The Shifting Pools

by The Shifting Pools (epub)

  I was standing outside the bar now, looking in through the pane that was gathering condensation on the inside, the sweat of all the energy being released, running in droplets down the glass. I watched as one droplet after another was born, bulked up, and began to descend down the window, tentatively at first, then gathering speed, until it reached the bottom and disappeared.

  I could see their table from here, nestled in the corner, cosy and inviting. It was already covered with various drinks and plates of tapas. John was just finishing some anecdote, whereupon they all laughed loudly, John slapping his thigh and elbowing the man next to him, trying to eke out a little more acknowledgement.

  I saw Maria, who had joined the team only a few months before, sipping from her flute, and eyeing John over the rim, using her long lashes to full effect. As she caught John’s eye, she lowered her gaze, smiling coyly. Her sights had been well and truly set for the evening. If I entered now, John would be thrown. He’d made no secret of his interest in me, and I had made my lack of interest equally clear. But, he would still have found it impossible to openly pursue anyone right in front of me, just in case.

  As I watched the vignette through the glass, the beer sloshing casually around the tumblers, the genuine relaxation of the faces of some, the expectation clearly written on others, I knew I couldn’t go in. Not tonight. I wasn’t capable of that tonight. I watched for a few more precious seconds, peering into a world I envied in its bubble. And then I turned away.

  Enanti: the present

  Wreckage

  Raul cast his eyes around the ruins of another village – pillaged in the night, torched and left as embers. He knew that they would find few survivors here. It was the same story all over Enanti. Anyone found alive was captured by the forces of the Shadow Beast, and pulled off screaming to damnation. He closed his eyes as he felt the terror here from the night before, his heart heavy with sorrow.

  He knew that the forces of evil were on the move, raiding further and further into Enanti, bolder with each passing week. The Free, those who lived still beyond the control of the Shadow Beast, were retreating increasingly into the woods, pushed to the very margins of their land in order to hide and survive. This was a Dark Age for Enanti – a land at war, its people clinging on to the edges of life, fleeing the forces of the Shadow Realm.

  Raul sat around the snapping fire that evening with his friends. It was a glorious night – stars thrown wide into the pitch sky, silhouetting the trees that surrounded them. But the lack of clouds meant the temperatures were plummeting, and he was glad of the fire tonight.

  He had to see Minerva. He had to know when this woman, Eve, was going to come. There was so much at stake here now, and she was crucial to this fight. He needed her. She had to come soon. Minerva would know – she would be able to see in her visions when this Eve would arrive.

  How often have you sailed in my dreams.

  And now you come in my awakening,

  which is my deeper dream

  Kahlil Gibran

  London: the present

  Haunted

  I walked through the damp avenue of trees that lined the main path of the graveyard. I didn’t come here often – and if I did, it was always alone. The only person I could have handled being with me would be Marni, but I preferred the solitary option.

  It had been my aunt’s idea – the stone memorial here to my family. It contained none of their remains, obviously, but Vi had felt it appropriate to mark their lives with this more permanent headstone – a place to come and remember. Everyone remembers such different things, standing facing a grave. It is such a personal thing, that re-ignition of your inner memory receptors – all firing up at once, making connections that were long forgotten, allowing space to feel the past.

  I never remembered them best at this memorial, but I did occasionally feel the pull to come here and just stand a while. Maybe Vi had been right about that.

  I thought back to that small service, when we had stood around the stone, solemnly committing their souls to God. I had felt disturbed by the lack of any mound with earth heaped over it. I didn’t know how I noticed the lack of it – perhaps because it was always like that in films. But the earth was smooth and untouched in the shadow of the stately headstone. It chilled me. Not only was it a reminder that they were not really there, but it made me angry, too – angry that the passing of their lives, my life, had not been noted by the earth. Nothing had changed here, no soil was rent or split in empathy with this loss. All was as it had ever been.

  I’d felt cheated then, standing there beside this hollow grave, furious that the earth itself was not screaming out my pain for me. Marni, standing next to me, had instinctively known not to try to hold my hand – I needed the honesty of being utterly alone. My auntie Vi had not understood this, taking my hand after the service, patting it awkwardly with her spare one, and busying me along to the refreshments waiting in the Church Hall.

  Vi’s was a strange need to comfort; a few pats on the hand was acknowledgement enough, and then she was determined to keep me ‘too busy to be sad’ – she had immediately handed me a plate of sandwiches to pass around. Marni’s way was to allow me the space I needed to work out my own way of comfort, if any could be found at the time.

  These images from years ago played through my mind as I approached the headstone now. More than two decades had gone by, and I had only come here a handful of times. With my hands deep in my pockets, and my coat buttoned tightly against the blustery chill, I read the words carved into the stone:

  In Memory:

  Elizabeth and Patrick Lanner,

  and their beloved children Hugo and Laila Lanner,

  snatched from us far too soon.

  A beautiful family, with so much to live for.

  We will always remember them.

