Pond: Stories by Claire-Louise Bennett Read Free Book Online Page A

what I’ve concluded and, in fact, from time to time, it has been pointed out to me, with varying degrees of infuriation and despair, that I’d do well to cultivate a more conventionally orientated set of needs. Which always comes as a bit of a blow it must be said, because, on occasion, I have gone quite out of my mind with love, and yet, as it turns out, that isn’t quite the same thing. But, tell me, what is one supposed to do exactly? Get cosy? Get cosy, perhaps? Get cosy! They stand there, you see, these terrifying and familiar entities. They stand at the door, a little before seven, with a bag containing God knows what. Some wine. Some flowers. Things like that. And I’ll hear them coming. I’ll hear the gravel, and when I hear the gravel I put myself in another room, the kitchen, the bathroom, sometimes, even, I’ll put myself upstairs. I hear the gravel and the hook drop and the lower part of the door open and then, after a crumbling pause, footsteps, not many, over the stone floor. As this awful and accustomed entity makes its way in.
    No, I’m not there, never there to greet him when he arrives. What does he look at while he stands waiting I wonder, andwhat thoughts pass through his mind? It is not immediately that he calls out to me and I cannot help but feel he must be looking at something and often the feeling that he is looking at something becomes so abrading I eventually tip-toe, lopsided, from out my hiding place. I come down the stairs or out of one of the adjacent rooms, always holding something, such as a towel. A towel, a newspaper I haven’t been reading, a piece of laundry, a glass. Like something reclaimed and brought back from another world. And I don’t stop. I pass right through and vanish into another part of the house. As if the item I’m holding needs to be presented somewhere as a matter of sacred urgency.
    Such domestic fluttering is always interpreted as a cue, to move a little further in and set their bag of things upon a chair. I can hear it all from the kitchen; I almost always end up in the kitchen. Looking at the dishes and the knives in the plate rack, then down at the worktop, listening. Listening. In the kitchen, near the sink, some aspect of me is waning, and I cannot pin down exactly why. I feel utterly flimsy, yet I don’t look in the mirror, nothing like that; I just stand for a moment, my back to the door and my tapering hands side by side on the worktop, pressing down. Pressing down with the concentrated effort of trying to give myself a little more density. I go to the doorway. I go to the window. I go to the entrance and push closed the top half of the door. And then I move across to the fireplace; sometimes I put both hands flat against the oak beam, and then I turn, and then I finally turn.
    But no, that is not it. I appear to have turned but I have only twisted in fact; some of me has turned, and some of me has remained away. And yet it is an adequate gesture, enough to create a general impression of having turned fully and thus of being engaged and unopposed, even of enjoying theconversation perhaps. I do not have the courage to take the risk. To risk turning entirely and coming to face something very ordinary. I couldn’t stand that so I stay twisted. And then I reach for my glass and I drink. I drink in order to—what?—become untwisted? Isn’t that perfectly commonplace? Isn’t that what’s proverbially known as drinking to unwind? But no, that’s not it. That’s not it either. It’s the location, actually—appearing to be located, to be precise—that’s what I object to, and somehow wish to dispel. I want to shove the walls away and for the stone floor to turn to sand. I say such silly, merciless things indoors, the walls and floor and ceiling press so much acidic nonsense out of me—I become defensive, critical, intractable and remote. Impossible! No, there are times when men and women don’t belong inside rooms.
    We’d be better off silently