Standing Still

A short story I wrote.

 

 

Standing Still

 

The heron startles her. It takes off suddenly, as if remembering it ought to be elsewhere. Deep wing flaps cut the still morning air as it rises away down the rhyne. Grey and white with a glimmer of yellow from the dagger-like bill, legs dangling behind like a pair of forgotten forks. The silhouette, a prehistoric concorde, seems extraordinary, not of this earth. 

Gwen continues along the drove towards the causeway. The disturbance of the heron’s reverie annoys her; she is cheated of the tranquillity that accompanies being transfixed by it. 

A hazy veil of rain hangs over the coast a few miles distant where the low-lying marsh meets the sea at Clevedon. The wind is picking up. She quickens her pace, climbs the gate and walks down the road towards home. At the sluice gate is a van with two men operating the mechanism that controls the water. Vic is one of them. She bumps into him quite often on her morning rambles, inspecting, measuring, or cutting weeds. 

‘Good morning Vic,’ she says, leaning on her stick to watch. He is the only person she knows who still smokes a pipe, a permanent fug of sweet tobacco clinging to him, sparking memories of her father. He keeps his hands on the oversize metal screw handles, manoeuvres the pipe to one side with his tongue, and speaks whilst biting on it.

‘Mornin’ Gwen. Better get a move on, she’s gonna’ rain soon enough.’ Another Vic oddity - the weather always female, like a boat.

‘Indeed. I see you’ve got a friend today.’

‘Aye. This is young Rob. Training him up. Little Kenn pumping station’s playing up, we’ve got to adjust some things manually here and there.’ 

Rob looks about thirty-five. Slumped over the gates he watches indifferently as the water trickles through the slits. He chews gum obviously, like a ruminant. Working for the Internal Drainage Board perhaps wasn’t what he thought he’d be doing when he left school.

‘Miss Lancaster! You used to say it’s not your fault, but it is your responsibility!’ says Rob.

Her catchphrase. A former pupil. She can’t assume familiarity now, after giving him the once over and ignoring him. 

Pastoral care was all stick and no carrot when she was made Head of Year back in the Eighties - shout at the bad kids and shove them in detention. Instead of detaining kids like Rob she talked to them, about their dysfunctional families, troubles and fears. Your less than perfect life isn’t your fault, she would say, but it is your responsibility to decide how you’re going to respond - your behaviour is always in your control. 

‘I’m so sorry Rob…did I teach you much?’

‘Drama in Year Eight Miss.’ Grown adults continue to call her ‘Miss’ all over town, a strange legacy for a widow. ‘But mainly I got sent to your office for mucking about. This and that,’ he grins, ‘nothing too serious. Lynch, Robert Lynch.’

Gwen’s memory bells are not ringing.

‘Rob Lynch, of course!’ She feigns recognition, better than the disappointment of being forgettable. ‘It’s been a while, you’ve changed quite a lot.’

He taps his paunch gently with one hand whilst stroking his beard and balding head with the other. 

‘My kids are at the High School now. Wish you were their Deputy Head.’

The school is floundering, rudderless - a trendy young Head with too many ideas. 

‘Doesn’t time fly?’

She leaves them to their work and continues across the bumpy road until it climbs a few metres to St Quiricus’ church and the fringes of Tickenham village. Pylons and a yellowing path etched into the grass by dog walkers blight the next field. As she crosses the Middle Yeo stream cocky lapwings strut around on the grass, looking for insects by the water. With their jaunty crests they resemble punks, youngsters with attitude. Her memory vaults finally deliver a recollection of Rob - a struggle with him and his mother over an extreme haircut. 

Teaching happened by accident. A temporary job helping the drama department’s yearly production became a maternity cover, then a full-time post. The head teacher didn’t mind the lack of teaching qualification; she’d been in professional theatre companies, he said, the university of life. Heads were older and wiser then. 

Before the houses swallow her, Gwen takes her customary last look across the levels. Strips of reflected light showcase the latticework of drainage channels. A man-made wetland. The grey diagonal line of gloom is sweeping inland splitting the world into wet dullness or brilliant sun-drenched clarity. Walking at what Joe calls her ‘school speed’ she makes it home just in time - as the kettle boils raindrops hammer onto the conservatory. 

Her breakfast newspaper informs her that she is lucky. As a woman from the baby boomer generation she had everything - free university education, family, affordable mortgage, career, and a good pension. She notes the past tense without amusement. This news does not help her fill up the void that is the rest of her day. After walking, and breakfast, what is she meant to do? She lunches with a few close friends, reads, watches detective dramas on television, tends the garden, but rejects offers of coach holidays and W.I membership. She tried a few meetings but knitting socks or bag-making workshops are not for her. Some days she thinks she is just twiddling her thumbs waiting for bedtime, so that she can get up again and walk. Before teaching and marriage, life stretched ahead; old age remote and distant. Three years in Sadlers Wells Ballet Company and nearly forty years teaching has not set her up for a sedentary retirement. Peter was going to go part-time, do another couple of years. They’d made a list of travel destinations, researched camper vans. Everyone else seems to treat retirement as a destination, not as part of a journey. She doesn’t feel particularly lucky and throws the newspaper in the recycling.

