In That Clelia Imagines she is Like Pluto

                    In That Clelia Imagines she is Like Pluto

 'What's this?' said Clelia, whose spirit now hovered above her prone body on the bed. Like a willo-the-wisp she hung suspended, invisible to ordinary eyes, which see always only what is in front of them. 'Poor papa. Yes, it has made you sad, but don't worry because I'm leaving now,' she said to her father as he got up and left the room. 'I'm going home. To Les Saules Pleureurs.' How can a child who knows nothing of life understand her parents’ sadness? She has had none of the regrets which slowly clog a life like an old, used up heart. She cries when she's wet, or in pain. Or when she wants a hand to hold her. She understands love, particularly when papa says, "Can you say mummy?" or maman says, "my baby," but can only answer with chuckles and smiles, and, with the clear light of her own love shining in her eyes. She has learned the art of communicating without language, something which belongs deep inside every woman and man and, indeed, every sentient creature that has ever lived.

 Though those are the limitations of her life, it would be a gross error to suppose they preclude her from having an imagination. For in every mind there exists a world. For Clelia, it is a world formed by struggle: chronic illness, an inability to achieve things. A confinement to things which cannot be radically changed. But who among us has not at one time or another had to contend with things like that? It is imagination which leads us away from such problems. With imagination, we interpret our world, fumbling around for the right word which will make everything better, or stop things getting worse. Children like Clelia have as much right to their private, inner worlds, as does the next person. And the right to live it out in immeasurable, secret, dreaming. Now, with the brute weight of a Sisyphean boulder, the crushing weight of illness rolling away out of control, she wishes to simply leave it there and go home. 'Roll, roll down the mountain, rock, I will not push you back up.' Words have always filled her mind, poured into her ears by loving parents and siblings, while she remained trapped without her own. Now, liberated, here they are, tumbling around as they do in every mind, waiting for us to use them. Waiting for them to help us make sense.

 She is tired of the machines, the noise, the giddy making drugs, the doctors whispering diagnoses in private circles, the nurses, the pin pricks on her arms and sometimes on her legs. Enough of all that.

 Clelia looked around the room and of all the things she noticed, her child’s eyes were drawn to the stencils on the window, just as the artists with kind hearts who had put them there hoped that they might.

‘There's Bambi,’ she said, and the image triggered a memory of watching that film, snugly resting between maman and papa under an eiderdown on their big bed. Then of car rides. Whizzing around, giggling happily, maman and papa taking delight from her own. The sight of young deer dancing across roads and fields and vanishing into woods and, of seeing them in the garden, creeping around early in the morning, pilfering what goodies might be lying around, or naughtily chewing the tender bark of young apple trees, to her parents' chagrin. 'I'm going to go home,' she said once again, smiling and determined and feeling free from the wires and illness which trapped her.

 She floats away through the open door to her room. Past the photo lined corridor, the heads of worrying parents. Up and out of the reanimation and emergency basement, past reception, and then through the sliding glass doors.

 The night sky is cold and black and yellow with city lights. There are still lines of crawling cars seeking escape for just one night. Clelia can see it all, and rises, flying, a supernatural mind in a natural world.

What's this?

 Clelia can see all of Bordeaux spreading out beneath her as she flies in the cold air like a hapless superman. Soaring above the fumes of the President Wilson Boulevard, and the Cimetiere de la Chartreuse where a monument to Goya stands in company with long dead wine barons in their elaborate family mausoleums. Above all of that, and the bored flower sellers hiding in their stand beside it. Away! Above the Rue Judaique, which these days is Jewish only in name. Beyond the basilica of St Seurin, whose ancient bones lay in a sarcophagus, and a legend of Roland laying his oliphant after the battle of Roncesvalles, are guarded by heavy wooden doors. On either side of them stand statues of bearded, handless saints, themselves stone guardians of ancient and esoteric belief.

 Onwards and upwards, through a brief and sudden shower brought by blackening clouds trying to warm the frigid air. Beyond the Allee de Tourny, where a giant Christmas tree has been installed, and shopping hordes dressed elegantly in black, have congregated around it in a mass to consumption. Like damp, Gothic Christmas trees themselves, their fingers are strung with brightly coloured paper bags like baubles containing baubles, as they shuffle, po faced, in and out of the high-end stores.

