Image courtesy of the commons collection at The Library of Congress.

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“Walking will do you good,” admonished the doctor.

So she walks sometimes up to two miles a day. The countryside lends itself to this, as it is lonely but not desolate. It speaks graciously in a voice that beckons you to nature, a hand cupped into a brook. There are no sinister creatures to be afraid of. Perhaps the wild boars, and the trolls, but her mythology is of quite a different sort, so she inhabits a kind of bubble, protected by ignorance she thinks.  The road curls with its graveled skin rutted and fissured by the farmer’s tractor wheels. On either side the forest leans in, interrupted by fields carved out by human hands. In the distance the cows stand, watching as a lone walker huddles along the verges to allow the tractor to pass.

She peers over the wire fence. The miniature scene appears; the old shrub that looks like a tree stands not more than two metres tall, trapped within its imaginary world. That little world could be painted as an entire pastoral scene. On the roots she could almost see a young shepherd playing his flute, a wagon drawn by desolate beasts rolling through the pool.  Yes, pastoral, now who was it she once viewed in a museum in London?

“Forgetfulness, that’s to be expected, with the medication,” The doctor remarked nonchalantly.

Forgetfulness like the fog that rolls in over the lake, its mysterious form blanketing the house, the town, making the world silent and expectant, in a kind of endless frustration that hollows out into lethargy. She eventually accepts the gift of oblivion that arrives with it.

She ducks under the fence and circles the tree, then heads into the forest; the spongy ground is surprising beneath her feet. The moss has covered most of the rocks in a brilliant green that absorbs the light. When the sky goes dark, threatening, this colour becomes luminous, almost assaulting to the eyes. The dry pine cones and sticks litter the ground and the smell is astringent like a new born world.  She misses the rowan, its cheerfulness now completely gone; the silver birch whose rustle signifies the coming of new things, also gone. Now is the time of the pines’ reign. High in the embrace of the firs, in this evergreen world, the little bird sings a high lilting song.  She strains to see the two tiny birds; does it have a red breast, the winter bird, it is called? She has meant to ask her husband its proper name, but she has forgotten in talk of wallpaper and bathroom fittings.

The weather is mild for this time of year. There has been no snow and it is now January. In some parts of America the polar vortex has hit the upper state of Michigan and of course Canada, where some of her family are living. Images of trees broken by ice, driveways covered in metres of snow. She has even seen a video of creeping ice on the social media forums. Global warming, they say. For her it has meant pleasant weather and more walking time. However, she knows what appears good can actually be bad. We see only the minutia in the pattern, and the pattern is so expansive, so colossal. Small stuff, her father used to say. There is a macro-universe and a micro-universe, both of equal weight, size and importance.

She passes the place where the farmer had lost his son. The boy had crashed into a tree riding his moped too fast, slicing his liver and dying with regretful words on his lips. The farmer’s wife Salome she considers such a brave woman. She manages to live on full of expectation and hope. No wallowing in grief for her, but maybe in private there are desperate moments, just like there are for all of us. Yet Naomi admires her all the same, this tenacity to positivity. If you live long enough inevitably death seeps in, small stories waiting to unfurl, like a shriveled leaf carried in the palm of the hand.

I see you stepping out from behind a tree, my dear friend. Your eyes like cold cucumber sandwiches wrapped in cellophane. Between us lies the multitude of emails, letters, phone conversation; a dreary wash line of communication wrung out to dry. The truth is: was there ever anything there to hold us, to bind us? Two teenage girls connected by their disconnectedness. Never the correct weight, correct skin tone. We read too much, had the wrong families. I suppose we hung on to each other, being sniggered at, possibly, by those girls with eighteen inch waist lines who had prospects.

With a start she acknowledges the ingenuity of this.  So many secrets and possibilities lie hidden in this forest, unbidden they come each time she walks.

Maybe I am wrong. It’s as simple as that.

She carries on walking along the pathway that is ancient and haphazardly cleared, where the ferns grow profusely between the rocks, giant reminders of a tropical place, like the place in which she was born: a place of real horrors and nightmares, but she has learned the world is filled with horrors real and imagined.  She passes an ant-hill, a mountainous endeavor of spit and forest decay, a home constructed of the recycled bones of the wilderness. It makes her shudder, to imagine this hidden and unsuspecting hive erupting, millions of fiery ants released, their venom charged in defense of home and self.

