The Source dreams

A prologue

Come with me, walk carefully and quietly. Stay back! We follow a woman as she steps carefully in high heels through the mud and undergrowth.  She is in the wrong shoes for this job, but it’s her lunch break and the only time unaccounted for. 

The water smells brackish, shallow and mineral-rich.  Will it be deep enough beneath that surface that is slick with oily stains?   Watch your step; there is so much rubbish, detritus of trysts and parties: cans, glass and condoms. Follow her.  Watch her.  You may need to remember this moment.  Her hair is sable-brown and neatly rolled in a French pleat.

 A man is dead, and there is a box to remove from the world, a grey metal lock-box she holds out in front carefully, like a tray of canapés being proffered. Stories trail behind her, little lost and secret stories. They cling to her pencil skirt and whine for attention.  No time for them.  Not now. Her heart beat is a bass-heavy thump but in her head is a crazed jazz treble: logistics, logins, passwords, email accounts. Another box, this time in a bank. Two PO boxes in two towns, and at the huge hospital on Broad street one body.  

One beloved, known, mapped by her fingers body.   A man is dead and the box must disappear.

Watch her. Follow her. You may need to remember this moment…

Little Boy Hansel

It is full dark and the trees whip and whisper.  Way up, up high, the orange street lights try to hold back the sky. There is no-one about--is there?  No squares of warmth and voice fall beyond the darkened window panes that sit behind long and low front yards. 
He is 107 centimetres tall and not yet six years old.

In his t-shirt pocket is a little plastic bag of coins.  He waves the blue arc of torch-beam like a light- saber through the cold night, the dark night, the excited night.  In response it asks: 'Little boy, little little-little boy, can you remember the rules?'
He toes the kerb, looks left and right, then bolts across the road, a river of risk, and leaps onto the safety of the kerb (embankment), punching the air with his beam, legs pumping along the path, one house, two house three house, four!

In his head his Mum's mantra: 'careful in the car-park, ask the staff for help, any treat you choose, my big boy...'

She stands in the shadows under a tree and lights a cigarette, able to see him nearly all of the way.  Prouder than she'll be when he starts school or performs a solo. Remembering, as she puffs her mum-blues out into the cold air, her own adventures in creeks (Rivers and Dams!) and tunnels (Secret Caves of Treasure), but remembering too that just short years older than him and the adult world had proved itself capable of a darkness worse than storm-drains.

Puff. Risk. Managed. Puff. But. Still.

The air stills, her neighbours pull away in their heavy-duty car and she imagines him suddenly mangled beneath it.

The beams trail away, replaced by a swinging solid line of blue. Here he comes, whistling on his lollypop, pleased and proud.  Whistle-Toot and in he tumbles, back to TV and bath-time and all the overblown baby-rituals of coddling.

So many risks ahead, most of them unmanageable. This his first.
Whistle-toot!

Puff.

Pull up a chair, grief.

I sat in a park alone. Let the wheel turn as it would. All went silver into nothing. Then the view again. Silver. View.  I found that finally I was crying, the tears thick, oozing gently past my lower lids and onto my cheeks, immediately effaced by the wind that was mildly warm but gusty.  After ten or fifteen minutes the view took more colours. I realized I was crying not for my Uncle who just died, but for myself and his children. That I was crying because I know and fear that when my Dad dies I will be infantile with grief, an utter child again, railing and flailing.  I understood too that that though I will cry for when my Mum dies it won’t be so outraged. I hold her too close inside, she’ll always be in me chattering away, whereas the loss of my Dad will come with a fear that he is indeed lost…He lives not in the world of talk which can resonate inside, but in the world of activity.  I will see him in the repairs of my home, in my own tendency to not let myself be picked over in a fight, my straight and sound work, in some of the charm he transmitted through genes or all the living. I should trust I will have him close, yet somehow it his death I fear more greatly.

The wheel turns, the warmish wind blows, it is autumn, thinning of the veils.  And there!  Colour again.  A shed so blue it is sky. Its trim is the burnished brown-red of olives. The taste almost on me, of olives on a day hung cerulean blue.  Death-thoughts subside in the moment of that shed’s painting, all the confluent story of someone choosing those colours, dreaming that scheme; then two little girls emerge from the shed on hot-pink bikes. I remember being six or seven and going to Dad’s work, the excitement of it, the great warehouse where I rode a big purple woman's bike round and round the empty concrete floors. Hot chocolate in the dark wood office.  Just another childhood Saturday.

And now I build those childhood Saturdays for another, good reason, sensible loving reason, to have held down on grief and mortal fears. Good reason to go now, away from the salty words and into the sweet of my son and his little limbs sprawled on the couch. But I know too I’m not done crying, that in the mix of life and the days there is so much salt ahead, salt enough to make a statue of a wife, or salt enough to buoy a ship.

Which will it be?