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By TNV, October 5, 2009

My grandfather told me a story once.  Thinking about it now, I don’t think he really believed it as much as he’d have liked to.  He’d fought in the war, or at least repaired machines in the war–the second one, that is–and he’d divorced my grandma, and he had it in him to be a bit of a bastard, frankly.  For the most part, though, I loved him with the sort of elemental commitment that comes with not realising you have a say in the matter.

I call it a story.  I’m not sure why.  It has no characters, as such, nor a plot.  I suppose that calling it a story has become a convenient way to suggest that it is truthful without having to actually say so.  It’s just more safe.  Considering the circumstances.

Because I’ve remembered with pin-sharp clarity, more so than I’ve remembered his exact words, the expression that I thought I saw in his face, in his body.  As if something was struggling not to be hidden, in fact, as he told me this  story.  It was something that I’d never quite seen before, or possibly something that I’d never noticed.  That would certainly be possible.  I was young enough to still think of him as an extension of myself, rather than an independent person, relative in some ways, important ways, but merely and hugely coincidental in so many others.  When you’re young this has the consequence, it seems to me, of blunting affect.  Emotions are read very blithely: that man is angry, or that woman is happy.  This dog wants to play with the ball.  You’ve been told about these things in bedtime stories, or read about them in books.  The Great North Wind, or the Dragon King Beneath The Sea, these characters have needs and desires that are straightforward.  Straightforward may be the wrong word.  But all the same, not like your parents, or your grandparents.  They don’t live in pain.  So as I listened to my grandfather I watched him too, because he was an animated speaker with big expressive eyes, and he gestured with his hands, gnarled and knotted like the cherry trees in the playground at school, fascinating hands, full of craftiness, and that’s when I saw, or thought I saw, that he was afraid.

It didn’t make any sense to me.  Later I dismissed the thought, because I couldn’t imagine what he could have been afraid of, and anyway the morning had turned into a glorious sunny afternoon and I was keeping my balance in a stream trying to catch minnows with a little net, really a ring of twine and fishnet stocking driven into the end of a bamboo cane, and through the warmth of the rubber boots around my feet I could feel the cold brilliance of the stream water, rushing is very much the word, or even racing.  The little fishes seemed to swarm, almost, and I shuffled from rock to rock by the arches of my feet, frightened of treading on one, frightened of slipping on the treacherous stones.  Happily there I was lost in the stuff of it.  The sunlight where it hit the water, bright enough to scald, one hand flung up in front of my eyes as a shield, somehow keeping my balance.

I didn’t understand, and I forgot.  I still don’t understand, necessarily, but now I remember, rather more than a decade later, almost two in fact, after a chance meeting with old keepsakes: a box, in fact, within which I found a fasces of strips of negative bound up with elastic bands who knows how long ago and now mostly melted together, three spoiled photographs of a river in the Forest of Boland, an sealed plastic carton of 0.22 air rifle pellets, and a heavy brass badge stamped ‘CITY OF SANTA FE DEPUTY SHERIFF’.

The unfamiliar taste of ham sandwiches spread with brown mustard from Germany at breakfast, mustard somehow seeming illicit and adult in its smell and flavour, the same sort of pungency of cigarettes and vodka, and that breakfast was at half past ten in the morning, and that from the living room window the garden was some thirty feet below, at the bottom of a precipitous wooden staircase formed by beams driven into the wall that I would never again trust with my weight.  Among all this, the thing I had glimpsed in my grandfather’s face there for a moment, the thing that I realise, remembering, was actually evasion itself.  I could not, still cannot see the thing itself that was being held back, but I saw something there that did not belong, the outline of something’s absence.

Suddenly he was not crafty and assured, as he so often seemed when asking me, for instance, how many grooves a record had (”Well,” I said brightly, “it actually depends on whether it’s an LP or a single, because …”, faltering, sensing a trap, “… er, wait a minute …”).

It must sound ridiculous for me to contend, after all that, that I can’t remember the story that he told me on this particular day, when so much else of it is alert to me.  But I can’t.  I can remember images and tunes and sensations, but words and tales, sequences, I seem to be incapable of marking these.  I can remember the kinds of things he used to say clearly enough by thinking of the sounds that his voice made, by the shapes his sentences made in the air.  The substance, though, the thread and weave of his thought, that seems to be permanently beyond the horizon, even if it only appears to be held there by a trick of perspective.