Yet you follow me, your tread like a wisp of smoke that curls out of the chimney of a darkened house, an intimation of a light and life inside.  I look at you and remember the time we swam in the ocean at day-break. We had sat up into the night listening to Meatloaf, the album so erotic and yearning, our hearts held in a flicker of candlelight, offered up to the gods of unrequited love. We talked of secrets, and likes and all the minuscule details of teenage life that are so important at that time, and yet you, my trusted friend, my confidant, betrayed me.  And despite all, I forgave you many times over.

I saw you two through the doorway; yes, you Marianne, kissing the boy I then considered the love of my life. Afterwards you said it so casually, that you had “got off with” him; a kind of serial kisser you were and I forgave you. Everything else came after.

Two weeks ago Marianne had called, her voice feeble across many miles. She wanted to talk, tea and sympathy as they say, but Naomi’s throat had became constricted and she was unable to speak. She literally lost her voice. This time she could not forgive; there is a litany of incidents that conspires against this. She could not say that three days earlier she had seen him on her weekly shopping route into the town, a dishelleved busker, blindly playing his instrument, a steel-pan. She could look at him; he was unaware of her presence. It was him; surely it was him, his scars like the bark of a mottled tree proved it.

Memory returns and places a hand in hers, accompanying her along the forest pathway. Twenty years ago it had seemed like a fateful coincidence, their meeting in the tube station in London. Marianne’s eyes were wrung out from crying, her marriage dissolved and washed away by a story hidden deep within the past, a seed of destructive love, planted long before she had met and married her husband Tom.  They had not seen each other for ten years. A distance Marianne had created with no explanation.

I, your best friend, had never carried your train, showered you with rice, toasted to both your health, wishing you well as you sped off to your honeymoon. Yet here I was eleven years later, placing my arm around you inviting you to have a drink, a meal, have a chat and get things off your chest.

Inevitably it had come up.

“Why did you stop talking to me?” She asked.  Marianne’s answer floored her. The reproach stuck in her throat like an errant chicken bone.

Because you thought I had taken up with your fiancé after he left you. Yes, Allan. Because you had seen his motorbike parked in my parents’ driveway a couple of times. I never knew until that moment that he was more than a boyfriend to you, that he had mentioned marriage. These facts were unknown to me at that time. Otherwise maybe I would have behaved differently, although I hadn’t behaved inappropriately anyway, but maybe I would have been more aware….

He was having some fun with us. I never knew how serious it had become between you, that he had broken your heart, promised you one thing, and denied you another. He just appeared one day on our porch and I was courteous to him. I was certainly not in love with him, as you know I was the romantic. Sweet sixteen, never been kissed and all that. Well I was holding out for one guy, wasn’t I? Terrence. You knew that. Maybe you whispered this to Allan, your private joke together, the building of intimacies; maybe that’s why he kept coming back, hoping for some feeble conquest.  In any event nothing happened between Allan and me. However you never asked. Not until that moment, twenty years later. At the time you just blanked me out of your life, took friends we held in common with you. Left me stranded and alone, but I was so young, so naive, so forgiving, I never questioned you. I accepted it without knowing the reasons.

Naomi sits down on the Troll’s throne. She has named it thus, this stump of tree, she finds in several places in the forest, it must be the tree-cutters’ doing, the forestry men. The wood-pecker is having a go and the ground is littered with naked pine-cones, a result of his voraciousness. His incessant knocking echoes through the pines. The past drifts like the mist in this place, indomitable. You walk blindly through it, hard to grasp, hard to sift through its density to find some clarity. The feelings are all you have, the anger corrosive. The sadness peeling like paint, touching the roughness and curling your tongue as it sticks.

His motor-bike parked in my parent’s drive-way; that was really the start of it.

Naomi remembers Allan, a tall willowy guy who modeled himself on American boy-rebels, motor-cycle, leather-jacket and all. He made studied movements, taking off his helmet, mounting on or off his bike. He had these affectations he cultivated to make himself interesting, and to impressionable eighteen year old girls he was. He sat with his legs crossed, the right over the left, his cigarette dangling, his cup of coffee receiving his undivided attention. For the first five minutes the conversation was about his coffee, how well you had made it, or how he liked it. This was different; boys did not speak that way, at least not the boys they knew.

He took her places on his motor-bike, desolate places away from the beaten track. Now she recalls it; dangerous places. Places where a girl and boy could disappear, but places that excited her all the same. He was grooming her; that she now realised. How she had escaped him she doesn’t know; maybe innocence saved her. They had been friends, or so she thought; their discussions abstract and a bit circuitous. She had escaped. For many years he remained a pleasant memory, someone she had learned from, but with time she had grown to understand his deviousness, his callousness.

All along it had been about Marianne. He knew Marianne would see his motorbike; he knew she passed by my house on her way home.

