Demeter liked his new smile. Cinnamon for reconciliation perhaps. She touched the amber ring around her throat and it felt soft. Honeyed pulp a voice told her. Dark orange fingers of light embraced her naked white neck and the man, dead for so many years, imagined he was alive again. Her hair caught at the amber’s fire and nearly engulfed him. Her fingers stretched out before her into the long long space between them. But this orange girl was not his: she had promised another years before.
His mouth called to the muddy dog who scuttled happily behind him and vanished into a room where all noise seemed to have stopped. Demeter held her breath. It was just herself and him. A man with a new smile and no name who was trying to tell her something she didn’t know. His mouth moved again but the words just echoed from another time and skipped away.
I think you’ve left your finger prints where they can’t be seen. Her words not his. But she did not own them, they were free.
How long she stood in this corridor she could not tell. All shapes started to move slightly so that things were not as they were, as they had been. She was falling into orange light.
Outlines changed. Demeter thought of damp bracken and heard the crunch of eager feet running through autumn’s fallen branches in a wood that was just at the very edge of her memory. The black dog was digging avidly at some pile of wet earth and the boy was walking slowly ahead in a diagonal line testing his compass and humming a tune Demeter knew she liked. She wanted to follow him and tried to move her brown boots but they seemed far way and she could not feel them at all.
More orange light and she waited to feel lonely and strange as she so often did, but instead felt a surging glow behind her eyes. Images rushed to the surface from lost places. There was a white step warmed by early summer sun, and a tall woman talking to a man selling fish. She was holding a book of poems. Or were they letters? Demeter tried to see more. Were these her eyes? Her vision was being fed. Peripheral shapes crowded around her. A word fell into her mouth, pecten. Pecten. Let me see more, let me see further, let me see you. Protein energy. A prayer.
Demeter shook her head as if she were that small black dog, trying to shake out the words that were in her head feeding her thoughts that she would only understand when she was at the end her thoughts, at the end of that corridor that led off a square gazed upon by a woman lost in time. The woman wore a purple hood and had once loved the sea. At night she had prayed to leave the house whose darkened rooms made her feel unnecessary.
‘You can help me water my geranium Demeter it’s losing its sense of pink. ‘
Amy rescued her hand and started to laugh. Full throated Pontypool.
Welcome back my wandering friend.
Demeter stood up knocking a book off her lap onto the floor. Amy feigned shock.
‘Is that anyway to treat my hero? ‘
Demeter looked down at a picture of a young man with tousled black hair doomed to die in Rome whilst watching visitors pass below his window . John Keats . He was 24. And she had no idea how he had got there; then suddenly she remembered the lady on the steps who was also remembering her.