As if I stand at one end of a dark wooded avenue, and at the other end, in bright sunlight, there is an open market.  People appear to come and go among the merchants, the book stalls and haberdashers and grocers and the man with things that are useful for computers, but I cannot clearly hear or see them (although nowadays, without my glasses, I can barely see to the other side of the room).  The transactions they carry out are said to exist because I presume that they must.  From here, I realise, I see nothing but colours and shapes, and I hear nothing but movements in the air.  Nothing is direct.  Everything is possible.
In this way, what follows is an assumption of the true events, a sort of reconstruction from the apocrypha that have been found.
We had eaten breakfast late that morning.  Last night we had bought food at the Chinese takeaway, my first.  Provincial to the marrow even then, I had had a steak and kidney pudding.  Suet pastry remains an enduring passion.

“I suppose that to me,” my grandfather said very carefully, “what really is remarkable, what I just cannot understand, is how time speeds up.  It gets away from you the more you try to pay attention to it, it really does, and believe me I don’t know where it gets to, or how, but there you have it – or don’t …”

“I remember,” he said, “unless my mind is playing tricks on me, how it used to be.  Back when I was doing my National Service, for instance, an evening would last us all night.  The rest of the time, the rest of the year, that was just the same way, only noisier.  I say I was never one for getting staggering drunk but I used to manage alright, me and my chums, my chums and I.  Whereas, and your nanna will vouch for this, it seems to me that now I’ve barely sat myself down in front of the telly, and you know what that’s like up here, Jim, but that it’s all repeats, it’s Minder and Murder, She Wrote and Monty Python–like I hadn’t seen enough of them first time around–and the next thing you know it’s the Ten O’Clock News, and it’s as though they’ve rung the bell for last orders.  My days are getting shorter.  It’s as if I’m asleep before I’ve begun, and I’ll tell you this as well: but I don’t sleep any better than I used to, either.  I just cannot keep from waking up now at about five o’clock, and I find myself getting dressed in the dark and pacing around making tea with the World Service on like a bloody farmer, pardon my language, just for something to do.”

He reached for his tea with the precise judgment of the arthritic.

“I don’t think it’s anything to do with, sorry, love, anything to do with death,” he added, having set his cup back down.  The aside was addressed to my nanna, who had just lit a cigarette and was now sat back with it held between two fingers of an outstretched arm, face unreadable behind her glasses that caught the daylight.  “At least, I hope not, but I don’t think so, if that doesn’t sound daft.  It’s something else that bothers me, that I’m afraid of.”

It was about here that I saw the shadow in his face, although I cannot say that those were his words as I saw it.

“I don’t know what it is,” he says, speaking my mottling memories as they stick together in the heat, forming inseparable superimpositions.  Double, triple exposures.  Already, I realise, his voice sounds less like his own.

“I can feel it, sometimes, but I can’t get a good look at it.  If I could, I don’t think I’d be afraid.  If ‘afraid’ is the right word.”

He hesitates, loudly.

“If any of these are the right words.”

I can hear a sizzling, a sudden warning: wow and flutter.  This may be the end of the tape.

“I’ve asked it questions, Jim, but it doesn’t answer.  It might be ignoring me.”

I suddenly think of a telegram that I found a few years ago among my grandma’s things.  I may even have found it in a folder at her wake.  He had sent it on or shortly after V.E. Day to say that he, unlike so many, would soon be coming home.  It may have said something more than this besides, although I can’t be certain, because the last line of the telegram is a line from a song:

I’LL BE WITH YOU IN APPLE BLOSSOM TIME

“It might be ignoring me,” he says.

I see the memory of my grandfather as I see everything without my glasses.  I see him in approximate clarity, pulled into focus through a painful squint.  I hear the memory of my grandfather as I hear anyone.  My mind walks the winter shore in its shrieking night, dragging ashore and piecing together what parts of their words are brought up by the longshore drift of uncaring time.  Somewhere on the seas there are beaches of white sand, reefs of pink coral, blue lagoons.  But I’m not standing in any of those places.

I draw my head up slowly and breathe in.  The muscles around my eyes begin to relax, pulling back from their forced focus.  My ears pop softly, and the noise floods in.  They refute time.  They give us back what it takes from us.

At the dining table with the stone inlaid in the centre for hot dishes, I see the semblance of my grandfather straighten in his chair.  For a moment, it’s as though he does something I have never ever seen him do.  As though he has shrugged his shoulders.

“It might be ignoring me,” he says.  “Or perhaps it just doesn’t know what to say.”

_____

Daniel Kedges is 28 and lives in the UK.  His diary is here.

