Man Was In The Forest

by Andrew Hook

 He sits on the clifftop looking out to sea. Grassy tufts are bent flat under the weight of his body, but will eventually straighten as though drugged guardsmen when he leaves. The wind is slight, and he is alone, sitting still in a Goretex jacket.

 Dancing shadows and glints of sunlit treasure reflect from the broken mirror of the sea. If he desires he can turn these fragments into the myriad shapes of an endless parade of mythical beasts; but he is alone, and the wind is slight, and he throws a stone out towards the water.

 Due to the sweep of the land the stone falls short and tumbles ungainly down the cliffside. Jenny's face is on the turning stone. It is also in the sea which is constantly changing. It is remade and undone with surprising repetition in the cloudbanks out of reach. He picks up another stone, and feels the sure weight of its very presence in his hand. It touches him deeper than the impressed skin cells on his palm.

 There are few birds. It is approaching winter and they have flown inland towards the city. They fill their lungs with the noxious fumes from the alternately speeding, trafficstunned cars. Come springtime they will return and be wiser for it. Yet once again the following year they will find their instinct overcomes memory, and they will head once more to the warmer city. It is a process of travelling which makes few allowances for the insistent progress of other beings.

 He stands up rather abruptly at the edge of the eroding cliffface. His head blurs dizzy for a moment, and his legs weaken but he doesn't fall. His state of mind confuses his perspective and he sees waves crashing on the lip of the cliff; but in reality not even fine spray can leave faint salt stains on his shoes. Looking around as though to see someone he then turns his back on the sea. With his hands in his pockets he makes the journey across to the train station.

*

 "Have you finished in the garden yet, love?"

 Jenny's voice calls across to him from the conservatory (from the past). Plants surround her, framing her face with a reflective greenness. He looks up and sees her standing there as his hands push into the moisture of the earth. "One moment," he calls back. "There's only a few more left to plant."

 The train lunges through the broad landscape along its designated, expected path. His thoughts make music from the electric hum of the reverberation along the track. Windmills with black bodies and white wings are dotted motionless within his view. So still that they appear to be waiting his passing before returning to mourn with him. Occasionally he sees a heron, knee deep in small fish waters; domesticated cattle graze with soft expectancy, paying little attention to the train.

 As they are drawn into the city's outskirts buildings seem to fold in on them like bullies around a small boy. He feels as though he is in the centre as the sky darkens in the night.

 When he steps out of the train he is reminded that there is no one on this platform who could welcome him. The immense glass dome over the station echoes with a cacophony of noise suggesting the importance of life. He turns his eyes up to the dome, and imagines sitting along its very apex, gently pushing out oblong glass panes with his feet so that they drop smoothly down below.

 The glare of headlamps greets him in the night air. Taxis with their engines running send up smog/fog clouds to the sky. He deliberates whether to walk but succumbs to one of the waiting vehicles, mumbles an address which needs repeating as he gets inside.

 Perhaps it is his soulful demeanour, or maybe the driver is at the end of a long shift, but they are both saved from the inane chatter of similar journeys. As they silently wait to leave the junction from the ever busy train station, he becomes aware of Jenny sitting alongside him in a memorydriven taxi.

 "New Zealand was wonderful wasn't it? Can you imagine what it would be like to live there? Such a diverse landscape in a small country much the size of Britain."

 He sits silent and thinks heavily about arriving home.

 It is as they approach his district that he realises they are taking the alternate route along Falcon Road. He watches passive but not immune behind dirty tinted glass as the zebra crossing comes into view. It numbs him to consider that he might have smiled or even laughed at the moment she died; oranges spilling out of a split shopping bag, rolling safely across to the other side.

 Traffic and noises and cars, he thinks. Something nasty always waiting to happen.

 When the taxi drops him off he pays the fare to the bulky driver, and makes the winding walk along the crazy paving slabs to the door of his house. The light in the porch lantern has been activated by a timed switch rather than the movement of a loved one. Its tidy glow seeming an inadequate replacement for genuine warmth.