Gwen was drawn to Peter immediately. He was a walking cliché - strong and silent - a man of few words. The landlord sent him around to fix the boiler, but he kept popping back to mend other things that she hadn’t mentioned. After the third or fourth visit she lost patience and invited him for a drink. He was never going to pluck up the courage. His hands were strong yet tender; he was an attentive lover, a decent rugby player and could mend the most intricate toy. Joe arrived after less than a year. Going back to work full-time wasn’t common in the eighties, but she loved teaching, it never crossed her mind to give-up or go part-time. Peter didn’t mind, sharing the drop-offs and pick-ups at child-minders and grandparents. Joe thrived. Look at him now she muses: married, and a physio at a rich football club.

Oesophageal cancer. Unglamorous, unassuming, hard to spot. How typical of Peter. Gradual changes in diet, slower eating, weight loss, intermittent cough and hoarseness. With hindsight all were signs. They were put down to old age, to heartburn. They’d barely got over the bleak diagnosis, (it had already spread to the lymph nodes – three per cent survive five years said the consultant softly) when the hospital called Gwen at school to say he was in an ambulance. He didn’t even last five months. Her strong, gentle man was taken before he could do battle with chemotherapy. Joe was at university. They wallowed in tears for a week or so, before she took him back to Loughborough for his finals. 

She retired a month later, having already given notice the previous autumn. Joe set up home with Annie in London, close to her parents, where she wanted to live. She doesn’t blame him. He’s a good boy, making his partner happy. He visits when he can, encouraging Gwen to travel, or downsize to London, or club together and buy somewhere with an annexe. Wisely, he has never used the term granny-flat. 

It never occurred to her to inform Joe about the early morning walking. When he stayed for the weekend after they started, and the first time that Annie, then merely a fiancée, visited, she simply got up as usual and left. At eight-thirty or so when she returned both were pacing about, frantic with worry.

‘Where have you been?’

‘Just out walking. I go every morning.’

‘I’ve been up since six. What time did you leave? We’ve been calling people! We had no idea where you were mum!’

She shrugged her shoulders.

‘You didn’t leave a note or anything.’

‘Joseph. I’m a sixty-one year old woman. I don’t need to leave a note to tell anyone I am going for a walk. Don’t be so silly. Now – have you had breakfast? Would you like pancakes? Eggs?’

Sleeping used to be easier. Nodding off isn’t a problem, but when she wakes, usually between four and five, Peter’s body is no longer warm, to nuzzle up to, but cold, and decomposing in the ground. Without its king the king-size bed seems cavernous, silently magnifying her solitude. 

After a couple of months of tedium - the measured crawl each day towards getting up time, the exuberant, taunting birdsong, (always happy and surprised with each new day) - she threw on some old clothes one morning, donned her crusty walking boots, and left the house. The town centre, and housing estate beyond, was the first step in her new, somnolent world. She ended up on the North Drove Rhyne, having been there occasionally with toddler-aged Joe - it was a great place to spot cows, and splash in puddles. She saw the heron that first day and has been bewitched ever since. Graceful, noble, patient, something about spotting it seems lucky. She’ll often continue her walk until she spots it. She used to be exhausted after a couple of hours but now she can keep going for five or six, sometimes more.

For nearly four years now she’s been rising before dawn and rambling. It’s a ritual, whatever the weather. In torrential rain she still ventures out, Peter’s old golfing umbrella in hand if it’s not too windy. Long straight droves, tractor-wide tracks for driving livestock, run roughly east-west, following the main rhynes. More meandering channels run north-south, the whole area scattered with farms, small-holdings, and narrow roads. 

She had assumed the grazing marshland on her doorstep was dull – a manufactured landscape for rearing animals on poor acreage. Drainage channels were surely a poor substitute for moving water. Now she can name rare plant species, spot otters and bats, and takes pleasure in sunrises, cows lining up solemnly for milking, and late-summer wildflowers. 

Like the heron, her favourite fauna, she has learnt to stand and stare. She finds the aura of quiet authority powerful. A king holding court. It is unlike other wildlife, almost existing in a different dimension. Keen eyes observe everything – the stillness is dormant – it interacts only when necessary. She likens the moment before a precision strike to a second of silence in a song; time appears suspended, stretched – what will happen next? Despite its slender body she finds it gluttonous, eating anything, impatiently swallowing a catch whole, no time wasted.

 

***

 

A field near Kenn the next morning. She’s been following a swan in the crepuscular light, hoping for a mate with cygnets and has been rewarded with a view of the huge nest, in between two clumps of black bog-rush. Gwen can discern a hint of olive shell underneath the sitting female. The big day is close. Each baby animal or expectant mother yields memories of trying for a second child. There were complications following Joe’s delivery and after two false starts she needed a break, threw herself into a frenzy of work at school and got promoted. The subject was never broached again. All her eggs in Joe’s basket. The swans nuzzle coyly. She imagines Peter’s hand on the small of her back. She looks away from this private moment, finding delight instead in some flowering Water Crowfoot.