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By TNV, July 27, 2009

A man went on a long rail journey. The train was crowded and he couldn’t find a seat. He conversed with the other passengers. After a time he became thirsty and went to the buffet car to buy a bottle of water. While the assistant was fetching the drink the man noticed a small, rectangular cardboard packet on the counter. It was black, with the logo of the train company embossed on it in gold letters, and sealed with cellophane. When the assistant returned with his bottle, the man pointed to the packet eagerly, smiling.
‘Are those playing cards, or cigarettes?’ he said.
‘They’re condoms,’ said the assistant.
The man’s face fell and his shoulders slumped. ‘I’ll take a packet, then,’ he said, sadly, and reached into his pocket for the money.

_____

James Meek is a writer. His novels include The People’s Act Of Love, and We Are Now Beginning Our Decent. He lives in London.

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By TNV, July 17, 2009

Peeking my head through the curtains like a comedy star, I see an accident on the street below me. I was never happy living in the city centre with its Saturdays full of “FUCK YOUSE, I’VE EARNED A DRINK”. They sing songs about sport and the girls laugh and they eventually walk on, having conquered my wall with their bladders and my front door with their errant cum. Drink and youth makes everything seem new. He looks like he’s mid-stroke across an ocean, and without warning, the tide has calmed and in the midday sun, he submits to the powerlessness of floating.

Lost in their mecca, the McDonalds, I sit around the screaming children who eye me suspiciously. I am effete, and they know it. I am tattooed, and their eyes flick from these sigils to my piercings, to my hairdo, my look. It’s designed to be different; singular, but right now I wish I could pass. I wish I could hide behind those screaming children instead of being engulfed by them. There is something beautiful in the honesty of a child’s taunt. Maybe it’s because they assume that each mark has broken your heart. There is an older man across the road – his arm extended, his hand grasping the air. He is slumped against my neighbour’s front door, the empty road between him and his victim.

The speakers on my stereo are so advanced that they can make the floorboards shake if I so desire. If I was brave enough to turn it up full volume, I think the nails in my floor would begin to unscrew themselves and that the wood would buckle and warp. I imagine noise ordinance officers banging down my door, police and the ensuing hullabaloo. A couple of notches from the maximum, the music drowns out the city but not all of it. When I hear the scream, I mute the stereo from across the room, and I’m briefly lost in the wonder of technology: orchestras at the touch of a button, rock bands in your living room, all of which can vanish with the press of a remote. People take all of these things for granted.

He is alone, suffocating in the shock, in the deepening horror of what he has done. There is no way he can move; he can’t ring the police, he can’t do CPR; all of that training falls out of your head anyway – with only the pretend version from hospital dramas remaining. The cyclist is dying, I can see that now. The driver sees me and starts to shout for help, moving his head in such a way so that I can hear him, but that the scream doesn’t cross his victim’s path – that would seem impolite. He screams for help. The bicycle looks like it’s been folded down for storage. The metal is scratched. I disconnect the phone, shut the window and turn up the stereo to full. The police arrive soon after.

_____

Mark Ward is a playwright and musician. He is currently working on his second play, Perfect Paragraphs, and writes a blog for gcn.ie called Brief Lives. He makes music under the name Where is This.

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By TNV, July 16, 2009

It is formed of wood, and screws, and imagination. Gables burst weathervanes of frigates and dancing fish above sun terraces built entirely from old doors. Freed from many rigours of local planning law – these are only temporary structures (though some date from as early as 1920), they are transitory, they are built from wood – the village, should it be called such, is more the product of dreams than of architecture. Its houses are the visions of their occupants; constructed in the main by the instinct of what a building should look like, afforded by whatever materials were laid to hand.

They are holiday homes; they are intended to be fleeting. These are the nighttime ambitions of families from Sheffield, or Doncaster, or Leeds; who at weekends, or Whit, or maybe only in the summer make it across for a bit to find that sand has lodged itself in the teacups and grasshoppers are making merry in the hearth.

You are doing it now. You are imagining what the village might look like. You are building your home. Perhaps you have seen similar arrangements elsewhere, they’re often beside the sea, treading the ground between the shanty and the prefab. They grow from such imaginings. Your house in the village is how you picture it to be; it is the physical rendering of that dull cliché, a ‘dream home’. Single-storey dreams made real and painted, erupting from the gorse bushes to weather the winds from off the estuary.

Two hundred or so miles and years along the coast, a poet lays dreaming. He has at various points in his life suffered from uneasy sleep. His poetry abounds with people who have never seized their life’s opportunity, who become trapped in villages and parlours fearing the outside world. He is a clergyman. He is a mild-mannered botanist. He is made famous by a Village that people assume to be his own, but really has just grown from his imagination. One night in London, wracked with toothache and dining late, he will be confronted by a distressed woman who will demand to know of him how one so calm, so gentle as he, so benevolent, one almost too kind for this world, could think and utter such daring, strong and vivid thoughts. That night the dreaming will begin again. Awake, he will write, I had been with the high and the happy… Asleep, all was misery and degradation.