 He takes the key out of his trouser pocket and attempts to slide it in the lock, but it jars unnecessarily and slips from his grasp to the ground below. Feeling for its metal edges on the pathway his fingers connect with some stubby grass. He rubs his hand over a cluster of greenery that sprouts up stiffly amongst the crevices. Finding his keys and rising to his feet again he looks across to the irregular shape of the regular moon. Neither full nor crescent it reflects the sun's rays in a silveryblue light. The trees at the rear of his garden bend backwards almost silently in shadow, angling faintly the dark perspective in which they are seen. Suddenly all around him he becomes aware of nature's presence. Under the paving slabs, and in the guttering, edging around the plastic contours of the pond. He waits a few moments to take this in before entering the hallway, closes the doorway on the outside now beyond.

*

 "Would you want to be buried at sea?" Jenny calls to him from the kitchen, as the kettle begins its whistle. She has seized a moment during a TV show in which to make the obligatory cup of tea.

 "What's that?" he counters, stalling his response to such a direct question; feeling his insides tighten at the very reality of the matteroffact view she had of things.

 "Buried at sea, I said," Jenny repeated; popping her head around the door to the lounge. "Feeling all that space around you rather than being hemmed in by the earth."

 He closes his eyes and recalls snorkelling off the coast of Fiji, of how he felt he was flying across a mountainous country containing multicoloured airborne fish. Of how the difference in air and water suddenly seemed to depend largely on their relation to the earth; and of how solid the ground itself became when next he stepped back onto it.

 He puts on his pyjamas now before getting into bed, finding them a necessity during the past three months after her ungainly death. As he closes his eyes and rests he can almost detect her depression in the mattress. As though he is a man aware of an amputated limb extending from a stump. The sounds outside his window mix a few nightbirds in with the cars, but it would take a trained ear to detect much presence of the former. He thinks of Jenny lying prone now in the security of her wooden box; wonders if she is here or there or whether she has truly ended up nowhere.

 "Are you coming?" she asks him, and he nods avidly his reply; feeling daring only later when his suitcase is packed snugly in her blue sports car.

 They drive through the night. In the morning they arrive at her ancient memorial home. Passing through the woodlands he is amazed by the dawn sounds that seem to surround them. As though the forest is a fully syncopated living being. And in many ways it appears that nature has taken over the entire house, with doves resting amongst the grey stone walls, and creepers both colouring and perfuming the facade.

 "This is my place," she says with a strange assurance once they are inside the imposing abode, her arm gesticulating to take in the cobwebbed statues. "Generations of my family have lived and breathed in here, but none of them have died. See where their condensation still clings to the glass."

 He looks sharply away to where she points and sees the residue of dew, which clings onto the sparkling windows like sticky rain.

 She picks him up then in her arms and carries him directly to the bedroom. The interior is clean except for crushed stamens which cover the duvet on the bed.

 "Trust me," she says as she lowers him, "I am but a rose made out of thorns." Then she bends her head and he sees her eyes split into fractured slivers like metallic petals.

 The room darkens intensely. He hears noises in the bushes. One by one eyes lit like yellow beams begin to stare directly out of the shadows. He spins his head around just to see more lights appearing magnified in his view. They begin to press in on him, until they almost touch the edge of his bed.

 Suddenly he hears a terrible roaring and his own eyes spring open onto the scene, which is of his patterned wallpaper regaining its shape in the advancing dawn. Outside the window he hears his neighbour who has begun rather too early with the hedgetrimmer. All he can think of is that man was in the forest.

*

 It is Saturday. He goes to her grave and mourns, and then he goes to the travel agents. He returns to her grave as though to request some kind of tacit approval. Back at the travel agents he hands over his Visa card and books a flight next month for Lima. Each action performed so simply that it takes the edge off what he is doing.

 At the chemist he checks on malaria tablets, and then makes an appointment at the doctors for some jabs. Inoculation against Yellow Fever is the only one he will need to pay for. Jenny had disliked the needles, but considered them a necessary evil. It had been implicit during their time together that they would travel to each country alphabetically.

 During the day he feels fortunate that he doesn't see anyone that he knows. His friends only serve to emphasise that he is now an individual. It is as though an aura surrounds and encloses him, permeates the people that he meets, so that they trot out a set of sympathetic clichés without acknowledging who his is.

 Within the cemetery the city sounds are distilled to a faint thin whisper; the noises of car engines on the nearby road lost in unechoing space. Her grave is almost central in a part of the cemetery that is being redeveloped, it reminds him of the nursery rhyme line that repeats "roll over". As one or two gulls fly overhead he kneels down before her in the damp grass, the few phrases that he gives her seem to have lost their intrinsic meaning.