For some time the air has been spitting needles into the skin. She thinks the snow will come soon. She is deep in the forest where a dark brook moves sluggishly, half frozen, the fissured surface like brittle candy.

The last time she had met Allan he had taken her on a walk up the side of a mountain. It was late but they had gotten used to these adventures and thought nothing of the time. The trek up was exhilarating; almost at the crest they could see the entire valley stretching out before them. The talk had been about religion, but she could not remember the discourse. She intimated there was a tension in the air, but nothing was voiced. It was just the way their bodies made contact, fingers held, arms brushed against the other, a hand placed on the middle of the back, but nothing had happened. They had climbed for two hours and had not reached the top when they realised that the light had begun to fade; the sun was disappearing behind the hill, heading into the western sea. They were in the shadow of the mountain and hence a fast approaching darkness.

They hustled to get down but the descent was tricky, cumbersome. Allan laughed nervously when suddenly they came upon him. He had a fire going on a ledge; why hadn’t they noticed that smoke curling as they descended. Surrounded by some tools, a cutlass, a small bag, a paraffin lamp, he was smoking a reefer, sitting on some fallen logs.

‘Breda man, whey alyuh going so fast?’ His tone was lazy and friendly, his arms out-stretched.

Allan instantly placed her behind him, by moving his body to block her.

‘Home, man.’ He replied adopting the island Creole, an attempt at bonding.

‘Alyuh come up here to see the sunset, eh?’

‘We didn’t get up that high.’ Allan replied deferentially.

‘Listen nah man. Stay and have a talk.’ He was blocking their way.

‘Yuh girlfriend looking scared boy. I ain’t goin to do alyuh nothing. Alyuh know that?’

Allan smiled, his tone easy almost jocular, ‘Yeah. Listen man it getting dark and we have to get back.’

‘Boy alyuh behaving like I want to do alyuh something. All I sayin is sit down and have a chat man. Take a little puff.’

She knew she had to silent, let Allan do all the talking.

‘We don’t do the weed man.’ Allan continued

The vagrant laughed, exposing his brown teeth.

‘Alyuh white fellas doh do weed. Yuh jokin right?’ he picked up the cutlass and stoked the fire. They started to move, but his voice held them.

‘Brown skin girl stay home and mind baby.’ He blocked their way cutlass in hand.

‘ Okay, maybe a puff.’ Allan relented, but she was frightened. Allan motioned for them to sit down on the log, and the vagrant passed them the joint. Allan took a drag, but Naomi refused.

‘What kinda puff is that! You ain’t take it in. Do another one man.’ The man admonished.

‘Nah man ah take a pull. Doh worry.’ Allan tried to hand him back the spliff but he refused it.

‘You girlfriend playing hoity. Tell she take off she shirt.’ The air thinned.

‘Nah man we doh need to go there.’ Allan was visibly agitated; his face became pink, the sweat popping on his fore-head.

‘Listen mister,’ she said. ‘We mean no disrespect but we were just taking a hike. That’s all. Our parents are going to worry if we don’t get back soon.’

‘Alyuh people is really something else, yes.’ His eyes flashed. ‘Feel you all too good to sit down and share a spliff, eh you with yuh white boy? I know what alyuh doin up there!’

‘Okay, okay. Look we share the joint.’ Allan made a movement to take the joint again.

Naomi witnessed the evening’s silence opening like an abyss, the darkness encroaching like a swarm of bats, the purple sky bruised, its colours mourning. In a second she grabbed the paraffin lamp and smashed it on the fire. The flame blazed. Then she grabbed the the tin of paraffin and hoisted it, emptying the contents on the man, his legs and feet, and then on the ground. The liquid trailed into the fire.

‘Ay what alyuh doin!’

The fire spread quickly. He dropped the cutlass, trying to out the flames consuming his legs.

‘Run!’ Allan commanded and they both did, not looking back, crashing through the foliage.

Their lungs heaved, erupted, the image of the cutlass searing a scar into their memories. They reached the motorbike panting. He took her home without a word. After the incident they never saw each other again.

I never told Marianne this story; never let her know as far as she was concerned it was about even.

Naomi realises that the snow has begun to fall, white fluffy lathers of snow. She knows she has to head back, but it swirls around her, settling like a bridal cape upon the firs, making the scene beautiful like the interior of a powder-bowl.

 

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Dawne Gowrie-Zetterstrom began writing at the age of 8 years old, and loved words because of her grand-father who was a storyteller and her father who was prone to compulsive recitations of poetry. She studied Creative Writing with Earl Lovelace as her tutor. Her stories have appeared in Anansisem and The New Local. She has recently completed a novel entitled Bridgewall.