Demeter could not easily differentiate between one shape and another.
Her toes would stroke over objects at night and she would wonder what she was sleeping with- an old shirt, a newspaper, a biography. Everything seemed differently arranged and she would act surprised and say out loud, ‘Oh is that what it is? It doesn’t feel like it…’
Her small sister Annie would play games with her, placing objects under her duvet and then listening for the muddled voice of Demeter who was trying once again to understand a world that to others seemed perfectly simple.
Annie liked collecting oddly coloured glass and would experiment with the sun light on her window sill so that her occasional visitors would exclaim with pleasure at the purple rays of light across her school books. Annie dressed up the half century old push dog in royal outfits that came from the supermarkets and left labels all over the house saying ‘Annie is sad’ when a family friend left.
Demeter could never bring herself to be so direct. The red tailed hawk in the aquarium seemed to confirm what she already knew: that it was only by looking at the edge of things that you got their drift.
So she wandered through life looking for edges, for those small movements just where your eyes nearly lose interest- those peripheral shades of sudden truth. Yet, when she stumbled over the present, she always doubted its integrity. It was the thing that was there at the corner of her gaze that was only waiting to be introduced.. a beckoning. She saw shades of other things too and could not be left at night in the house alone, without her believing that something was there.
She had been an awkward, solitary child and though her late teenage years brought out a luminosity and light to her movements, an essential clumsiness and difference remained.
Her school colleagues would look at her curiously, and then pass on unsure what to speak to her about. Her striking looks didn’t give them an obvious way to reach her except in small portable exchanges about time-tables, the long queues for lunch and essay dead-lines.
Demeter veered from apparent carelessness about her school existence to a kind of unresolved aversion. She spent much of her time gazing out of the window and only her English teacher seemed capable of drawing her back to this world. When all her class rejected Thomas Hardy for his relentless fatalism, Demeter unnerved them all with her passionate defence ; she left the room red-faced but curiously uplifted, seeing in Hardy shapes of intimacies too rich to tell. She loved Bathsheba more than Troy or Oak, yet did not kid herself that her affection was merely one of identification. Demeter knew what she was not: her real problem was in knowing who she was.
It was only when she met Amy that her awareness of others became at all solid. Amy was simply and devastatingly there. She moved in from the daily periphery and stood clearly before Demeter and for once,Demeter could not look away. ‘I am here’ said Amy, and of course there she was. If Demeter blinked and then reopened her eyes, Amy would still be there, looking back at her, waiting for her to speak. Amy would not let her friend disappear away into her thoughts and edges. And Demeter had to love her for that.
By contrast,Demeter’s mother Alice appeared to live in her camel brown hand bag. Her family always found her intent upon its contents somewhere, tipping them out, counting them up, replacing them again and then checking the zipped inner pocket for something she never declared or named. It was if she had lost something long ago as a child and had never quite managed to forget it. Demeter would watch her staring inside her dark leather bag tutting to herself, and would hope that just one time, for a change, her mother might actually find what she was looking for.
Her mother needed the reassuring dusty scent of the old bag each day and the ink stains made her breathe more slowly, more truly. Each part of her ritual unzipping and gazing and looking soothed her: here I am again she would think; I have my bag and my memories after all.Demeter could not imagine her mother without the bag.Alice would just disappear away.
Her step father John was always at some repair shop or another. He remained convinced that we lived in a broken world with broken things that hung on by minute threads, threatening to betray his world’s fragile stability at any time.
Demeter would meet him in the porch, on his way out with some thing wrapped up in a supermarket bag heading for the village. The cork notice board had a special protected area for coloured perforated tickets with pencilled in dates for collection. Everything in the house existed in a state of anticipation. Kitchen utensils, bath rails, cupboard handles, and taps: Demeter would find herself checking to see what she could give John as a gift for repair so that he didn’t have to start murmuring and searching by himself. ‘I thought this needed to be looked at John’ she would say, and he would stop and nod and gratefully examine the proffered object, turning it carefully until its imperfection made him sigh. Demeter hoped that her gifts limited her step father’s disappointment with the world. She hoped that their successful repair would ward off his gentle assumption that all things end, that all things finished in pieces.
So the family were involved with the shape of things: they each held to their personal vision of things, strangely united despite their apparent isolation, in their vivid sightings of a wary world. Only Callum appeared uncertain of where he should be in the family and in this world. He wondered what he needed to acknowledge.
Perhaps he was more outward than they were Demeter thought. He went out and stayed out far longer than the rest of his family would ever countenance. One day Demeter feared he would just break the thread and not return and they would be left unsure of any directions and any report from the places they never visited. They each wondered in their own way what he might be doing out there beyond the ‘edge’, but there was no hostility in him when he returned and he always came back with a story that moved them temporarily away from their separateness and quiet despair.
I think that is a very sensitive piece of writing. I feel like I am getting to know the family very well – directly, but in a kind of oblique, subterranean way too.
For prose, your writing is very poetic – there’s nothing precious about it – it’s evocative in subtle and sensuous ways.
I hope you write some more.