 "Come on love," she says. "Let's go up to play." He follows her upstairs with an anticipated sense of nervous exhilaration. It isn't the making love itself that is so important, but the invitation to experience her. The allowance of penetration seeming much more intimate than being the penetrater. Then as she lays back on the bed he notices the pot plants on the windowsill. They have been filled with too much water and it has seeped dirty at the base.

 He slips out of his remembrance, and finds himself back at her grave. He is stunned by the knowledge that they will never, ever, be able to have children.

 Later he sits in the greenhouse watching the garden through frosted glass. He feels he is outside yet not outside, and the selfcontainment makes the world look different. He is aware that somewhere around him bugs are nosing about, scrabbling for food. There is an anger building inside of him which makes him want to stretch his arms out through the panes. Instead he gets up tired, pushes the door open on its welloiled runner. Closes it after himself allowing a brief gap for the entrance of air.

 For three days now since the dream he has had the notion that someone is with him. Only in the greenhouse has he realised the absurdity of that charge.

 He closes his eyes and the sports car is there. Gleaming in blue the reflected sunlight gives the appearance of white streaks. Behind the steering wheel she is a goddess in a yellowgold dress.

 How will this end, he thinks, as he leaps into the adjacent seat. Will they crash into other passengers on zebra crossings, or float into space off a cliffface where he will close his eyes until the ground? Jenny is not quite Jenny, but he always has to look at her. There is a wildness in her eyes which suggests she has found a greater freedom.

 When he awakes in the autumn morning he remembers their first holiday in Afghanistan. Just outside the window the mountain of Hindu Kush dominated the landscape. The solid brownness of its colour trivialised the intensity of his illness, he had awoken early morning to see Jenny in silhouette getting dressed. As he looked up weakly from the bed she had asked with quiet impatience if he felt better. His answer was choked back by an impromptu premonition of separation.

 So Jenny had gone out early, on a wind, on a breath of whim. Pale morning sun stroked her bare legs, hilled bum, walking boots, back pack, her black pack of hair smothering the fastenings. The great sky was clouded but bright, promises to clear. From the window of the guest house, doubled up with stomach cramps, he saw her disappear. Micro waved. A pale white, skinny, long lost arm floated over the horizon, hung there, sun blemished, tarnished, varnished, vanished. He watched her disappear. A disappearer disappearing.

 Of Jenny's demise in the city he realises that he knows absolutely nothing. An awkward police presence at work, and numbing recollections of mumbled sympathies. For a fraction of a second each morning now the world is sleepeyed and quite alright, then reality comes crashing back to him like a comet with its tail alight. His remembrances become falser and less concrete by the day.

 The young girl who is the receptionist makes him feel guilty for the first time in the past few months. He reads more into the smile that she gives him that even he knows was intended. Later when the needle sinks into his shoulder he exchanges banal chatter with the nurse, and tries to justify his reasons for travelling to Peru.

 "There's just so much to see," he says, "and we all have such little time." It seems a nonsense now to mention the alphabetical approach they had to things. The nurse nods and wipes the blood away, puts the needle to one side. With a conspirator's air she tells him of her holiday in Mallorca.

*

 Prior to his departure he goes to the clifftop and looks steadily out to sea. The wind is slight and he is alone with only the elements. Jenny's face is becoming fainter now, their memories fading fast no longer shared. He cannot believe sometimes that she was ever really with him.

 In the city the seagulls cry, swoop down on offerings to sparrows. They steal and soar then alight on rooftops in the breeze. But whatever direction they take they will always return to the sea's expanse. Filching chips and following in the wake of commercial boats.

 Beside him on the clifftop is a heap of gently piled stones. He has determined to return here frequently to see if any are displaced. As though an alternate gravestone they are also a symbol of enclosure, of how there can be no insight without the building of an outer wall. It seems apparent to him now that Jenny never came to him in a dream, but that out of a longing desire he simply dreamt of her. It was not as though she was reaching through to him, but rather he was reassembling, shifting bits of memory and filling out the space.

 Jenny is sitting there beside him; faceless and thin, but he remembers the dress. He wants to dissect the fantasy out of this but fails because there are no hidden meanings. When she gradually is erased again he edges closer to the cliff. His descent is made internally and he never hits the water.