On 1st Main Road, gnomes and plastic squirrels quarrel on the ridge tiles. On 5th Avenue a cottage is painted black beams on white, like half-timber, only it is all timber. 9th Avenue dissolves into sand. They are memories of elsewhere, of other houses, incompletely rendered because they are half-forgotten before they are begun. I will walk here many times with no adequate purpose just to remind myself that it exists, this imaginary place of clapboard and wind-chimes. I will walk here along the coastal path and along St Anthony’s Bank. I will sometimes bring the poet with me to read in the sand dunes. Sometimes I will bring along some lunch.

Every Monday he makes his own journey to another village. He walks the coastal path to sit with his brother and to read. His dreams concern him. Dreams concern a lot of people at this time; they mark the battle lines in the defence of the Soul. He will read the Scottish metaphysician Andrew Baxter and he will suppose that his dreams, violent and awful, must be the visitation of external spirits on his sleeping mind. He will read John Locke, and he will worry that his dreams must be assembled from his waking ideas oddly put together. He will read Thomas Branch and think of himself asleep as God’s theatre; his dreaming, some necessary instruction he must learn. Yet despite all of this he will worry why one so gentle, so benevolent, would have such horrifying dreams.

Some days when I walk to the village I see people constructing their dreams. They are painting their gates or standing atop stepladders fixing new windows to offer fresh prospects onto the estuary. They have pictured these windows for months, maybe all through the winter, but it is only now that they have taken their saw to the facia and made a new opening into the world.

The world here is flat. It is comprised only of horizontal lines – sky, estuary, beach – it is a landscape of separation: sea from land, soul from man. This is what troubles the poet. If his thinking self is asleep, if his senses are shut off, then his dreams might be a product of his soul. If he should die, dreaming such degradation, how might he be saved?

The walk to the village follows these parallel lines. They are only broken by the skeletal limbs of the amusement park, and the dun concrete skull of a pillbox, nestled half–forgotten in the sand. His contemporaries are grappling with the notion that man might not always be conscious of his thoughts, and that some might form themselves unnoticed by the waking mind. It is a difficult fight, for it will one day call into question the very existence of the soul. He prefers to think of his dreams as visitations, as intruders, things separate from himself. It is a cruel irony that his critics claim he has no imagination when it is this one thing that troubles him so.

Before I reach the village, I will sometimes pause here, sit atop the concrete war defences and read for a while, the composite stones of the concrete dimpling the palms of my hands. The interior of this angular cranium is cool and damp. It smells of urine and its floor is deep with beer cans and broken glass. Torn carrier bags from Kwik-Save have been left here bundled in the furthest corners; red and white and spilling sand and mould-pocked magazines across the ground. Breasts burgeon like toadstools amid the Scotch bottles and discarded bin-liners. Pages with full-colour, glossy vulvae, blossom across the sacks in the confined gloom.

It seems both an act of repression and confession. Left here by someone, but also apparently taken away from time to time by someone else. He will struggle with his dreams, for it is central to his belief that he is vigilant for his own salvation. In his poetry salvation is never reached, people do not act; they do not make the journey for they cannot know it.

In the recesses of this darkened space, only yards from the pastel-shaded verandas of the next village, one day the body of a young child is found – an indeficient consequence of dreaming, of misery and degradation – the inability to make sense of the rendering of wood, and screws, and imagination.

_____

James Bainbridge lives in Liverpool where he is finishing off a PhD on the poet George Crabbe. He makes occasional contributions to a group project called White Hole.

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By TNV, July 15, 2009

In the next village something terrible awaits you, all the storm and stress of the village you set out from, and it will take an entire lifetime simply to reach that next village, and yet, something compels you to go there.  You will meet the same people, but in the next village they are refugees from the village you left, having abandoned their families, friends, and belongings to reach the village where they anticipated a better life: there is no going back, for time has run against you, and you’ve brought with you everything in the old village that you hoped to escape.

_____

Gary Indiana is a writer, film maker, artist and essayist. His novels include Horse Crazy, Resentment, Gone Tomorrow and Do Everything In The Dark. A collection of essays, Utopia’s Debris , was published last year. His new novel, The Shanghai Gesture , has recently been published. He lives in New York.

