The Wash: Love Stories of Sarah Hurst

James Pleat

For five years, Sarah Hurst had preferred to avoid mirrors. Her ugliness had occurred to her at the age of eleven, changing for P.E. in the primary school toilets, her first spot colliding with thickening eyebrows, a mass of unstyled hair and the orange stripe on her track-suit bottoms to eclipse entirely a childhood full of expression and energy. Her features had shrivelled inwards, in fear of themselves, and her voice rose, chattered and beamed only inside her head, where she could burrow quite comfortably, without the contradiction of grosser outer manifestations.

For when she spoke, she felt every eye upon the loose flesh of her lips, wincing under the looming threat of moustache, and the rest of her face flushed for their uncoordinated movements, until it too scurried and jerked away, from those eyes surveying its grotesque downfall.
Sarah had little knowledge of her face. Surrounded by the known, by her family and friends, she was invisible, and her roaring child paraded before them all, with instinctive humour and a jabbering interest in everything. She forgot that her eyebrows moved and her cheeks were contorted and her lips were a blur. In this rush of sexless confidence, she was a comedian, and her thoughts – so used to lurking and anticipating – followed her performance dutifully, rushing between ideas to fuel her retorts and enliven her imagery.
In the company of her classmates, their intruding eyes were mottled mirrors that caricatured her features into tabloids of grimaces which tormented her imagination and forced her eyes away from theirs.
There were evenings in the bathroom, alone, when she would approach herself. The lights would be low, her forehead passing for smooth in the dim. She found her eyes in certain poses, magazine profiles, angles which glazed her blemishes, froze her wild hair and glossed over the wilful bumps of her chin and nose. In this instant, the reflected black circles fell into hers; a black tunnel bounced between them at the speed of light, a moment of eternal circular reference which held everything she was against everything she appeared – inside and outside simultaneously, gargoyle and cocoon reconciled, a blink of astonishment, and an unbearable strangeness.
She never stayed for long. The poses embarrassed her, and her lifeless self repelled her. She recognized none of them, could not perform her usual self whilst observed. She was caught in a conflict between vanity and distaste for vanity which let her shave her legs but not wear make-up – she was most content when she could ignore it altogether and watch the rest of the world.
But in those five years, whatever the extent she contemplated them, the rest of the world was only accompaniment to James Pleat. In the confused nights of her first term at Mewitch Secondary College, she found herself stumbling through rising waters in the ornate dining room of a doomed Ocean Liner. Couples in evening gowns and dinner suits scrambled for the exits and waltzed to the tune of an absent jazz band in equal measure. Old Rotarians chortled around card games under the swinging chandeliers, whilst a collection of school friends squabbled at the scram on the port-side door. As the stream of relatives and acquaintances passed, in panic or romance, oblivious, they drew the room apart, like the thick red curtains framing the empty stage, to reveal a solitary boy on a central, solitary table, smiling up at her with wine glass raised. As she approached, the red liquid rose and fell, almost to its crystal brim, the warm water swelling and rolling around his chair legs; reflected, concave, in the stalk. He alone; tall, freckled, black-eyed James Pleat, could see her. They stood, eye to eye, smaller than the rest, but monumental. Caught between actions, between the indifference of childhood and the paranoia of adulthood, she found herself, for the first time, motionless. The longer his eyes remained, the larger they became, and the closer it grew – something deep; some muted, rising scream, like the buckling metal at the bottom of the ship – to a dreadful, quavering line slapping at her knees. The moment stretched, blacker and blacker, until it overflowed – it broke into something deeply buried, his eyes opened into a cavern whose walls were falling away, ballooning as she inhaled, until she found herself on the brink of a dark universe as vast as all the years she had lived. It had pushed itself inside her until she was two people. One was almost twelve; daughter of Daniel and Penny Hurst; older sister to three; patron to a basketful of cuddly rabbits and five hundred and thirty two paper people; graduate of stripy leggings and face paints and family walks along the Ouse Washes. The other was a liquid missionary, shunted by the tides of new emotion, a pilgrim wandering the brief glimpses, the brief exchanges that cast lightening on his universe – she was a totality of her discoveries, her fantasies and the call to his dark, sparkling unknown.
In the Ocean Liner they kissed, from a distance, framed by a crowd of extras, the encircling sea, and the tilting ceiling with its clusters of chandeliers, leaning gently, a chorus of glowing ingénues.