  Survived by their daughter and sister, Eve Lanner

  Under that it had the dates of each of their lives – the brief snatch of time each one of them had lived on this earth. But I had always found the wording hard to read; if this ‘beautiful family’ had been snatched away, where did that leave me? This had been my family. Had I been snatched away too – in any sense that mattered? It made me feel as if I didn’t really exist - that I was just a flickering hologram that remained, forever lacking the voltage to snap into proper focus. A family can’t be just one person, can it? So this Lanner family had gone – and I had never really known where that left me. Somewhere between the ether of being and not being – an archive of family memory and witness. But no longer a member of anything. I was reading my own gravestone. They might just as well have carved my own name on there at the bottom. Some nights I had ached for that; had asked the forces of the universe to make it so. But they hadn’t. They had kept me alive, like a conscious body part, where the rest of the body had died off. I was still attached to something that wasn’t alive any more. What are you meant to do in that situation? Drag it along behind you?

  I didn’t kneel at the headstone; rather I used the time simply to stand and think. To think of happier times, and agonising times. To think of those who had known everything about me – had watched me take my first breath, my first steps, enjoy my first party. I obviously hadn’t thought it consciously at the time, but I was fully known then, and I ached for that. I knew I never would be again. Those shared moments of childhood are irreplaceable. I had assumed that my brother and sister, at least, would be there always, travelling through life with me, bringing something precious out of the past into the future. I yearned for that familiarity, for the way my brother used to ruffle my hair, the way my sister had pressed into me when she’d sneaked into my bed in the night. I yearned for my mother to put down my favourite meal in front of me at the weekend, not needing to ask what I liked. Just knowing. Teaching me that I was known. Just knowing the most mundane things about someone can actually be the most intimate knowing; a knowing that is
one step ahead, never forced, just aware, due to the intimacy of shared life.

  And I thought especially of little Laila here. Was I the only one left to remember now? At least there’s me, I thought, fiercely. There’s me, Laila, and I will always remember.

  As I stood there, I felt my skin prickle. Glancing up I saw a little girl standing in the gathering gloom under the mass of an old oak, behind the headstone. She was small and slight, with dark glossy curls that were blowing in the wind. She wasn’t wearing enough clothes for this weather – just a thin cotton dress – but she stood completely still, looking at me. I started, physically jolted by the sight.

  “Laila?” I gasped. I shook my head, for a fleeting moment thinking that my own yearning thoughts had conjured her up. This little girl was older than Laila, but looked just like her. When I looked again, she was gone.

  Dream

  The ice bridge

  We were being attacked. The high, empty walls of the castle rang out with shouts and the clang of metal on metal. I saw figures moving in the shadows, behind enormous pillars: samurai-like, melting into the shadows. Mysterious and covered. I was trying to escape with my friend, but it was hard to know where we should be fleeing to. The fighters had breached the walls, and they seemed to be everywhere, encircling us. I crouched down in the darkness of the external courtyard, near a large gate. I carried no weapon myself. I don’t know why I and the person with me were to be helped to escape. I didn’t know who the person was.

  I eventually saw my chance and ran for the gate. I was outside the castle now - feeling extremely exposed and vulnerable. Hunted. I had never left the castle before. I looked around at the walls and battlements, and saw the immense, fast-flowing river at its side. It was night, and the depth of winter. A canopy of stars furnished the heavens. Some of them fell down from the sky, and they sizzled a little as they rained down into the icy river, adding to the shards of ice.

  I saw a very narrow bridge of ice, leading out over the river into the darkness. It was incredibly beautiful, with effortless arches and turrets like a fairy carriage, all carved in ice, glowing with soft lights from within. Ethereal beauty promising an escape from the turmoil that roiled beneath. It vaulted out over the onyx water, seeming to float just above the tumult, serene and elegant. Part of me wanted to cross that bridge, to flee to the other side, but I was worried I would end up in the icy river, which flowed fiercely, just a few inches below the bridge. It was a magical, luminous structure, promising much. Tantalising. But I knew it couldn’t take my weight. I turned away from the bridge, and into the night.

  By the sea: the present

  Sea glass

  Whenever I went to the sea I always felt a release of pressure. As if a breath I had been holding could finally be let out. I could venture out from my shell a little.

  I was standing on the cliff tops, in the wind. I recalled an exchange with Claire from just a few weeks before. I had been talking about how I shut my feelings down, to survive and keep going. I had said simply:

  “I have found a way to turn off the wind, but now I am starved of oxygen.”

  It was true, I had found a way – but it only worked for finite bursts, before the need to escape overwhelmed me. Then I would come here, to the sea, to the wind. I needed it. It was just enough to feed what was inside me, prevent it from going out. I would stand in the wind; feel its power. I understood it, and it understood me.

  This was a place with a completely flat horizon - a space that allows your mind to expand and wander. No distracting landmarks or features. True calm. The contours of the land are smoothed down to a pure, unrestrained line – a sense of the infinite. Infinite simplicity. You can transpose on to the sea: imprint your own deepest feelings there. It is boundless enough to be the backdrop you need it to be, to hold everything. I needed that vastness today.

