Hollows (For S)

She is young and old. Old like the pebbles on the beach with their ancient fossil creatures entombed within; but not as old as those that have been worn away to grains of sand. She sits there, looking out to sea, wrapped in woollen hat and scarf and gloves, woollen coat and trousers. She is like some schoolchild from the 1930s picked up and put down again some seventy years later.

The pebbles, stacked up like a monstrous wall with an almost sheer cliff face drop from sea defences to shore, are hard beneath her, where she sits. On the beach, dogs race each other and themselves, back and forth, and round and round, mad with the joy of sea spray and wind, racing time, letting their ears blow behind them as they face the wind head-on, tongues lolling from panting mouths that make them look as though they are laughing. Asthmatic laughing, but joyful.

She is protected from the wind, inside her woollen layers, but it kisses gently against her face. Its kisses are cold on her skin, and she tries to remember the last time she was naked in someone else’s presence; to remember what it felt like, who she was then. She tries to recall how the sheets felt against her skin; her hair falling over her shoulders. She can’t, because that would be invention. She won’t allow herself to remember the facts; the roughness of the carpet against her back; the bruising on her spine; the roughness of his mouth against her breast; his hand pulling her hair; snapping her head back, so she could not look at him; his hand covering her eyes when she tried. She doesn’t want to remember that, or who the woman was to let that happen.

She thinks, instead, of marbles. The tins and bags of them she and her brother had as children. The feel of the glass when you rolled a fistful of them against each other in your hand; the way the glass surfaces would crunch and grate against each other; the cold, almost metallic feel of them inside her mouth. Glass marbles taste like fear. They fill your mouth with fear and make you gag. Some of the older marbles were pitted with craters, where the force of impact in play had chipped away the surface. Those were the ones that grated the most, the ones that tasted of chaos and death. She shudders to remember.

A long time ago, she was small and young and still almost innocent. But glass marbles in her mouth told her everything she needed to know about life.

She is wearing a silver ring on the third finger of her right hand. In cold weather, her fingers are thin, and the ring slips around, too big, but smooth as well, on the inside. She can feel that the ring is loose inside her glove, that the smoothness of its crafted circle is moving against her finger.

In her bag she has a notebook, and a green pen from MOMA. The pen is a green plastic labyrinth, and there are tiny silver ball bearings trapped inside. Smaller than the sugary ball bearings you can buy to decorate a cake with. Tiny, like the ball point in a ball point pen. The pen is an impossible puzzle to complete, but it is fresh and green, and sits in her bag, waiting to be utilised.

She is unable to write today. She has taken the notebook and the labyrinthine pen from her bag over a dozen times. At the kitchen table this morning, toast and jam on a plate in front of her, a window looking out over the bay there for her to gaze through. Curled up in an armchair in the living room, snuggled inside a blanket, in front of the fire, waiting for the weather to decide its action for the day. Here, on the pebbles in front of the sea, in this winter-spring hinterland of cold winds and dampness in the air. Writing is not for her today, though. The ink stutters from the pen, and the words refuse to even stutter from her mind. She is a blank, content to listen to the sea; happy to watch daft dogs circling on the beach.

She can no longer write to the formula expected of her. She can no longer surrender to the free association of her thoughts. She is stuck. Abandoned. Uninspired and far too calm to care. In her daylight, waking hours, she is a ship whose sails won’t catch the wind; who sits and waits for inspiration to strike once more.

She has been here forever; for the period of her entire existence, and that of the planet, of the universe. She has been here and never moved, staring out at that same cold, green sea. And yet, she only arrived two, maybe three hours ago. All of this clean and fresh to her eyes, all of it painfully familiar.

She came here to escape. Her mind needed rest and peace. When she opened up the house again, turning on heating to chase away the damp, pulling back the heavy shutters on the outsides of the windows, the light came through from the outside and showed up traces of the last time she was here. The rabbits peered out at her from the dull bronze of the bracken at the back of the house. They are slower in the winter. They were huddled together, their eyes shining back at her as she looked out of the kitchen window.

Pots, pans and glassware that had not been put into cupboards needed to be cleaned again, and the first hours back in the house were spent fixing small jobs like that one. The clean sheets and bed linen she had brought with her from home were put onto the bed, and the sheets and towels that had been tucked away in the airing cupboard during her absence were brought out to air in front of heaters and radiators. All of these things she did alone, in the silence of this big stone house that sits among the bracken on the side of a mountain, a hundred miles from what she had left behind. A hundred miles, and a hundred years.

You can't go back to the start. She knows that. Things have happened that ruined all the positives there were between them. She is no longer able to go back and make them good again. The only way forward is to start over, trying to find new positives, hoping that the new will be as good as the old once were. The old positives underpinned everything that they were together, and enabled forgiveness, but now they no longer work. Some things happen that ruin them completely. Her choice now is whether to start over as part of a pair, or whether to take this opportunity to be free, with her own positives, and the hollow of missing him to fill.

So she sits here on the pebbles, and thinks about marbles and the taste of fear and death in her mouth. She could use the pebbles to fill the hollow, but even all the pebbles on this beach, and all those lying at the bottom of the sea, and along the coast, would be too few to fill that space. She is everything and all of time, but he is even more. The hollow where he was feels bigger than the universe right now. Throwing pebbles into it would be like trying to fill a black hole with grains of salt.

Lies and corruption on all sides. His lies far worse than her own, though. She only toyed with the idea. She didn’t go out with the idea that out of sight and out of mind meant the usual rules no longer applied. And the hollow that is left by the knowledge that he did is larger even than the hollow of missing him.

The pebbles clink as they hit each other during the infinite fall into the void. She stares out to sea, cold and grey-green, wrapped in woollens and hard as nails, but melting, distorting. Failing.

She places pebbles into her pockets, lets them fall through the holes she has cut there, so that they fill the edges of the lining of her coat. She shakes them round, standing upright on top of the pebble cliff; she feels the weight of them, and knows they will do the trick.

She crashes down the pebbles, sliding her feet into the mass of them, leaving behind a trail. Landing safely on the beach, she strides purposefully towards the sea, trying not to think of how cold it looks, how cold it must be. She wades out to waist deep, and the coldness of it shocks and thrills her. She gasps when the cold first hits her.

Moving out against the waves, the water becomes deeper, and the sandbar falls away beneath her feet. Her instinct is to swim, but the pebbles that line the inside of her coat want to pull her down, and she surrenders to their will.

As her head goes under the water, she hears dogs barking, and people shouting. She keeps her eyes open, so that she can see the glassy grey-green of her underwater resting place on the way down, but the salt water stings her eyes. She is sinking, and the air she had saved inside her lungs is beginning to burn, telling her that she needs to gulp more in or die. She knows that if she gulps, she will only draw in water, flooding her lungs with liquid instead of air.

She breathes in the sea through her nose, and suddenly arms pull her up out of the water, and she is spluttering and gasping, and air instead of water is rasping into her lungs.

She is pulled onto the beach, and she vomits salt water into the sand beside her head. She hears voices above her, raining down on her from the sky, but they do not make sense, and instead she concentrates on the chocolate coloured face of the dog that has come to lie down more than an arm’s-length away from her. Its eyes are a dark brown, too, and the whites are very white. She stares at it for a long time, it seems to her, and then the blackness descends.

© J R Hargreaves August 2006