But is the world ready for Pond Man? A man of few words, he will not charm, and he will not charm you, so the rest is left to me. I must do the work of carrying him over, of taking him out of his hushed shell.
But silence is golden and must be honoured and kept separate from the hurly-burl. Silent space, a warm cavern, a dark velvet curtain he sits behind waiting to emerge. Separate and apart - ‘though we are all separate and apart - but not so quietly, and not so softly. We squawk and squeak and rustle awkwardly through our bags rummaging, always rummaging for what we do not have. We fumble, we stumble, and we try to claim the keys to many kingdoms as we trip and fall and lose ourselves in performances we never thought we’d have. So tactless. So graceless.
I should say Pond Man never stumbled, although he may have dropped from some height. From a tall pine tree, or a willow or a beech or an oak. Of course he has been known to pollard. Yes. He has been pollarding trees for years; but it is not that exactly I am trying to say but something more fundamental. He has let something drop around him like grace. “Grace”. There, it is that word I want to get at but it is difficult; it is difficult to reach that place. We are so afraid nobody will let it alone. Or him.
Still, it follows him everywhere, pure immanence, the whole world inside him; a rock rolling away carrying no sound. Patience. Kindness. Taciturnity. After a while it can only become that; a slow hardening of the shell; something like a turtle but more nimble because Pond Man is not slow. He moves rapidly to the next house, to his neighbour the harbour master’s, a stone’s throw from his own.
Like the parable, he is a good neighbour, and so the harbour master and Pond Man live side by side with few disputes and just enough words — ‘G’day, 'G’Morning’ — the sorts of words people have been exchanging for hundreds of years; and then the right gestures, the right signs. We all rely upon them to reassure us none of us is mad. Continuity, the usual matter, “how do you do?”
And so everyday Pond Man walks past and lifts his hat to the harbour master’s house as a recognition of his place in the order of things. Civility. Gentility. Hat on, hat off, and in between the house which on sunny mornings beams back at him from windows which the housekeeper shines once a week as the harbour master shines his shoes. Laurence Gallows is his name, a strange omen, but there it is, he has lived with it for long enough, hanging there in the air disquietingly.
(But it is only a name; it is what is done that matters, surely?)
For in years to come Pond Man will help Laurence Gallows more than he will know; he will avert disaster simply by putting poles in the right place; poles made of oak sunk deeply into the ground. Ominous you might say, but life is built upon small moments of doing or not doing what you had intended to before the grand event came along and swept you away.
Remember that night years ago when a storm blew up from the Tropics? Pond Man had been out walking the pier waiting to see the cut of her jib - the wily storm - her knives flying up through the waves as he considered how far she might reach this time. To the bottom of the garden gate and underneath creeping along the pavement slabs as he wondered whether the boundaries might hold.
Wooden stakes driven into the ground boring down. He had chipped and chipped with the mallet deep down; deeper and deeper into the soil - the soil holding fistfuls of earth - they are relatives but perhaps the earth is deeper - the soil holding together clinging insect life; stopping distraught worms from flying, before cutting them in two. The mallet: yes, the mallet is to blame. And the rain lashing down and the windows rattling on their lintels and the doors on their jambs — History was reckoning with itself that night; with the breadth and depth of things. The cornerstone beneath the chimney breast where two walls meet. The kitchen and the parlour where the harbour master keeps a stack of newspapers and the mice have built a cheery nest and several neat droppings no one notices as no one notices the silent minutes ticking by, unearthly.
That night the harbour master stood out on his front stoop shielding his eyes, his hand a small mizzen sail hovering triangular over his face. He stops and frowns and pulls down his cap before moving rapidly towards the pier where the lighthouse towers tall and proud as a spear. Nothing will budge her says the harbour master to himself under his breath. Nothing, not for ninety years, muttered Laurence Gallows to himself that dark and stormy night when the seagulls flew into the harbour wall from the brute force of the wind. Nothing could be held down, nothing between the hands, no barnacles, no seaweed, no jutting rock, no grip. That’s how he remembered it. Nothing would hold that night, nothing at all.