Thursday, November 4, 2010

Lording It Over Time

When I think back to that day, before it had all started, it seems gloriously boring. I feel like I could revel in the mundanity of things as they used to be - shopping for dinner, washing the dishes. Of course I know that I didn't. Revel in it. That afternoon I was so monumentally fed up with life the walk from my flat to the supermarket was a feat in itself.
The ground was moving under my dragging feet, it must have been. I had been walking... oooh, hours - years perhaps - and still hadn't reached the trolleys. I felt old. I've always felt old. I started a gradual decline into midlife crisis when I hit eight. I remember contemplating the years then past and thinking, 'they won't come again.' Of course, at the time I speak of, I really was old. Thirty-three. Every morning I hunted age in the crackle and fall of the soft skin above my eyes. I tracked the dainty footprints of crows who, for reasons best known to themselves, came in the night to stand on my face. I like crows. They are respectable, and intelligent, and loving to their spouses, but - why did they stand on my face? Did they realise the effect it had? They must have done. They weren't pigeons, they knew what they were doing. Why did they mean to harm me? I passed one at the entrance to the carpark. I glanced at him, worriedly. He ignored me. Pointedly.
I decided to make a detour to the library before doing the shopping. The library is beside the market, at the back of it. It's an undignified place for a library, now I think of it. There are usually a few empty orange crates lying outside, sometimes cabbage leaves, that purple moulded foam used in apple packaging: random detritus from the business of grocering.
The library itself is almost deserted. There will be two librarians, looking exactly as they would appear in the least imaginative imagination. I do not know that their names are Agnes and Neville. I do not know that. The most depressed person I ever knew was called Hope, so the librarians' names might be Shazira and Jet, but they are not. Agnes and Neville have the genes of long-descended librarians. They are not rebelling against hippie parents.
They will be inexplicably sorting books back into shelves from the 'returned' trolley. Inexplicably, because no one ever visibly checks any out. If they are not doing this, they will be having a furtive conversation about something which, judging by their expressions, they disapprove.
About four o'clock there will be two or three teenagers fidgeting outside. They are not hankering after literature: the library, as the least-visited corner of this town, is a good place to smoke, and hold clandestine meetings with equally-fidgetty members of the opposite sex.
Apart from that a dog occasionally strolls up, sniffs about the supermarket debris in a business-like manner, seems to consider for a long while whether it is worth the water to urinate but invariably decides that it is, and then strolls off again. He is unmoved by the friendly advances of a schoolboy, but that is because he is a Jack Russell, and they are independent creatures.
The library itself is small and the architecture is from the 1970s and has no beauty in it. There are no very noteworthy books but there are enough harmless detective stories to get you through dismal Mondays and soul-destroying Tuesdays. In one corner is a temporary display, installed in 1983. It is a small and unrepresentative collection of minerals. It was to this that I, ruffled by my encounter with the crow, fled for solace that day, the day it all began.
I found those rocks so soothing. There was an austerity in their presentation: white box; glass; small typed label. Typed, on a type-writer.
Porphyry, fluorite, malachite, serpentine. Serpentine, from a place called Lizard, in Cornwall (it's all true). Dark green, like a treacherous sea, with bloody red and white like a dragon tearing the waves into flays of foam.
As I stood there, my mind relaxing into thoughts of the cold Irish Sea, harsh words broke the habitual silence of the front desk. I looked over anxiously. A tall, angular man - untidy grey hair, long coat, drumming, twitching fingers - made an impatient gesture and scanned the room, ignoring now the muttered protestations of Neville. His gaze seized on me, I thought, and he stormed towards me. I flinched. He came to an abrupt halt, coat whirling forwards for a second and then settling. The man bent, hands on knees, and glared at the rocks.
I wondered whether I should dash away. He didn't seem to have noticed me yet. What an interestingly mad person. It was all reminding me of the time I lived nearer the city, near a ... I don't know what you're meant to call them - an institution? It was an asylum. The people who lived there, those who wandered abroad in the day, were intriguingly mad, rather than disconcertingly so. One man shouted at litter but beamed gloriously when you greeted him; another man was the very double of Stanley Kubrick, and appeared perfectly normal apart from his habit of plugging his ears with his fingers whenever he passed you on the street. This man was like them.
He had tapped one long finger on the glass case, just over a sample of porphyry I liked. It was dark purple of course, with paler markings that made it look like a tinted photo of space - a galaxy, you know, all the stars clustered centrally and scattering outwards into the darker depths of emptiness.
He glanced up at me. "Very sorry," he muttered. "The fools have lost the key."
Then he took a screw-driver (how did he happen to have one?) and eased it between the wooden frames. With a crack, he had levered them apart, and now he opened the case, greedy fingers stretching towards the beautiful porphyry. Well, no-one else ever looked at the rocks, no-one else even comes to the library. I felt that, really, they were mine. With a little indignant gasp, I had slammed the glass top down on his hand. He yelled, grabbed my hand, drew his own out (porphyry clutched) and turned to me. For a moment I thought he might wring my neck but, although it is likely this was his inclination, he instead screwed up his eyes and exhaled furiously through his nostrils. I tugged my hand in his grasp but he did not let it go.
Eventually, he opened baleful eyes on me, and raised the porphyry between finger and thumb.
"It is mine," he said, slowly and definitely, almost reasonably. I just stared at him, my breathing quick.
"I left it here for safe-keeping," he continued, "and now I need it."
"You left it here in 1983?" I asked disbelievingly. He was mocking me, probably; I just wanted him to know I was not a fool. "And now you suddenly need it?" Who needs porphyry? I looked at it. "It's just a pretty stone."
He shook his head irritably. "It is not just -" Then he sighed. "Yes," he said, nodding. "It is a pretty stone, and I want it back." He pushed his hair back and looked around, about to leave, I could tell.
"What is it really?" I asked, tentatively. I might have asked because I suspected he was delusional, and I was humouring him. I might have asked because I wanted to know if this was some trick - if a peurile TV producer had set it up to record my and the librarians' reactions. But I asked because I looked at him and I no longer believed either of those possibilities.
He cradled the stone, looking at it, and then at me. And then, he showed me the porphyry, and I saw. It was not a stone at all. I sighed to see it. His expression changed too.
"Do you want to come with me?" he said.
"There will never be enough years," I said, thinking of light-years and Einstein and the vastness upon vastness of the universe.
He smiled, like a Doctor assuring a patient of a simple cure.
"Time," he said, "we have."

Monday, November 1, 2010

All Souls' Day

Will o' the wisps wreath through these trees
Unnatural weather falling over their leaves
And the prayers of the dead, and all they ever said
Hang in the air on memory's threads

November nothings sigh the sweetness of May
From the dark of the grave, buds break into day
Rising to lay shades over dusk-coloured stone
While dining on those who are laid out below.