report and sprouted two, long, thin legs.
Oh no! My knees are in the wrong place. What have you thought me into?
“It was the first thing I could think of. I’m sorry if it’s not good enough for you,” she said, with indignation.
The ball swore at her, using a word that Lucy didn’t quite understand. Finally, a long, thin neck like a bamboo pole thrust from the ball. On top sat a small, wedge shaped head with large, confused eyes. With an ending “puff,” the creature sprouted black feathers.
Have I finished? asked Conscience’s timid voice.
“Yes, I think so.”
Oh good, he wheezed, how do I look?
“Just how I imagined you.”
Fine, shall we go? Where are you now?
“I’m over in the playground. My dad is about to say something very important to me. I think that’s why we’re here, to see this.”
She set off at a slow dreamy pace towards the playground.
Conscience tried to follow, forgot he now had only had two legs, and fell over. The ostrich, which he currently was, righted itself and trotted after her.
Lucy leaned against the bright-red railings at the playground’s edge and breathed in the heavy wood-chippings aroma. It always smelled of damp rotting logs, or perhaps her nose was registering her actual body’s surroundings, inside a damp log. She couldn’t tell. There was no way to tell.
So, which one of these little monkeys is you? asked Conscience, as he leaned his ostrich head over her shoulder.
She ignored his jibe and pointed at her smaller self. “I’m over there, on the swing.”
Ah yes. You haven’t changed much, have you? You’ve grown taller is all.
“What did you expect, a caterpillar into a butterfly sort of thing?”
No, nothing like that, but I expected some difference. Look, even your hair is cut the same way. Does that make you childish or were you mature for your age?
“Conscience, don’t be smart with me, or I’ll imagine you’re a slug and squash you,” she said.
I’ll be good, I’ll be good, he said, ducking his head in
submission. So, what are we here for? What is it, you wish to relive?
“I don’t want to relive this.”
Then, why are we here?
“I think…I think I have to show you this.”
“Lucy!” The cry came from Ethan. Both Lucys raised their heads at the call from their father. “Come over here, I’ve got something important to tell you.”
Lucy, and the ostrich, entered the play area and sat on the bench by Ethan and the younger Lucy. No one seemed to pay them any mind. Other children and parents passed right through them as if they were spectres. Lucy supposed they were in some way. It was her memory; she would always be here in some part. Like most people, she was trapped forever in the past, looking towards the future and never noticing the present.
She knew the conversation by heart. She knew all the nuance, the cadence, the shape and the timing of each word. In the days, weeks, months and years that followed she would replay them again and again, like a dog worrying at stitches. The phrases were etched into her mind as if cut by acid. She mouthed the sorry syllables as her father spoke them.
“Lucy,” said Ethan, dolefully, “I’ve got something very important to tell you. It’s about your mum and me.”
Here it comes, she thought. Here is my White Sands. On one side ignorance; on the other side knowledge. Once the genie was out, it could not be put back. She cringed away from the utterances, as if they were physical blows, but she could not change them. The words she knew so well fell from his mouth like a poisonous waterfall full of love.
“Me and your mum are splitting up.”
There it was, out in the open for Conscience to hear. It stood in all its malignant glory—the worst sentence uttered to her in her life. The sham of her happy childhood lay wracked and ruined on the rocks.
“I don’t understand. Don’t you love me and mummy anymore?”
It was pitiful. That was all her six-year-old self could say. She felt the gentle patter of rain on her cheek.
“It’s not that,” said Ethan immediately. “It’s not your fault. I do love you still. It’s just your mum and me…well. We’ve been fighting more. You must have seen that?”
“You and mum have been fighting more,” said the little Lucy, her face down cast.
“How does that make you feel?”
“It makes me sad. But I…but I…”
“Yes?”
“I don’t want you to go.”
“I know, Lucybelle, but living with your mum makes me sad. And I’ll still come and see you.”
The vision began to fade, like fog in the rain.
Was that it?
Lucy nodded as she wiped the rain from her cheek.
No fuss? No bawling? Just a patient questioning and then acceptance? You accepted his story just like that? Where’s the drama in that?
“What?” she asked, actually shocked.
You were six, and your father tells you he’s going to leave. He does it in a public place so you can’t throw a tantrum, and you just accept it? You didn’t even cry.
“I don’t cry.”
You little liar! All right, you may not have shed tears, but you’ve whined enough when it’s only been you and me. ‘Conscience, it’s too hard,’ ‘Conscience, what are we going to do?’ Your father left you and your mum. That doesn’t give you the right to be an ice queen. You’ve got to let some people in Lucy. Not everyone will leave.
She spun to face the ostrich, fuming with anger. All of her pent-up emotions came roaring out like a tsunami. An odd sensation rumbled in her chest, deep below the coercion spell.
“How dare you! Would it make you feel happier to see me cry? Would that entertain you? Where’s the drama?” she spat the words at him. “Did you want to hear me scream for him to stay? To have him try to explain to his six-year-old daughter that he just didn’t love her mother anymore? That he was leaving her, and me, for a barmaid named Rachel? Would that make you happy?”
Why did you bring me here if you’re going to lie to me? Why show me these things if they are not real?
“It is real, and I’m glad my memory has disappointed you. This is how I remember it.”