 The night is now full of electric lights. Christmas decorations shine from streetlamps and shop fronts, from skylights and windows, in the nightlife of a great city such as is Bordeaux. Such a busy world, thought Clelia, as she crosses the River Garonne. She watches the wet metal cars below her as they travel over the Pont de Pierre. The river beneath whirls in confused currents between its stone arches as it hurries to join the river Dordogne, where, at their confluence, they become the wide Gironde. The dogged cars, like all others lining the veins of this town, itch to get away and return to their garage homes. The yellow lights of their eyes are as wide as saucers as they sidle like scolded dogs from a kitchen.

 Clelia follows the traffic from above as it inches along. Then watches as it finally spins freely in every direction. Following the myriad routes which wrap around then veer away from the old centre of town. The cars hug taillights greedily, or overtake impatiently, as the rush hours grow and slow exponentially.

 Clelia rose upward. A thin, tin ribbed child with curly, red-brown hair. An apparition in a pale blue hospital gown. One of the rain laden clouds that has lost its way from the Atlantic drifts by. She studies its wispy mass as it rolls along. 'I have a cloud for company!' she says. She Looks up in amazement at the stars as they burn sun-bright in the cold, dark, immense space surrounding our world which turns on its lazy axis. She looks towards our sun, but not for too long, her eyes unable to bear its bright, white, nuclear light. Then from it, counting the planets as they move around in vast, elliptical orbits: Mercury, Venus, then pivoting around to face the never-ending dark: Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus, and there, not even really a planet, little Pluto, weak, peripheral, fading as all things must fade as they spin away from the centre. 'Am I like that farthest little rock,' Clelia said.

 Beyond them, so far away that even magic eyes cannot see, the atmospheres and nebulae, novas and holes, fabric bending and threading in an infinite weaving of moulded dust and bodies, light, and gas, continue to exist without real knowledge of them.

 What's this? To sit beside a grey cloud and look at the stars. What it is to have strength in your arms and legs and a spine that is straight. To have the ability to talk and to see things for their own worth. What it is to be. Turn world, as you are meant to. Clelia watched and waited through the night. Thinking and dreaming of things which made sense, and those which did not, until the world turned once again to face the sun. Her heart was hopeful as she drifted down to earth to greet it. She hoped and hoped, for freedom and answers, and adventure and knowledge. She hoped to be the girl she saw in her mind's eye - a hero in a story from her own imagination - and to see her lovely country home unencumbered by the illness that has trapped her for so long. Clelia smiled as the day-light horizon spread in an illuminating white line.

 She passed across the suburbs of Bordeaux: La Bastide, Cenon and Floirac, and over the surrounding countryside of Creon and La Sauve, Cadillac and La Reole. Over and along the winding flows of the sometimes green and sometimes brown, rivers Garonne and Dordogne - the two seas - until she slowed herself down, sticking out her ankles like brakes to slow her delightful freedom's flight.

 She saw the ground rushing up to meet her, much as we see it when an aeroplane is coming into land, closer and closer, until we feel that little bump (if our pilot is good) of landing and rumbling. Her legs, stiff like pogo sticks, bounced as they connected, hopping up again until her bare feet felt solidly planted in the cold, dewy, long grass of a fallow field. 'Where is this?' Clelia began to think, until she saw the small stone building with the words ecole and mairie etched in a lintel above a sun-bleached wooden doorway. 'I know this place,' she said, clasping her hands. It was then that her senses seemed to overload, flooded as they were with the tingling feeling on the soles of her feet, and the way her hands smacked as she brought them together. Like her out-of-body experience, these small things were brand new.

 The sun was slowly rising, but the village was deserted. St Columbe was a strange collection of the old and the new - timeless stone cottages and hay granges and tobacco barns, and modern houses which had been built in an excess of aesthetic enthusiasm but missed the chance to blend into what was a truly pretty corner of our world. A tractor on the knoll of a field in the distance gave the clue to where all the people might be. It was not a ghost town, but serious farming country, and you may well know that there are never enough hours in a day for a farmer to accomplish his lot. It trundled slowly along in silhouette, pulling a mass of something behind it until it disappeared. 