It was this kiss she imparted to her friends in a tremulous hoot; eager yet embarrassed to join them in Boy Talk and having crushes. In this respect James was well-timed. Her success with this group of friends, a collection almost entirely descended from primary school days, largely depended on her talent for the ridiculous and the unexpected. Her role as group comedian; master of impressions, pronouncer of bizarre and scandalous outbursts, ironic commentator on the absurdities of the teenage condition; was the only role her considerable height, conspicuous accent and distaste for conformity allowed. Neither she, nor anyone else, could take very seriously her attempts to participate in discussions about hairstyles or celebrities. Although she had lived in Mewitch all her life, and her paternal grandfather was the indomitable chief of a family farm lodged firmly in the soil of centuries of Fenland desert, her father still dropping his ‘t’s in unconscious moments, her own syllables were inherited from her mother’s passage from a quiet town in West Dorset through the stony meadows of the University of Cambridge. To abandon even one consonant, in the style of those of purer Fennish descent, was a procedure artificial as surgery. Whereas Sam, or Nina, or Melissa could discard the fiddlier elements of speech like chaff into a wind; when Sarah tried to pronounce ‘li-ull’, or went to any lengths to evade her natural vocabulary, the letters omitted would peer up from their metal tray, puzzled and hurt, silently following an aped sentence with an accusatory stare which others sensed and concluded they were being mocked.
As it happened, they were not. Sarah knew too much about grammar not to let corrections silently dog her attempts at conversation; however, she was not proud of her voice. Overhearing herself, startled by another mirror, she was mortified by its pomposity. It was a bulbous, misshapen voice that rose and fell with all the grace of a wobbling stomach, buoyed up by gas. It was awkward, alarming – once conscious of it, speech became a balancing act; her voice was a pile of peculiar items which protruded at odd angles, always an instant away from toppling to the ground, leaving her bare and gasping. Amongst her friends, she swept past the problem in vigorous self-parody.
She had not entirely cornered the market, regarding parody, even within her group of friends. The class system for children is far simpler, far harsher than in the adult world, where personal characteristics are muddled by the implications of background, the tangles of family; by qualifications, prospects, authority and money – all things which school children have few dealings in. Whereas adults must always be cautious, reserving for each an appearance of respect, wary of the power of each of society’s cogs; between pupils there is no such co-dependence; all are black-blazered, confined together between nine and three thirty, running parallel lives, free as bats... and what better grounds for hierarchy than freedom and equality?
Confidence casts the first stone. Sarah and her friends were all those the stones had hit – or all those too shy to throw. Sarah was both, but she was not unique. Erica boasted of her seven childhood years in Leamington Spa. Louise slid in and out of dialect-camouflage which did not conceal that her parents were Derbyshire immigrants. Maisie was an R.A.F gypsy. This did not guarantee their unpopularity – indeed, one of the year’s primary socialites was not long out of South Africa – however, their voices were another irregularity after an assortment of ailments; shyness, primness, stupidity, weakness, ugliness, dullness, religion. These traits were dispersed throughout the group, so many of them had little in common with each other; however, as a pack of maligned asides, some degree of irony was instinctive to all. Maisie, Louise and Nina, in particular, had enough heartfelt irreverence to accompany Sarah in pantomime tones.
Camp has always risen from the margins, pride its ethic. For all that irreverence is carefree, the stiffness of pride in its backbone is perhaps more severe than the oppression it opposes. Parody is a judgement, with an implied morality more demanding than the unreasoned abuse cast upon appearance. Sarah’s impression of Megan Palmer’s faithful mimicry of glamorous soap stars accused them all. Erica, Sam and Melissa giggled, Megan’s snubbing avenged, whilst they styled their hair from the same magazine. Maisie, Nina and Louise contributed the flat chimes of Megan’s admirers in brash, bawling catcalls which crumbled into mice when they came face to face with their inspiration. Sarah felt her hypocrisy in every subservient word she edged towards her enemies. She felt it in the fear of approaching them – or reproaching them; in the jealousy for their ease and prettiness; in the laughs she sometimes joined in at another’s expense; in each preen in the mirror, in the razor at her legs, in the dress in the back of her wardrobe.