  I looked out over the eternal waves. It was only in this space, this edge-land, that I felt able to unlock the powerful sentiments within myself – as if their magnitude could only be released when in the presence of something still more immense. It felt soothing to be so small. The sea was such a vast expanse that I could take my fears, my hopes, my griefs, and lay them out a little; look at them.

  I always felt a particular closeness to ‘other’ here; the veil between worlds was stretched so thin. So thin that you could almost feel what you had lost, almost reach out and touch it. Being by the sea allowed me to grieve. Little punches of time I allowed myself to feel that enormity of loss.

  I enjoy the wonderful dichotomy between the eternal you sense by the sea, and the constant daily flux. The crafted castle just waiting to be washed away, the secret beach you must leave before your way back is cut off. You are always on borrowed time; walking these magical places for a fleeting moment – a brief window into a world that is then hidden and washed anew; never entirely the same again. The constancy of change.

  As I stood up there on the bluff, the wind picking up around me, I saw a tiny figure down on the shore, dressed in nothing more than a summer dress tied in bows at the shoulders. The little girl was standing still in the wind, staring out to sea. I gasped. Laila. Why was I being punished like this?

  I started along the rough path that led down to the beach, desperate to reach her. Scrabbling over the jumble of rocks and branches, I glanced in her direction. As I did so, I saw Laila turn around, look at me, and place something carefully on the sand. I hurried on, slipping a few times on the loose stones, and eventually gaining the sand. The little girl had vanished.

  I reached down and picked up some sand, letting it slip out through my fingers. These fragments have been ground down over millennia, I mused, watching them fall. The power of the waves comforts me: so thunderingly powerful. Could they wash everything away? The sea is life to me. It soothes, it caresses, it ravages and cuts. It washes away some of the things you can’t let go of. You can swim, or you can drown. It is life.

  I walked over to where the little girl had been, and my eye was caught by a glow from the sand. I scooped up the piece of sea glass that was lying there. It was beautiful, rubbed smooth and frosted by the sea. A pale blue. I ran my thumb over its surface, and felt a deep longing. It was broken and damaged, but beautiful in its new, altered state. So tactile, such a gift. I felt the poignancy of the moment as I held it.

  What happens to all those abraded parts of you? Where do they go? Is there some beach somewhere that all the little lost parts of yourself wash up on to, like all this sand? Can you ever go there?

  I slipped the sea glass into my pocket. It aroused a sense of connection within me that I couldn’t examine too closely. After some time, just looking out at the sea, I dragged in a breath deep enough to last me several months, zipped up my coat to the top, turned and left.

  It took me much longer to reach the tops of the cliffs again. As I did, I turned to take a last look at the sea. A tiny figure was walking alone along the strand line, dark curls flattening against her head as the stinging rain began to come down. I watched in anguish as the little girl wandered along the shore, around the headland and out of sight.

  London: the present

  Incantation

  Back in London, I accepted an invitation from Vi to a choral concert. As I listened to the swell of voices, I wanted to cry. The purity of the sound washed right through me, holding me in thrall. Why had I stayed away so long? It was soothing, enlivening, devastating. It spoke to my spirit in a way that I had allowed nothing to for so many years.

  I had sung in a choir like this one, before, when I was happy. I had loved the process of making a communal sound that rose and rose, becoming something far greater than the promise of the constituent parts. Our choir mistress was a formidable lady – I remember her now, her hair in a ferocious bun, jet-blue mascara magnified by the glasses she always wore, giving her a severe, owl-like expression. She did not suffer fools – a trait she was c
learly proud of, mentioning it verbatim on several occasions to cowering parents who had the temerity to question her approach. I loved her passion – loved the sharp click of Mrs Hazeldean’s heels on the parquet floor in the colonial school hall, her relentless attention to detail, to the blend of sound, the slim wand she wielded in her right hand, weaving her magic on the rapt choristers. I loved the rigour of it, the feeling of being forged in a fire, the alchemy of transformation. And god, what a transformation! The motley assortment of voices became something so pure, something so special to be a part of, that I lived for those moments.

  I had tried being a part of the choir again at my new school, afterwards, in England, but it wasn’t the same. Nothing was the same. The wonder that I found in singing turned into a blade, that cut too close to something too raw. There was not enough of a scab there yet to withstand the sweet agony of the sound. I asked to leave the choir, but my aunt was so convinced that I needed ‘normality’ in my life that she insisted the school kept me on. So I shut my ears to that sound, stood there robotically going through the motions for several more terms, until I managed to do myself out of a position organically. With other talented singers in the school, and competition hot for places, the choir mistress had simply not picked me.

  Memories of those times moved through me, swirling gently with the ebb and flow of the voices in the church.

  “They’re marvellous, aren’t they darling?” I heard Vi say.