Demeter was walking in her favourite wood. She had left school for the dentist and then found no reason in her form diary to return that day. All the golden leaves lay sodden before her like some dismal bridal train. She felt in her duffle pocket and discovered something chipped and round and dared herself to name it before she clambered up to the folly at the top of the lane. Was it red? Was it edible? Precious? She realised she was talking to herself again.
Her teeth tasted sedimenty and she breathed out on her damp glove. Sometimes she had to breathe out to check if she was really here, if she was Demeter or some mirage of a person sprung up out of the earth; the rocks, she decided dreamily. Mud squelched up over her boots. Rich dark brown stains. She sucked in her cheeks and swallowed. She tasted sweetness.
A few moments later and she was at the folly and peeped over the broken wall to stare down at the grey lake. A few friendless ducks swam by and she had a clear view to the motorway if she really concentrated. Something whirred in her other pocket. Her mobile. A text. Demeter read the dental inquiry from her mother and sent back a legion of kisses.
‘They get everywhere’ said a voice she recognised. And there was that woman from the New Year walk, clad again in a huge bear coat, smiling with a mouth that went on and on. She had the bluest eyes she had ever met. She could not remember them from New Year. Was it the same woman? The woman laughed.
Demeter felt she was wandering around the edges of this woman, following her mouth’s strange performance and strangely dizzy as the brown eyes gazed upon her.
More mud she felt beneath her boot and she staggered a little sideways. And then took a step back and leant against the wall.
‘Last time we met you were with a new friend and this time you are alone, yet here we are meeting again. Demeter. And you can see all the way across today, and the woman pointed across the lake to a place that seemed to form just on the border of what Demeter thought she had seen. A smoky avenue of trees that took your eyes with them and then seemed to lose them. Was there a door?
‘I am making a new map today Demeter’ said the woman’ and I want you to help me – perhaps. ‘
-Perhaps? Was this an invitation or a doubt?
‘Old maps are so constricting after all,’ continued her companion who was now equipped with some unusually yellow paper and a soft pencil and was sketching away as she turned her head slowly, this way to that.
‘ I make maps once every change of government and then we can all see more clearly where we have to go, you see. ‘
And Demeter did see, though what she saw eluded her, but she thought it might have a door and a path and even a dog perhaps. She looked down at her boots and they were no longer muddy and were shining in the bright light which had suddenly arrived from nowhere.
Even her gloves felt warm and Demeter laughed as she pulled out the small object
That was a marble afterall. She was pleased she knew this. A marble from her pocket. It was amber now she could see it, amber with a slash of ancient honey. When she held it in this light there was something tiny caught in its centre, shaped as a heart, a very small heart. She held the marble against her cheek, strangely scalding now against skin. Not even her own skin. She was slipping into another place, the amber ball expanding her senses into one another. She could taste the amber, honey trickling down her throat like the residue of a long kiss. And then she could feel it there, here, in her breast, tingling, burning at her edges. It was a centre, pure heat. Pure time.
‘You have many hidden places Demeter and it is your destiny to seek them again. Find what you have hidden and set them free. ‘
Warm words; courageous words for a girl who had always felt afraid. She lay her gloved hand across her breast and could sense each idea swirling around beneath her touch. Winter, summer, autumn; words and seasons like leaves; like care; like love.
‘Like love itself ‘completed the woman who was still drawing out her map. ‘Find the heart of the journey and the journey is over.’
And then the amber marble seemed to dazzle Demeter with its dark centre which promised so much. It matched its pulse against her own. She met the rhythm and its honey climbed inside her. There was that beat; one; three, five, seven. Prime time. Honey time. Secret love. Molten time.
She turned the amber ball once again against her skin and felt its heat: electron the Greeks had called it. Elektron. The energy of the past. The small heart with its secret pulse seeping into her, taking her through something that she could sense but not see. She saw Amy’s ring for a moment, she saw Amy’s face and then lost her in the swirling glittering gate that seemed to descend upon her. Unbounded impressions were everywhere around her, nothing remained itself ; inky darkness swallowed her. Demeter put the amber in her mouth and tasted the raw ancient honey.
Pine resin from the neck of a Roman wife. The woman’s throat pulsed and blood poured down her slim neck; sticky scarlet stains upon Demeter’s mouth as she tried to save the woman who was staring at the dark sky through eyes that were already milky with death. Her hands trembled at Demeter’s lips as her visitor tried to breathe her life back again as her soul yielded to a Godless wound. Farewell my strange angel Demeter wanted to say. But her voice was through a heavy darkness, curtained from the souls of the dead.
‘You cannot save her’ said the woman.’She died 2000 years ago. Her husband betrayed her for his own life. A trade he could not resist. They killed him in the mountains. Fed him to their pigs.’
Demeter smeared her bloody mouth on her coat and smelt the stain. This is real, this is her suffering on my arm. This is new blood.
Nothing ends Demeter, everything is carried through time, here and there and everywhere. Shapes make us believe that this is that and so we trust to our seeing that sees so little and then we get glimpses, and here the woman paused, You get glimpses Demeter that there is something else, just at the corner of your eye waiting to be known.
The woman turned and looked back along the path. I think we are about to become three again Demeter.
There you are! That voice. Amy had missed her.