It would be a long time before she forgave herself the little weaknesses of being human. She forgave them in her friends without noticing the incongruity. She admired, and empathized with, the guilt which followed lapses of imitation as a sign of loyalty to their childhood – as a sign of a self more enduring than the whims of fashion. In the others she found no such integrity. They did not notice their hypocrisy, chose their road only by how easy it was. Barely recognizable, under old familiarity and doctrines of loyalty, was a scorn for this audience quite as sharp as the scorn for its characters. The comedic act again made her a hypocrite. Despite pride, despite individuality, despite not-changing-for-others; half of each joke was for the diet of an audience she disapproved of. Comedians are not individuals.
It was not for herself that she had begun swearing, aged ten, when it was still a novelty, something daring. Neither was there any personal principle behind her abrupt return to clean English when they entered secondary school and it became commonplace. Her appeal relied on the exotic sense which her vocabulary and her collection of accents were a useful vehicle for, and which depended entirely upon her ability to shock, to appear three steps ahead into the farcical kingdom of adulthood. In primary school it had been swearing; at Mewitch Secondary College it was sex.
“My children”, she had announced, operatically; “The day has come. My innocence is lost. James Pleat came to me in a dream”.
Although this outburst inspired one of the longest-running and most entertaining set of theatrics the group had yet enjoyed; for the first time, she regretted her irreverence.
This was something new. This wasn’t absurd in the way that other people were absurd. It wasn’t a part of her that she could separate and ridicule. It was her entire being. James Pleat was no longer a character; he was the shadow of her every thought, the energy behind every movement, the essence comprising her every bone, her every inch of skin, her every drop of blood.
It was this she attempted to convey to Louise, her oldest friend, as they walked home together one quiet evening after a netball game. They could not remember a time when they had not known each other, or, once they had learnt to talk, not confided within each other their most solemn fears, their most sombre discoveries. In the middle of a garden picnic, aged six, Louise had pulled her into the house to convey the awful revelation that only one could attend the other’s funeral. At seven, Sarah had whispered, in the security of the garden shed, her discovery that God was pretend. Two years later they were to be found flying on the playground swings, shouting in astonishment about the vastness of space.
However, it had been far easier to describe the universe changing than to describe herself changing. Nowhere could she find the words, words which weren’t a parody, to describe James Pleat’s inexplicable mattering.
James Pleat was a handful of months older than Sarah. He had attended the town’s other Primary School so she had met him only that September, where his timetable coincided often with hers. Statistically speaking, he could not be faulted. He was clever, athletic, quiet – all the things which she was, their test scores orbiting each other; he was the more reliable, she erratic and extreme, occasionally bringing their names together in classroom lists. He was one of few boys taller than her; he was brown-haired, like her; brown-eyed, like her, and he laughed easily. He was polite to everyone, as was she, but unlike her he was popular. This was perhaps the most major of a string of differences which Sarah, unbeknownst to herself, did everything she could to ignore. She gloried in the little ways they were united; a shared dislike for quiche, an inability to draw, an impatience with fashion, a sister called Debbie, a fondness for The Beatles, a matching pair of trainers, a slightly clumsy way of walking... at this time she did not believe in masculine and feminine characteristics... and she was quite skilled in convincing herself she was charmed by his moments of irregularity.
She knew all this, not from speaking to him, but from the conversations she overheard, or the snippets he volunteered in lessons, or the tunes which sometimes spilled from the headphones peeping out of his shirt collar. In fact, the number of times they had directly spoken to each other was so small she could – and often did – recall each of them with perfect accuracy.
He was shy and never initiated conversation; she was shyer and avoided it. Perhaps the most common mistake that quiet people make is to assume that another’s quietness is the same as theirs. Quietness is like night. It casts the same shadow over the Amazon and Antarctica; over New York and New Guinea; over Fenland and Fort William. Dawn, when it comes, is full of surprises. Sarah had extrapolated from their similarities to imagine the insides of his mind in the same colours as hers. The narrator struggling inside her head struggled in his too, with the same desires, the same secrets and an identical voice. A few times a year she would be jarred by inconsistencies; overheard words which she never could have uttered cut across him like lightening, the landscape of his mind illuminated for a moment; a strange, foreign place. Tiny clues; prentious slang leering from a group e-mail – a dance tune stuttering from his headphones – a moronic look reflected in a door pane.