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By TNV, July 10, 2009

I don’t think life is that short at all, I feel as if I have already lived about five different ones and more to come. And when, for research purposes,  I went on to Death Row in Philadelphia,  I could smell the length of time there. And if I ever get bored I am shocked at how long a day lasts. And yet if you decide to get sick so you can stay in bed with a hot water bottle and a small paperback, it goes so fast, ah it’s gone already, I wonder could I do that again to-morrow. I never was a boy so maybe that makes a difference, but I was a girl who did really cycle into the village in 1950s Monaghan, we had no next village, that we called a town. And was the journey exciting or what,  the possibilities of who you might meet on the way! And if you didn’t meet anyone, except old people over 30, that was ok too because you always had the flowers and the wind and taking your hands off the handlebars. And the next time, when surely you would meet someone uproarious. On the other hand life could be so short that I do not have the time to be thinking about it at all, so short but I don’t know it yet.

_____

Evelyn Conlon is a writer. Her books of short stories and novels include My Head Is Opening, Taking Scarlet As  Real Colour and Skin Of Dreams. She is the editor of Later on: The Monaghan Bombing Memorial Anthology.

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By TNV, July 8, 2009

Lying

I recognized I had contrived to understand the next village as a small and overcrowded planet. Even before the clarity of survival began to reveal the business of this anxiety, there was impatience with my obsession, with my bidding to understand the never ending journey with aching feet and tired limbs. I just didn’t understand what religion people around there belonged to. Astoundingly, they had outgrown the valley of darkness, neglected to follow the diversion both from the route for happiness and beyond necessity, as though seemingly satisfied with purpose alone. Remarkable! I recall I found this arrangement odd. They did not really understand the persistence in talking about and awaiting the potential of association. Maybe they were just too polite? But now they are thinking more about the place.

Indeed, however they slackened before, they now speed their decision to reveal what shall make itself, in the end, and I say this with confidence, invisible. The next village is receding, for its outskirts are very abstract, and eyes curious enough to look are suddenly struck with talking about an insight that seems merely the lowest, simple superstition. The problem at first was that anyone who had looked up its postmark was throwing the village open before there was a technique designed to settle argument about it. So we have taken to watching it from some undefined point as though it is all-encompassing. We unsteadily took to work with novel, quiet, bright and curious eyes, optics that never blinked with their technique designed to carefully decipher and verbalise the faith that is printed and scattered among us from the first sentence through to the sweetness of the conclusion without affirmation. But we realised that the image was transmitted in the shape of the transformation itself because we slander with misrepresentations and darken with falsehoods.

We might not be a great preserver of the next village, but if we are not lying, we are lying down. By being pacific, how can we justify its unassuming perfume that buses off ceremony? We would be diverted to the shadows in a fight that is of everyday relevance because all that is born of freedom are little seeds of defiance. The village has caught us. The path riddled with remarkable concision and mechanical utility will found the irresistible as lacklustre, but to take away the custodian means no longer remembering or, better still, trawling through the rhombus of our miscellaneous memos of forgetfulness.

Either way, it is always a dream that proves to become preoccupied by its forgetfulness, as if secretly we could ascend to sacrifices to, albeit haltingly, envelope a pedigree of imagination, only to find it delivers nothing more than defensive answers, efforts assigned as a mistake right from the very start. Yet it seems we still involuntarily keep thinking of the next village despite our footsteps being wreathed in isolation and failing. How dreamers will climb. Perhaps then it is enough to settle on the immediate honesty in this?

_____

D. Coys re-authored Lying from some of the existing texts at The Next Village. D. Coys writes a blog, here.

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By TNV, July 6, 2009

As we grow older we take in and process less and less information from the world around us. Of course. Which, say, is why it seemed to take such a crushingly long time until my next birthday when I was at primary school, yet these days it feels less and less exciting and more and more embarrassing to throw a party each year when the last one has really only just happened. Again. With this in mind, a friend recently told me that while, physically speaking, the average person reaches the mid-point in their life somewhere in their late thirties (terminal illness and accidents notwithstanding), in terms of what we actually perceive during our lifetime one’s mid-way point occurs around twenty. Here are twenty memories from the first half of my life:

Top-loading washer
Kidnap
One cat
Edgehill
Choir
Three cats
Piano scales
Summer biking
Sonic the Hedgehog
Florida
Four cats
Badminton in gardens
Kissing in a tent
Stratford Music Centre
Lunches at Safeways
Spun
Head-spinning whiteys
Videos with Pete
Norwich
Three cats

_____

Markland Starkie is an occasional musician, mostly under the name Sleeping States. A new Sleeping States album, In The Gardens Of The North, will be released on August 17th 2009. Markland currently lives in Bristol.