It’s not what happened, is it? It’s what you choose to remember. You forget bits. There was a girl on the swings next to you; what colour clothes was she wearing?
“I don’t know. Blue?”
She wore green, but you can’t be sure. This is your memory. Things in here change. Look at me. I was a dog now I’m a… What am I?
“You’re an ostrich.”
See? Everything is in flux. You can’t rely on your memory for accuracy. Your father may have said those things to you, or he may not have. We can’t tell from this data because it is subjective—not empirical.
“I wasn’t even bitter at him,” said Lucy, all the fight gone from her.
Who? Your father?
“He abandoned my mother and me, but I still wanted him. Having him back was all I ever wanted for those seven years, just him back. He was still my dad, and I missed him every day. It felt like having a chunk ripped from inside me and never having it filled back up again.”
Her eyes were stinging again, but she couldn’t let herself cry. It wasn’t what she did. She coped. Her father had left her, and she coped.
“The fling with the barmaid ended in just over three months, but he never came back. He just moved into a flat and kept paying the alimony to my mum. He never said sorry, but he never asked for forgiveness or understanding either. It simply was what it was. Then it all changed again when he went to work on the oil rig.”
The surroundings changed. The park was gone. Instead, everything around them was metal. A salt spray filled their nostrils and gulls caucused overhead.
“Oh no,” Lucy entreated the world, “please don’t show me this too.”
Whatever god it was who looked after little girls in their own memories remained unmoved by her supplications.
What don’t you want to see again? Where are we?
“It’s the oil platform he went to work on. This is the day he died,” she said, as flat as a frozen lake.
There was a soft wet flap beside her and Conscience flopped into a seal to coincide with the nautical theme.
They stood in an alcove just off the main forecourt. Gigantic pipes surrounded them like a gunmetal bamboo forest carrying god knew what to god knew where. In the quadrangle’s centre was a large hole, like the maw of some mythical beast. A monstrous, umbilical pipe went through the opening sucking the rich oil from beneath the sea floor in huge pecuniary gulps. An extra section of pipe was suspended by two large chains from a crane.
Lucy knew this story well; she’d replayed it in her mind every day since she’d heard about it. She tried to turn her face away, to forestall the accident by ignoring it, but she couldn’t. Her neck was stiff, unresponsive; she must watch.
She guessed the hairline fracture had already begun in one of the chain’s links. It would cause the chain to break and allow the pipe to make its swinging death arc towards her father.
She closed her eyes, wishing the fracture together again. She tried to make the atoms bond, to make the electrons fuse with the power of her mind, but it was impossible, like sailing up river in a sieve. The fissure continued across the linkage as inexorable as an earthquake in a fault zone.
Her eyes were startled open by the voice on the forecourt. The rich Louisiana drawl, like a mixture of honey and wine, looped across the air.
“Hey, Ethan. What you got ’round your wrist?” The voice came from a man in the crane’s cockpit. He wore a blue, sweat-stained, denim jacket and oil-slick, denim jeans. His hard-hat skewed awkwardly across his balding head. His piggy eyes fixed on the small band of purple crystals on Ethan’s wrist.
“This?” asked her father, pointing at the bracelet. “It’s a bracelet my daughter sent me in the mail.”
“Don’t move dad,” Lucy whispered at the elements. “Don’t go and show him your bracelet. If you don’t move
, it can’t happen. Stay where you are and you’ll be safe.”
It was useless she knew. She couldn’t change the past. He would move, and he would die, nothing she did could alter that fact.
“It’s really cool,” Ethan said to the man with the piggy eyes. “Look, she made it from tiny pieces of amethyst. You wanna see?”
He began his final walk towards his friend.
The chain, holding the pipe, snapped; it was that simple. There was one second when he could have avoided the swinging pipe. He saw it heading towards him and there was just enough time for him to move, instead, he froze. Then the time passed; it was too late. The pipe hit him, crushing him between itself and the office wall.
Workers thawed, moving to help the victim, but it was too late. The spectral voyeurs grieved at the river of blood blubbing beneath the pipe, falling into the indiscriminate ocean.
Conscience was impressed that Lucy was still conscious as she cried openly. She’d just witnessed her father’s death. Most people would have fainted. Could you faint in your own sub-conscience?
“There, are you happy now? Now you know,” she screamed as she turned to face the seal.
Wait. I know what?
“It’s my fault. It’s my fault he died!”
Pardon?
“If I hadn’t sent him that stupid bracelet, he wouldn’t have…wouldn’t have…” she couldn’t say it again.
It’s not real, Lucy; it’s even less actual than the other memory. In that one, you were at least present. You saw those things occurring. Even so, you’re not here. You’re supposing how it happened. It’s a fantasy, nothing more. This isn’t the truth.
There was a cracking sound, and the seal became a polar bear. He loomed over her in his new frame like a snow-covered mountain. His thick, soft, white fur blew lazily in the breeze.
Even if this was how it happened, continued Conscience, his voice soft and warming, it’s still not your fault. You didn’t cause it. You gave him a gift. You showed him you loved him. He died knowing that, and that’s a beautiful thing. It’s all anyone can ask—to love and be loved in return.
Ravens and Writing Desks: A Metaphysical Fantasy Page 11