Her love blundered past every piece of evidence, a tumult of self-preservation as possessive as the ocean sinking her dream ship. James Pleat did not make it difficult. Not in their five years of secondary school did he once acquire a girlfriend. Sarah was perpetually single too, of course, that went without saying – and she couldn’t help but theorize that the reason was the same. From before her dream there had been jokes about them. Their similarities flung them together by smirking matchmakers who would insinuate crudely the secret desire of each – bridal marches were hummed if they accidentally stepped together, cast always as ‘the parents’ in drama tasks. She would wonder, later, if it was this interference which had drawn her to him in the first place. She blamed it for the awkwardness which surrounded them from the start, every moment together invaded by a shrill, implicating voice which they both remembered – and knew each other to be remembering. This was curiously both a separation, which prevented them exchanging a single casual word, and an intimate connexion. It was a permanent and complete embarrassment which ensured that they always knew, to some extent, what the other was thinking, and once in a while, their eyes would collide in a moment of shared irony before the descent into blushes began.
It was these moments she remembered on lonely evenings, when her mind opened up to fill the darkness before sleeping; these moments she designated for hope, and summoned to kindle her dwindling ocean. It was these moments, an accelerated stream of every one, which fled before her on the evening our story starts, as she stood before her Grandfather’s bathroom mirror and saw herself just as she was, not in love.
The best of these memories were in drama, arbitrarily partnered, where they abandoned, with some relief, the burdens of identity, the demanding pressures of shyness. James had achieved puberty, as he did everything else, before anybody else and with greater success. His voice had arrived at Mewitch already broken, supplementing a jocular, inflated stage presence. Sarah, by contrast, shed her shyness into character studies, attentive to each detail of voice, movement and personality, utterly disguised behind someone else’s confidence. Sarah decided it was romantic that the longest exchanges they ever shared were in the mists of an alien planet; seated around a fifties dining table; crouched together in the trenches; twirling walking sticks down an Elizabethan boulevard.
In the still of her Grandfather’s house, on the edge of the Wash’s silent stretch towards the sea, Sarah stared at her reflection as memorized lines swam to the surface.
“They’re gone. All gone. There’s only us left”
“No...”
“Well, it wouldn’t be if you’d kept your slippers off the dresser as I’d asked” –
“By all means continue, my dear, continue”
“And I know you’ve been with Winifred so there’s no use your pretending”
“Get thee to a nunnery!”
“Get thee to a nunnery”
“Speak up, Corporal, speak up” –
“AND IN THE DEATH!”
“Thank you, Mildred”
“What’re you wanting next, Doctor?”
“A herd of Canadian geese, I am sure of it, standing at the crest of the hill”
“Well now, I wouldn’t be too sure of that”
“More than that I know where you spend your tuppence and believe me you’d be better off with Sally-Ann in a telephone box”
“Oh but you don’t, you don’t!”
“But I wanted to...”
“What nonsense, darling”
“Yes, yes... yes, my love, yes...”
The hiss in his voice still echoed in the breeze from the open window. It had followed him as they left the floor, shuddering froth in his wake – the bump of eyebrows acknowledging a scene well done, his head whipped away, sunk beneath shoulders as he slouched into his friends, the words breaking and collapsing, breaking and collapsing, still spraying from the turn of his head as, two weeks later, she called to him –
“James –”
She saw his reflection in the mirror too; that snapshot of him eight hours before, looking directly at her, head-on and absurdly symmetrical, like a horse’s face photographed from the end of its nose.
“Oh... yell-o”
The planets crashing and the stars erupting inside her were confused by this flippancy.
He stood looking at her, waiting.
“Great! Hello. Sorry. Hi... So how are you? How are your exams?”
She skittered like a ferret. He was more cumbersome.
“Good...”
He held on to the ‘O’, nodding to it as if it were a tune, his eyes bobbing around the floor.
“Good!”
“Yeah. Scored history”.
Her mind, surging with determined strings, took a moment to understand this.
“Oh. Good”.
He was still nodding, waiting. She was trying to find her romance.
“So... are you staying around in this old town next year?”
“No... no, I want to do medicine and the science here isn’t exactly...”
She found herself scowling defensively at his ellipsis.
“Oh. I am”.
“Oh”.
Neither was blushing. She waited for his revelation to shock her, but the conversation seemed suspended from all life, all past and future, not attached to anything at all. They were more strangers than when they ignored each other.
She forgot what she had been going to say. Distantly she grappled with her brain, urgent for invention, but it was as if every instinct she reasoned with shrank at her touch, peeling into a hole, collapsing in on itself, until there was nothing certainly left inside her but something numbing, blinding, rising up, obscuring her senses like a rush of traffic.
“Good luck then. Guess it’s good we won’t have to compete next year. Miss you though. The good old days in drama...”