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By TNV,

I am interested in The Next Village because it expresses with remarkable concision a fundamental experience of any ageing person: how dramatically the perception of one’s own life is changing over time.

I think that the main reason why the text is so powerful is that it conveys its meaning in a very abstract and yet extremely visual way: it kind of puts the two time-lines (life as perceived by a young man and as perceived by an old man) side by side and the conclusion is irresistible, because you involuntarily keep thinking of life as the series of things still ahead (or is it only me?) and looking at it that way the old man’s life is undeniably shorter than the young man’s. This “trick” is reminiscent of those kind of visual effects like the never ending staircase. It is also something remotely similar to the brain flipping the image transmitted by the eyes, as that image is necessarily inverted due the eyes’ optical structure. (Talking about optics, I’ve just seen on television the trailer of a Hungarian film adaptation of  Transformation (Verwandlung) by Kafka. The movie’s main “selling point” is a photographic technique designed to render K’s unique perspective: the movie was shot with a full-panoramic camera moving at ground level. It was pretty impressive even on television. It remains to see if the movie delivers enough in other aspects to make it comestible in its entirety, though.)

An interesting aspect of how I personally relate to The Nex Village is that I recognized (and appreciated highly) its “artistic machinery”  (described in the previous paragraph) not long after I had first read the text (about 10-15 years ago). But it was only in recent years that I really understood/experienced the meaning of the word “astoundingly”  in the first sentence. Well, it is pretty shocking indeed to see all the potential of your personal life reduced to an everyday “fight of survival”. To see your future changing from some undefined, all-encompassing variable to a narrowly defined path on a small, overcrowded planet — one string of events among the billions of other strings.

Citing a passage of “L’homme aproximatif” by Tristan Tzara may be in order here:

“les vies se répètent à l’infini jusqu’à la maigreur atomique
et en haut si haut que nous ne pouvons pas voir avec ces vies à côtés
que nous ne voyons pas
l’utltra-violet de tant de voies parallèles
celles qui nous aurions pu prendre
celles par lesquelles nous aurions pu ne pas venir au monde
ou en être déjà partis depuis longtemps si longtemps
qu’on aurait oublié et l’époque et la terre qui nous aurait sucé la chair
sels et métaux liquides limpides au fond des puits”

_____

Péter Kovács is a graduate of the University of Economic Sciences of Budaptest. A former journalist, and a former banker, he now works as a computer programmer. He writes a technical blog.

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By TNV, July 2, 2009

The Next Village

Like the beanstalk, I had outgrown the village, and as the days passed I finally lost all confidence that it could contain me. I had outgrown the village: everyone said the same. True, they were too polite to verbalise it directly; instead, they forced me to read their conclusion through the sign language they carefully scattered among the various pots and pans and fruit baskets and wine presses and, in brief, any and all the objects that made up their lives. At first I read a kind of embarrassment in these signals, which, appearing both prolix and contrived, seemed to lack the immediate honesty of a conversation. But soon I realised that it was only my own understanding which was awkward, that their symbolism had both fluidity and grace, and that the first sign of my maturity was doubtless this newfound ability to read, albeit haltingly, the messages assigned for me at the agency of their hands. Indeed, perhaps they had been telling me to move on since the day I was born, but it was only now I had learned to read their signals that the request became a prescript. The girl was lying down, watching me with quiet, curious eyes, and behind her eyes were the eyes of the whole village, willing me either to leave them or to accept them unconditionally, to accept her, to accept myself, to put aside disbelief and return to the place where everything is acceptance and no understanding is required.

“You’ve made your decision. Now you’re just trying to justify it,” she said. “Even now, you’re thinking about the girls in the next village, and what might happen between them and you. I can see the thought, like a little coiled silver thing that’s trying to make itself invisible.” She stood up and walked toward the house. In the wake of her unassuming perfume I seemed to inhale the mild serenity of something always full and always complete. I had found a second-rate lover that would do my bidding, I reflected, even if secretly I had always coveted a first-rate virgin that would not. But the fact was, I did not really understand what I had, and neither did anyone else. All I knew was that her happiness did not depend on me, and, not looking to her for happiness myself, I could not place her purpose or justify her retention. Already, as she rightly said, I was dreaming about the next village, and wherever my dreams went, my heart was bound to follow. It was only an hour later, lying on my back in the shade, that I saw that what at first I had taken for a contemptuous arrow of defiance was in fact buckled and blunt, and realised that I had hurt her by failing to reply.

