By Freya Bertham
From the doorway, the world spreads marvellously before me. Streams ribbon through the landscape like veins and the earth convulses with evening life. Teeming with quiet activity against the backdrop of the setting world, the shoulders of the land swoop in drooping shapes down towards the lake, pooled between the arms of the mountainous bodies and suffused with the reflections of low hanging trees tinged pink by the dusk.
On the porch, my grandfather sits cocooned by this worldly beauty. His hands, like folds of thick velvet, rest on the arms of his wicker chair and he silently stares out across the terrain, intoxicated by the heavy August air, which hangs sultrily with the oppressive floral sweetness garnered from the moist summer.
My nightdress billows around my ankles, taken gently by the humming wind. A chime is caught by the zephyr and the humid evening is scattered with a light tinkling.
The lake stretches out gloriously. In the weeping light it looks like a mirage of deep, liquid silver: a passage to another, ethereal world. When I was younger I’d often spend long afternoons crashing into the water to observe the slivers of golden fish jetting about below the surface. They looked like tiny stars littering the depths of a universe, and I became an astronaut, face submerged, suspended in the liminal space between the world I inhabited and a turbid mystery.
Tonight the small waves roll in noiselessly.
The figure on the porch does not stir. Perhaps his mind conjures fantasies, which colour the world in resplendent ways I cannot fathom. Maybe they are not fantastical, merely thoughts he indulges in to escape the time that seems to have loosened its grip on him. Somewhere lost in the pathways of his mind, he could be on a great journey travelling through lands blanketed in golden barley, wandering through precious streets he used to dawdle along when he was a boy. He could have slipped into a world where he does not find himself trapped by the limitations of his own body; where the medics do not pay him visits; where he does not have to take the four yellow pills, the two pink pills, and the two white pills each morning. I could spend forever placing him in the spaces of poets, of artists, of inventors, of voyagers – but he is not anymore.
Instead, he is a victim to his own brain and lost to the fabric of blank periods of time where he ceases to be anything at all. He is stuck watching the world without absorbing it. He is numbly looking out across the rolling land, and his eyes will be glassy and irritated because he has forgotten to blink. He is propped up, overcome by the pulsing of his heartbeat and the clanging sounds in his head.
When I was little, I’d climb like a leopard onto his lap and we’d sit together on that wicker chair watching the sun dip below the horizon. He’d tell me stories of when he was the captain, his adventures, how he roamed the seas, undertook expeditions others would never dare. He was infallible, undefeatable; a man who could wrestle with the tempestuous waves Neptune hurled at him and come out the victor each time.
A pair of swans descend elegantly down to the water and break the glass surface. They shake themselves and slowly swim together across the lake. I imagine him bewitched by their effortlessness, eyes watching the ripples intently as they bloom out behind the creatures, how he would be charmed by their smooth movement.
It’s all going to change. I’m standing on the periphery of tomorrow and suddenly this place feels like something that will become forbidden land, a dreamscape intricately fashioned to the soles of my feet, and ripped away overnight. In years to come, I’ll unintentionally shape the memories of my time here with desperate longing until I mould the melancholy into poignant nostalgia. I’ll be standing here limply as an observer, sanctifying everything to the point that it becomes surreal and idyllically adjacent to time.
Our peace is ruptured by the birds pulsing from the neighbouring trees. They spiral into the air like billows of black smoke. They squark, madly; scream at one another, malevolently. Crows don’t twitter like songbirds and they don’t hoot deeply like the chorus of birds in the morning, they lurch and croak and cry and fester in trees waiting to interrupt tranquillity. They are an omen of death, a funeral march for this perfect place we shall have to abandon. Time has caught up to us, and bundled the furniture into large vans, left naked nails where pictures used to line the walls, taken the lady of the house.
Behind me, there is a chasm where there used to be a choir of gentle voices in rooms scattered with memories – trinkets from places I have yet to see, jasmine scented draws filled with photographs of ancestral faces that I cannot assign names to. There were cabinets lined with hand painted plates, pots laden with silverware, glass cases boasting collections of angel sculptures with faded blue wings. There was a home I knew better than the ridges in my hands, a haven that already exists only in my memory.
He will have forgotten the place he breathed life into. Forgotten why he has to leave it. Forgotten the laughter that reverberated through these rooms; forgotten the sound of small shoes as they clattered into the house leaving muddy trails behind them; forgotten the bonfires we would build in the garden that would burn until the morning of the next day; forgotten the sound of the floorboards on the stairs, the way they creaked, exhaled differently and familiarly under the weight of each person; forgotten the smells that came from the freshly made raspberry jam in the kitchen; forgotten the hands of the small children who picked those berries; forgotten the unruly garden that he used to nurse until it was immaculate; forgotten the door which had all our beaming faces tacked onto it; forgotten that he used to feed the birds with an array of different seeds in the morning; forgotten the golden curls that would float to the floor when they were trimmed with the kitchen scissors; forgotten the cheeky giggles of the children dancing wildly in the sitting room; forgotten the breathlessness of the soaked bodies that would emerge armed with snorkels from the lake. Forgotten the life that was his.
Though, he would never forget the shuffling of her slippers on the carpet – that I am sure of – and I am certain too that the faces of the ones he loves are etched so deeply in his brain that in their own way, they too shall never be fully forgotten.
From the chair, the captain suspires deeply. A robin lands gracefully on the porch balustrade in front of him. I know it has captured his attention, for he leans towards the bird as if compelled to reach out and touch it. Its orange breast puffs out proudly, vibrant against the collapsing sky.
I turn and leave him to slowly resurface from the abysm of the sea.
Featured Image: Breannah Holton