His voice had an affected tone of elderly reminiscence.
“‘Simmer down Mildred’”.
She countered eagerly with the lines still on her lips;
“‘Always for you, Edgar!’”
He caught her in the eye at this, puzzled and a little wary.
“Yeah, it’s been great. Good times, good times...”
He nodded to his tune again.
“But you ought to know I’m not really interested”
The rising sensation roared to a tremendous pitch, harsh jets pummelling upwards, pressing at the top of her skull, surging; until it burst, shot out of her, every drop, raining upwards – her mind suddenly relaxing, turned gently by the breeze, the colours of the world blossoming back into focus; the sky yawning, rejoicing, every blade of grass preening and tumbling, the bricks of the Science corridor catching the light, other people’s voices suddenly sounding in her ears, unmuted, singing with life, their eyes shining, trails of gems hurrying towards the front gates, paths of little atoms burning over all the world – intense – infinite –
She smiled.
“Neither am I”.
He cocked his head a little, his lip curling, peering at her with something familiar at last.
She only beamed, thrusting her chin up, surveying him – all of him – as he was. The mad energy suddenly beating through her veins made her want to leap at him, hug him around the neck, spin him around. Instead, she took two steps backwards and bowed.
“Thank you. You’ve been terrific!”
She turned from him so quickly she almost lost the bow he returned. He inclined his head slowly, the corner of his lip still curling, staring after her retreating head for a moment. Then he straightened up, looked about him, and walked away.
Sarah scampered across the courtyard, through the double doors into the building and down the East corridor. She was striding with the considerable length of her legs, bouncing on every fourth step, tumbling into a half-run. The corridor was packed with students and teachers straining for the exits, for the weekend. Sarah darted between them all, slipping through gaps, racing into spaces, feeling like a fish. She caught the eye of a stern looking teacher heading the other way and beamed, leaping around him and vanishing through the south doors before he could speak.
Out on the road the pavements were clear, for most of Mewitch and its houses were on the other side of the school. But she was not going home, and, at the first gap in the traffic, she sprinted across the road and into the narrow alley opposite. The crooked garden fences forming it passed quickly, winding out to a small meadow on the edge of the bypass. Bobbing amongst the dandelions, tripping across burning asphalt, she was away; out of school, out of Mewitch, storming the zigzag path which bordered square farms all the way to the Wash.
It was a long time since she’d walked to see her Grandfather. It was a five mile walk and a boring one. She had taken it quite regularly with her Dad and her brothers and sister when they were younger. Once she had begun Secondary School, these journeys had been abandoned in favour of faster visits all together in the car. If she went alone she would cycle, for it was faster and the roads more direct – but the route on foot was simple, and she found it was as familiar to her as if she had walked it only yesterday.
Except this time it was not boring. As she walked she laughed, she kicked the dust of the track, she ran her hands through the wild grasses bursting from the ditches – everywhere was beautiful, basking in the sun. Butterflies followed her, dancing around her ankles, as if in companion to the wings beating in her chest. The scrubby hedgerow buzzed with a thousand lives. With delight she came upon a footbridge; only a few planks wide, slightly crooked, where her father had always taken their pictures. The hedge it poked through was as wild and violently green as a scene from a jungle. On the other side were bare ditches. They crossed in a network of parallel lines and right angles, narrow beams pursuing the horizon. It all lay ahead of her; the Fens; drained and featureless, the expanse marked only by desultory lumps of trees and flat farm buildings, the occasional spire a feeble point to heaven, the ground reaching into infinity. Ely Cathedral, imperious cat, sat as a sentry in the far east, surveying the land.
It was the expanse that had always frustrated her. There were no hilltops to overcome, no corners to turn, no woodlands to emerge from. The countryside was so uniform it seemed to be self-replicating. However far one walked, whatever changes of direction were made; the same fields would unfold, an identical distance moving further away. No amount of running would disturb the haughty waters of the Wash. The twin Bedford Rivers cut two perfectly straight, parallel lines from Earith to Denver, a twenty one mile lesson in geometry. They shortcut the Ouse, bypassing its amble around Ely with two artificial channels, a hundred feet apart, which allow the strip between to flood in winter; sparing the surrounding villages, many of which are below sea level, from the waters that covered them before the draining operations of the seventeenth century. As a child, Sarah had found them unimaginative. In bad tempers, she had thought them severe. Now, as she mounted the raised bank, they impressed something different upon her.