I set off at the height of spring, but, though the journey took less than a day, I felt almost immediately as if I were trawling through the depths of autumn, and I had left not only the village but even its season behind. If ever there had been a summer, it had long since slipped away between the cracks, although I fancied that, among the mist and damp leaves, I could still hear little seeds of it bursting on a bonfire somewhere. I do not know for sure if it was insight or merely superstition, but, either way I sensed that I had made a mistake right from the start, and maybe even before the start. Somehow, I was convinced, I had joined hands with an unsuitable travelling companion who would frustrate my efforts, and indeed, when I next looked up, it had grown dark.

I was tired, and there was a farmhouse before me with a little coil of smoke above it. I knew that the grey outbuildings, the peace and warmth and isolation of this place had begun to soak up the mysteries of the next village, even if it was only on its outskirts, and the most I could see of my destination were a few lighted windows and a silhouette on the other side of the valley. But it was still waiting for something to settle, all the same, and the stone and moss and ivy – the way they lay together, the way they drew apart – told me that perhaps I, or indeed anyone who looked at that farmhouse in this way, might be a part of that settling or unsettling, with the night dew dripping slowly from the eaves and the rutted path riddled with moons that overlapped the sodden leaves. It was no longer the village I had come from, nor yet the next one to which I was bound; but neither was it completely its own place either, and I realised its stasis must mirror my own until both of us acted decisively to reveal the lack within us.

On the first storey there were two wide windows in the shape of a heart, but it had been a mistake to wave at them: they blinked out at once, and I listened in vain for the sound of footsteps down an interior staircase I already knew was flagged with pots of geranium and had iron rails along which some kind of wild flowers had been trained. Instead it was from the stables that the lantern issued at last, carrying with it, a little unsteadily, the rhombus of a bearded face. I asked if I might stay the night, and the lantern moved without affirmation; the beard bowed and turned, and a back-of-neck replaced it; a moment later I was inside the farmhouse. I had come by bicycle, the man declared. Failing to understand the relevance of this, I nodded. Then he asked me the pedigree of my bicycle. Abashed, I told the man I did not know. Its worn chrome had always been at one, in my mind, with the worn hands of the farmer from whom I had bought it – a small piece of mechanical utility born upon the stage of a lacklustre time, and tricked out for little purpose beyond necessity. Seemingly satisfied with my answer, he said it was to be quartered in the barn. I myself, as custodian of the bicycle, might sleep at its feet, if I were so inclined. This much concluded, he sat down at a kind of bureau – perhaps it had been a dressing table, once – and began to write.

If it was a receipt or an instruction, it was a very lengthy receipt or instruction, and from the general poise of the room I soon realised that it was perfectly capable of reaching its destined conclusion without my standing on ceremony and awaiting it. I moved to the foot of the stairs, where the newly watered geraniums were dripping water and petals onto the stone floor, and, realising I could ascend it with my eyes alone, it was the work of a moment for my imagination to alight at the first landing and step softly along the corridor. At the first window it paused to try to decipher the outlines of the village, wreathed in night, beyond the reflection of the glass. But there was no village any longer, and throwing open the window only brought in the heavy mist of the fields and the distant laughter of geese on a lake somewhere.

“You are the man with the bicycle,” said a voice behind me. “I heard it squeaking, like a mouse. Well, not like a mouse …”

The moon had been joined by a pillar of lemon light, extending far above it. I turned back to the open doorway and the broad girl who was standing within it, her long raven locks separated by a rose.

“Not like a mouse?” I repeated.

“No. Not at all, as a matter of fact.”

“So what does a mouse sound like, then?” I asked, wondering why she had chosen the comparison, if it seemed so inopportune. It was not the question I had meant to ask; there was at least one other question that should have preceded it, but somehow we and our conversation were already here – wherever here was – in despite of those missing preliminaries. I had been caught unawares, my back to her, and now I stumbled blindly after her lead.

“I haven’t the faintest idea. I’ve never seen one,” she said carelessly, as if, once again, she intended the incongruity, and hoped I would make light of it.

“You live on a farm and you’ve never seen a mouse?” I asked involuntarily.

“Who said I live here?”

And she gave out, somewhat deliberately, as if she hoped to take later profit from it, that her name was Sisé. Suddenly I had something concrete, and involuntarily my mind grasped the name and held it the more strongly because of the evasion, the lack of focus that had preceded it. A moment later I realised that this had been her intention from the start, that she had deliberately surrounded her name with half-shapes so that I might distinguish it among them the more clearly, and accordingly credit it with greater substance than perhaps it truly warranted.

