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

overlapping each other; next to a river or beneath the clouds or among the long grass— somewhere, anywhere, where something is moving. Isn’t that right? Shouldn’t we be somewhere where something is moving? It’s the treacherous stillness I can’t stand. When so much is at risk what sense can it make to be somewhere where apparently nothing is moving? There is music, of course, but selecting it is such a colossal anxiety—so often it comes out wrong and warps things, like a poison, casting me in some dimensionless and highly-strung role, an eternally spurned revenant in fact. Preposterous really, yet barely surprising. They sit there, you see, biding their time, these awful and accustomed entities, clueless, quite clueless anyhow, it seems, to the music, to the compressed hands and sipping breath, to the craning shadows. Perfectly composed and biding their time. Awaiting that kiss which somehow settles everything. And I have to try, so very hard, not to say something imploring and unsophisticated,such as: I only wish you could just spend five minutes beneath my skin and feel what it’s like. Feel the savage swarming magic I feel. But an invitation of this sort achieves nothing, worse than nothing: it comes to them as a threat. A threat they scrapple to keep at bay by tethering worn out schemes of placid cosiness about the place. They move about your home depositing things here and there, making ordinary noises along the way, like it’s perfectly acceptable. It’s ridiculous and quite untenable to become enraged and put off by such gentle armaments as these, yet I cannot settle, and so I drink. I drink to you; I drink to me. I drink to plough and fortify a one-track mind and suddenly, briefly, the blood surrenders, shuffles through the old channels, and there is no such thing as a false move.

To A God Unknown
    A leaf came in through the window and dropped directly onto the water between my knees as I sat in the bath looking out. It was a thoroughly square window and I had it open completely, with the pane pushed right back against the wall. It was there, level with the rim of the bath—I didn’t have to stretch or lean; it was almost as if I were in the coniferous tree that continued upwards, how tall. There was a storm, an old storm, going around and around the mountain, visiting the mountains again perhaps after who knows how long, trying to get somewhere, going nowhere.
    And to begin with nothing, just a storm, nothing original, nothing I hadn’t heard before. I went about my business for a while until it struck me I should disconnect the cables and thus the lights went out on those small matters I endeavour to attend to and I didn’t mind very much because the matters were straightforward and already composed and yet were at the same time quite beyond me at that moment. It was of no great consequence really. I got into the water which had been waiting for some time, the temperature loosening, and then I had the idea about opening the window wide, which I did with no difficulty despite the rigid appearance of the clasp.
    And then, from there, it was possible, unavoidable really, to listen to the storm going around and around, and I knew it was an old one that had come back—it seemed to know exactly where it was and there was such intimacy in its movement and in the sound it made as it went along and around and around. Yes, I thought, you know these mountains and the mountains are familiar with you also. No—it was not raging, it was not simply raging—I heard no element of anger in fact. How loud it was and yet so fragile, stopping and starting for a long time— it didn’t know where to begin, but it was by no means frantic, either, not at all. I moved a web of lather about the roots of my hair and became immersed in the body of the storm; I knew its structure, saw its eyes, felt its past, and I empathised with its entreaty. It had style, it was experienced; and it came back, and it came back