The water spilled into the sky. The fields gaped at the clouds. The bank was higher than all the land – she was walking in air, on air, joy still pounding in the rhythm of her steps. She felt her happiness overflowing, pouring from her, breaking the bounds of her limbs and flooding over everything that she could see; serene and unstoppable as the Wash, blessing everything, racing over the unobstructed horizon. This was the only land that could contain her. She engulfed everything, consuming it, adoring it, with a passion which would have been restless at the boundaries of hills.
A herd of cows were passing in the marshland between the rivers. They were sluggish in the afternoon sun, processing like wildebeests on a plain, flicking their tails at flies. They looked at Sarah with disinterest. A family of swans slipped along the river between them. The four cygnets following were almost fully gown. They were as large as the two white birds who led them and their necks were just as long and elegantly arranged, but ruffled in grey feathers, they were still humble, their beady eyes blinking.
She remembered trips to the Ely riverside, throwing bread to the ducks. She wondered when that had gone, when they had stopped going. Part of her suddenly felt very old, as if the release of her love, confined so long within the idea of James Pleat, had exhausted her. She had been stationary for five years. Something overwhelming, as she became a teenager, had startled her into a burrow deep inside herself, and her love – taking its first, inquisitive steps – had hidden itself in the first person it encountered. Five years, five years... As she climbed over the stile, the opening beats of the David Bowie song began to tick against her footsteps.
As he started singing, counting down the years to the end of the world, she looked back on them, in its aftermath.
She hardly recognized the images. They seemed to pass in a series of rooms. Venues. Brightly coloured corners crammed with faces – telephones, opera house, favourite melodies – school people, in costumes, in two-tone wigs, their expressions frozen and collected like the paper people in the draw in her room – like cardboard boxes with writing on, and lists of things, colour coded, the shapes of names, assembled in Multilink and the – boys, toys, electric irons and T.V.s – she looked sideways at the friends, assembled, then dissembled, put back into the wings with the lights going down; boxes, Bunsen-burners, lying on the field with the crisp packets rising – people in the distance – James Pleat – and fat-skinny people and tall-short people and nobody people all registered, all time-tabled, all expected; corrected and inspected and dissected and shot in focus for FIVE YEARS –
Violins were inching into the soundscape. She was walking harder. The song came out of the sky, jolting her. James Pleat kneeling – looking up from the floor – drama teacher laughing – hand on her breast – headmaster at the front of the school – handstands and piggybacks and falling down and looking for him, sprinting over the mud, scoring, seeing her, thrown together in the corridor, hand fumbling for a bow – ducking, turning, blushing, collapsing – red brick, red brick, the clock tower, hard against the sky – the sky, the sky, erupting
“I miss you, you’re beautiful, I want you to walk!”
FIVE YEARS
She sang it down the track, calling
FIVE YEARS
Remembering every moment, crying
FIVE YEARS
Surprising the cows...
FIVE YEARS
She ran again, shaking her head, casting off the red walls into the tidal water. As the song faded back into a beat, she slumped onto the upcoming stile, panting, head reeling with the exertion. She knotted her hands over the fence post, her breaths steadying. The universe was still there. A lonely marsh willow nodded through the breeze. The jabbering of school was shrinking, birds chirping. The past five years shot back and forth inside a valve, but it was failing. Its light was lost beneath the sun. The people of her memories were brightly sketched, over-coloured, fed on their own importance. They thrust into her, insistent, but as she felt herself sink into the distance, she became like the Wash. Stately, immense and unconscious. They became ripples. They shouted their names in concentric circles. Sleeping, a wave gently turned them over.
She had her head on her hands, propped on the fence post, almost solemn. The people of school had vanished. Perhaps she was the only survivor. Or perhaps she’d never been there at all.
The heavy hand of the sky was still open, and she took it, climbing the stile and continuing her path. She was ambling now, calmer, humming her song again, and this time a few quiet faces came to join her.
Louise had been there the years before when they walked this stretch in red wellies. Nina and Maisie suggested themselves softly, followed by others; teachers nodding, other allies smiling, and even James Pleat returned, shyly and softly, to rest his head on her shoulders.
She gathered them all up at the final stile, shuffling down the bank to join the lane. The landscape descended beneath the line of telegraph poles. Through the open window of the yellow farmhouse adjoining the lane, she saw her Grandfather, head bent over a sheet of figures. As she swung open the gate, the musical crunch of the wind chime hung on its slats jerked his head. Waving and laughing, she went inside.