“It means safe haven,” she said with a smile, and the smile itself seemed to say: You have fallen, but I shall catch you, because I am Sisé and safe harbour, and I mean exactly what I say.

I told her it was a nice name, and – “Well, it’s my name,” she replied carelessly. But something caught her attention. “My name, ” she repeated more thoughtfully, as if it were part of a prayer. The carelessness, now feigned, escaped her, and circled her like a bloom of lost youth; knowing she could not regain it, she pretended not to notice that it was there.

“It’s my name,” she said a third time, and as if to underline the point and lay her authority firmly upon it, tore it off, like something at the bottom of a pad of paper. I let out a cry, but – “What I should be called now isn’t the point,” she said. “It’s that you are here, at the beginning, with me. For the first time in our lives, we are at the beginning; we didn’t run to catch up; we didn’t slip sideways, over the hills; there’s nothing we missed through an opera glass.”

I could not believe the ease with which she had given up her old name, and I felt humbled by it, since I had done nothing to deserve being here with her as she did so. But then I saw that it was because of me that it had happened in the first place. She had been waiting for me – perhaps for me, maybe for anyone; – but she had been waiting, patiently, for someone to come along all the same, and she would have given her name away regardless, even if they would not accept her in return. Something was moving in the room; her lips brushed my own. Already I was dabbing at the frosted glass, rainswept and green with mould, against which the diluted, anonymous and somehow comforting yellow light of an unknown interior had framed itself.

“I’m not very good at kissing,” she said apologetically. “I’m better at doing the things people do when they’ve finished kissing …” But when I raised my head I found myself staring into the confused eyes of a child, and a legion of things passing upon the backstreets and thoroughfares of her mind without either clear shape or general comprehension. Maybe the errant, dream-governed thoughts had some agenda, but they put me in mind of the village I had just left, which could not even begin to mean until it had been unconditionally accepted. Not knowing what to say, I kissed her on the forehead, and turned back toward the flight of steps at the head of the landing, taking the piece of paper the farmer was still writing from my pocket.

“The lights will be extinguished at midnight,” he had written so far. “It is the responsibility of all tenants to ensure they take their belongings with them when they leave …” But the finger – Sisé would not be left so easily, and was beside me once more – was pointing to the next sentence: “Any items found missing or damaged will be charged at the cost of repair or replacement, as appropriate.” I started, not knowing the cost of a name or a heart in this place, or who could make a new one.

“I was only holding the paper,” she said, “because you were trembling. It’s like that in the beginning, but when you stretch out your feet and find there’s nothing you can touch, then it’s like being on a beach. What are you worried about a new one for? What’s done is done.”

“But I didn’t mean to do it,”

“But you did it all the same. Both of us. You are the tenant, and I tore off my name. If you had it in you to get to the next village, then you would be there by now.” And she pointed out the window where, sure enough, I seemed to be still walking with my bicycle in the leaden early morning mist, an ever brighter skyline shining pink and blue between the black trees.

I was the tenant, and minded to take care of my possessions. Was Sisé my possession now? She followed me as if to constitute a claim, though she did nothing specific to hold me back. I knew in time I would tire of the cold, grey dawn in which nothing could be achieved, would tire of it before it gave way to the more bearable day which would succeed it, and in which perhaps I might be able to see Sisé herself in a different light. The argument of convenience was to remain on this sheltered landing, at the top of this flight of steps, where it was warm and safe harbour, and this beginning could be our distraction. But perhaps the farmer had not been talking about Sisé. Perhaps, instead, he was talking about the possessions I had had before. Only after breaking with the first village could I embrace the secrets of the next village, but I suspected that the secret of the next village was simply everything the first village had always been, only revealed by its rejection, and that this was the reason I stumbled about in the gloom, unable to recognise my own hand before my face.

“And the lights will be extinguished at midnight,” I repeated, with a sudden sensation of colour – fields, sky, sea, battlements, ships, Sisé and her eternal descendants, all a burnished, shining, shadowy, glittering green. I saw that at every moment events run up and clap their hands, and the time for good intentions and leave-takings is already past. Slowly, but quicker than we know it, a small frown settles upon the brows of our tomorrows, down the slopes of which a man with a sickle hastens on a sled. Knee-deep in snow, the journey upward exhausts us, and we take advantage of his charity upon the way.

“Midnight is time enough for everything to be done,” Sisé said indifferently. “It’s the same rule for everyone, and however much you want to do, one day you’ll feel sleepy, all the same.”

_____

No Answers writes a blog, and maintains Mazeopolis, where many more short stories can be found.