Disappearance. So much of life is about this and we have to endure it. People disappear, like birds they migrate; we are all seasonal creatures. Affection is like this: it waxes and wanes, but too much of the hot tap scalds us, drowns our feathered wings.
Owls prefer to see at long range. Dorothy peered through the gloaming and thought, better to stay put. No need to move. She had read enough books to know romance goes quiet after a while. Get out the ear trumpet, dear, I can’t hear what you’re saying, you’re mumbling. She wasn’t mumbling but neither was she annunciating. She and Henry were comfortably remote, politely distant, respectfully so. Civil, very civil, it was a decent marriage -- and so the months passed, and the tawny owl began to call through the autumn evenings -- for it was mating season, and by October Dorothy knew she should go in.
The pond had given her a season’s worth of calm retreat, but the air was turning chillier. Really, there was no good reason for remaining outside. The house was wide open and yawning; every evening Henry left the doors open. She only had to drift nonchalantly in and go straight to bed. They slept in separate nests. Henry came to bed later, and as Dorothy didn’t wish to be disturbed —it was a good enough excuse — there were enough doors in between.
She’d learned to do that at school – to duck, to dive, to fold herself away -- behind her desk, behind her taller best friend. Five foot eight aged ten. And then later, to return home at dusk, when the lights were on in the house and the shadows were shorter and she could slip up to her room without anyone noticing. Concealed, unrevealed, furtive. No one asked questions because she knew not to make a fuss. Dorothy was always doing her homework or tidying her room. She came down quietly for supper and went back up again. Quiet pauses, quiet rituals, a hello on the stairs. She had learnt a gentle decorum early on. Even when she was ill, she never made a fuss. Fussing just brought disturbance, someone interfering. The doctor’s teeth pressing in, his cold stethoscope. No one noticed her passing in or out – disappearing -- Dorothy was good at that -- you just made yourself smaller. A big house helped, and Dorothy had always lived in big houses, in far-flung rooms.
I grew up remotely, my friend says. We couldn’t see each other at the other end of the corridor. We hovered like lonely atoms, chilly to the core. Cold on the outside and cold on the inside. So many people live like this with draughts running through in a granite house off the moor. Hear the windows rattle, will someone let us in?
Dorothy always went in through the backdoor; the front was too large. Lions on either side, creatures with paws. Angry beasts, they had been left too long in the rain. Dorothy patted them and ran away. Her father’s choice. Mother remained silent on the matter. She didn’t like showy things, but history repeats itself. Or perhaps all quiet men like roaring lions. Will someone let us in?
Loneliness is deafening, but Dorothy was used to it. It sat behind her eyes, in quietness, a pale vale. In recent years she had surrounded herself by wall. I take this thing to be a wall, and she had; and her wall was packed with stones -- sharp edges -- it could hurt her. Imagination is a cruel thing.
It woke her suddenly at night, a tangy smell, a sharp realisation of the future. She dug her nails into her hands, and they turned pink, then white. At some point she would be all alone, at the end of the world like Cathy Earnshaw when Heathcliff would be dead. But she was already alone, and dawn was breaking through the curtain. She clasped her thumbs tightly, she held her bones. Would they snap? She had small hands which explained why she was always dropping things she told Henry back when they used to talk of such things. Or perhaps she had invented that; perhaps she had been talking to herself. She should close her eyes, settle back down, dawn was still a faint apparition. She didn’t need to push back the covers yet. Face her bare white legs.
(from POND LIFE: NOVEL FORMS OF LIVING, a work in progress)