*
At the end of the day, she stood in front of the mirror. The bathroom tiles were white behind her, the open window a black square. She moved her head slowly to the left and then to the right; two profiles. She was frowning very slightly. She shook her hair back and raised her chin, looking up into her eyes this time. She looked away quickly and then back again, catching the shape of her nose, the swing of her hair, her eyes peeping from the corners. Gripping the basin she leant forwards, inching closer. Speckled pores, flecks of red, oily bumps loomed into focus. Her face was grainy, the freckles merging into spots around the crease in her forehead and the dimple in her chin. She found her eyes. They slid together; pools of black, wet, sparkling... They were grainy too, the brown shattered in rings, mottled with green and gold. They enlivened her face. Where her lashes parted, reaching out, the freckled spray on her cheeks was deer-like. However she stood, wherever she looked, the strange feeling did not recede. She was alone. There was no longer any gap between her thoughts and her reflection. There was no forced reconcilement, no effort to confront her self – she was there. The light in her eyes and the irony and excitement in her heart met each other, point to point, as she looked into the mirror. They swam together like the moonlit waves in the water through the window. When she smiled, her soul beamed.
It was an old smile, one found in photo albums. The strong scent of the lilac tree outside the window recalled her to other evenings, splashing in the bath with her sister, rosy cheeked, hair full of bubbles, giggling up as her mother doused her with jugs of water; arranging the family of plastic ducks, poking out her stomach and marching them over the island, her sister writing on her back, hugging her knees, guessing the message. Afterwards, glowing in twin pink towel dressing gowns, they would pile onto the sofa, onto their Grandad’s lap, and listen to his stories; warm and heavy and slow.
She smiled like that now, settling onto the rim of the bath. She was taller, stretched like the cygnets, her body curving and arching where before it had been flat. She was slower too, her eyes at odds with each other; considering, where before she would have marched off on to the next activity. But she still retained a sense of lankiness, her knees still jutting out with an assortment of bruises; her hair still fuzzing with energy, ears still nestled in its tufts, her freckles still underlining her eyes which glinted with the same promise, the same presence, the same joy.
It was as if some part of her had been caught, like a butterfly in a jar, on the first day she had begun to fear herself. Now it was released again, perfectly preserved, fluttering off into the air as if it had been held for only seconds.
Five years. She swung her feet into the bath and rested her elbows on her knees. And this was the end. The end of second-guessing. The end of trying to like Coldplay and football and fishing just because he did. The end of obligation. She didn’t need to search for him anymore, she didn’t need to be careful and comely and bland just in case he was around; she could walk down a corridor without anticipation, let things surprise her again. She could sit like this – in an empty room with an open window, just herself and the breeze.
He had been here on evenings like this; conjured up, creeping behind, laying his hand on her shoulder, perching next to her, staring into her eyes, lying behind her in the hot water...
No longer. She caught the chain of the plug in her toes and swung it into the plughole. She would have a bath; wash it all off, forget. Finally be alone, with the lilac and the stars and the sound of the wind chimes. But the sound of the chain on the cast-iron bath had a nautical ring that could not stop her recalling an old ship.
The ballroom was empty, tipping up to the open doors where light was spilling through. It had almost entirely drained. Its grandeur was gone, unsuited to natural light, the walls stained with the same watermarks as the bath. They were faded and strained, streaked with damp grey smudges. The stage curtain hung on one link.
Looking back over her shoulder at the mirror, she saw the face. It could have been his; the brown hair, the freckles, the eyes staring into hers.
But she left it, crossing the room, mounting the stairs, out to the hall, onto the deck. The prow was raised above the water, still dripping, white and majestic. Sunlight blinded her, burning her hands on the rail as she squinted over the edge. There was the ocean. Or was it the ocean? The sky boiled yellow over a vast horizon of deep blue waves – and yet birds sang, the boat was firmly lodged, and rainbows danced in the water.
In the darkness, she settled into bed. Out on the Wash another expanse of water was moving by. The stars shared their solitude, casting tiny lights on its surface. The marsh trees and the verge grasses seemed to exhale, hushing the breezing. Curled under a duvet, Sarah heard a minute, airy whistling as a flock of large birds rose out of the water. Canada geese, she wondered.
As she fell to sleep, her senses retired and her thoughts began to drift away. In the last few moments of consciousness, only two words remained.
What now?