She climbs the gate onto Kenmoor Road. There’s a junction of ditches here, Thirteen Acre Rhyne meets Weston Rhyne, and the Claverham Drove. The water level is much higher than nearer home, the ditches a deep royal blue instead of shoe-polish black. Over the road, a couple of snipe on a flattened area of mud and reeds, digging for worms with their stick-like bills, remind her of Joe poking about on the beach.

She freezes. The heron is there too. Motionless. It stares downwards into the water, poised and calm. As often happens she holds her breath, joins it in anticipation, fearing any movement will break the spell. It owns all the time in the world. She thinks of all the Sunday mornings spent ironing and cooking lunch, the afternoons trawling through schoolwork. A working mother preparing for the week ahead. Joe and Peter were banished in the morning whilst she listened to the Archer’s omnibus. Blissful solitude. 

In a flash the heron tilts downward, as if gravity has suddenly been switched on. The S of the neck becomes arrow straight as it harpoons the prey with a splash and then tilts back up. A huge frog! Legs wriggle frantically as the heron squashes its middle, shaking the catch. The frog is dropped a couple of times as the heron manoeuvres it to position for eating, re-capturing it with spiteful stabs of its bill. 

Gwen sidles over the road and sits on the grass to watch. The heron has never been closer.

Breakfast has been positioned satisfactorily; the frog drops head first into darkness. The heron gulps, and moves its head up and down, neck stretching to encourage the slide down the gullet. Either side of the bird’s bill rear legs continue to cycle in desperate self-preservation. 

The heron begins to struggle. 

She stands quickly without thinking, a reflex action, body suffused with fear without understanding why. She wants to descend the bank, wade over to the bird and help, but her legs don’t move. She holds her hand out uselessly, heart thumping. She is drenched in sweat. The heron paces, tries to eject the frog, head bowed, bobbing its neck up and down exaggeratedly. It steps towards her, almost off the reeds and into the deeper water, and fixes her eyes. Help me, help me. Movement is impossible.

The force of the epiphany strikes hard, she staggers, bends double, can’t breathe: Peter eating in those final weeks, struggling over every mouthful, using his entire upper body, snaking his neck and shoulders to help food down. Their eyes have the same pained, sorrowful look. The heron is Peter.

The frog’s legs are barely moving. The heron’s actions are slowing too. It seems to be trying to swallow again, its steps unsteady. Then it keels over on the reeds, frog still wedged in its throat, and twitches a few times before becoming forever still. Its eyes are still open, still fixed on Gwen.

 Peter used to apologise: ‘Sorry love, must be horrible to watch.’

Some time passes before she can wrench her eyes away. The road is empty. She is crying. Brackish tears stream over her lips. She sits down and brushes her face periodically with her sleeve. Memories of Peter overwhelm her. He used to say sorry again and again for the cancer, as if she was inflicted also. She thinks perhaps he was right. 

A few vehicles begin to pass, early commuters on the back roads. A van stops on the verge behind her.

Tobacco perfume announces Vic before he speaks. 

‘Gwen – you ok?’

She cranes her neck to look at him. 

‘You’re as pale as anything. Here.’ He holds out his hand and she accepts, closing her eyes as she stands, getting light-headed. Pipe smoke at close proximity perhaps saves her from fainting. Hands grip her arms gently, and for a moment her existence is simply using him as an anchor, feeling she may float off otherwise. 

‘We’re just on our way to the pumping station. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

She opens her eyes, sees Rob standing by the van, and says ‘something like that.’

She points at the heron.

‘Suffocated on a frog.’

‘Sweet Jesus!’ says Vic, letting go. She sways slightly. He descends the bank and takes a closer look. ‘Wow. That is… something else.’ He stares. Rob wanders over.

‘Brutal.’ 

‘I couldn’t do anything.’

‘Nasty shock. Must’ve been upsetting. We’ll deal with this later’ says Vic to Rob, ushering her towards the van. ‘Would you like a lift home Gwen?’ He has offered countless times over the years, particularly in inclement weather, but she’s always refused.

‘Yes please, if that’s ok,’ she says weakly, wondering what a pathetic sight she must be. She is shattered. 

Rob is instructed to walk up to Kenn and wait. Vic opens the passenger door of the van. 

‘She’s gonna be hot today,’ he says, looking skywards as he starts the engine. He sucks his pipe vigorously as he drives, directing smoke through the open window.

They bump along the road to Nailsea. Gwen gazes at the fields and ponders the morning’s events. All this time walking the early morning away, believing she was taking the onus, moving on. Measuring her life in walking boots and wax jackets. Has she in fact been standing still? Not taking responsibility, but merely caught in the pause before whatever happens next? The self-delusion of countless dawns without a new beginning. 

‘Where to now?’

They have navigated the narrow sunken roads, flanked with tall brambly hedgerows, and climbed suddenly into the west end of Nailsea, with its well-ordered rows of 1970s houses. 

She tells Vic her address. He knows the street. 

‘What you need Gwen, is a nice hot cup of sweet tea.’

That’s exactly what Peter would’ve said, she thinks.