 A grimy Tricolour hung from a long white pole on the roof of the joint school and mayor's office, and the little building looked like a model, the kind children add to their train sets to bring them to life. Clelia imagined a a row of lead soldiers standing proudly to the Marseillaise, the kind her elder brothers used to play with, would complete a Napoleonic tableau. Clelia ignored the buildings. The green fields opposite promised more adventure to a curious child. She also knew that they lay in the direction of Les Saules Pleureurs.

  The long, tired grass scratched Clelia's knees gently as her spindly legs moved through it, and gave them a cold, numbing feeling, like the sensation on the soles of her feet. So, this is walking, she thought. She looked down at them as they rose and fell awkwardly in the lumpy clumps of grass. Those legs and toes, the ones that maman and papa often tickled to make her laugh, here they were, doing what they were meant to. How funny they looked, like pale swinging poles projecting her forwards at will. How funny her toes were? She looked up, once she had got used to them, and searched the surrounding vista for signs that led the way to her house. She knew this field and village and had seen it many times from her child's seat in maman's car. Home was not far from here.

 With St Colombe now left behind her, Clelia stomped her way across the uneven field. Ahead, across a drainage ditch, lay a vineyard. It was covered with orderly rows of bald Duras vines. The old, low, double guyot vine trunks ran along a wire train from one side, up a gentle slope, to the other side without break, following as best they could the trajectory of the sun. Next year, under a strong summer sun, their tendrils will climb and cling, wrapping themselves snugly around the taut metal to support the weight of their long and languid pregnancy. They had not yet been pruned, and the brittle remains of the last harvest jutted from the old, gnarly stumps like Struwwelpeter's hair. As her steps grew bolder, Clelia felt the atrophied muscles in her legs lubricating with blood, and they almost gave way. Her body had forgotten for a moment what her mind demanded of it. 'Come on legs, you can do it,' she chided her legs, childishly. Protesting, the little white sticks shuddered and refused to do her bidding.

 She stood there still, perplexed, scolding her unwilling legs, 'Come on you, you, naughty legs,' when suddenly, a young deer flashed past from behind her. He ran so fast - legs springing in a hopping bound - Clelia thought he'd vanish in an instant. But abruptly, he skidded to a halt on skittish legs. He turned and gave her a panicked look, caught in half momentum, between his next evasive bound. The deer knew instinctively that he ought to be afraid of people, but there was some strange compulsion in him, and the sight of the pale girl in a hospital gown made him unusually unafraid. His nostrils quivered as he had a good sniff and tried to understand what she was doing there. Steam rose from his dark brown coat in the warming winter sun as he watched her closely. His legs flexed like dry spaghetti as he walked over to where the vineyard began. He tore a strip of bark from a young vine with his teeth, while not taking his eyes off her for a moment. He carried on staring with gentle and curious eyes and chewed the lime green bark messily with an open mouth. Then, to Clelia's surprise and delight but not disbelief, he said, 'What are you doing there?'

 'I don't know. I've been so sick and maman and papa have been so worried. I think I just want to go home now,' Clelia said. 'I've been in the hospital. It's full of noises and wires and doctors and nurses. I just want to get away from there, so I came here. I know my house is nearby because I've seen this field from maman's car many times before. I think I have seen you before.'

 Concentrating on the furious gabble coming from Clelia's mouth, the deer decided he thought it suspicious. Was this a trick of some kind? But he was a young deer, a season old, and unsure of what constituted a trick in the first place. Plus, that aura which seemed to surround her. Was it of goodness and perfect innocence? Was she as he saw himself? This thought, though thoughts were not his forte, persuaded him that she was not a trick or a trap. How easy it is, after all, to see only what is good in oneself.

 'I thought that this might be a good place to start,' Clelia added, trying to assuage the deer's confusion.

'Start what?' said the deer.

'Start going home,' she said.

'Home?'

'The house where I live is not far from here. It's beautiful. Would you like to see it?'

'I live in the forest,' said the deer with some pride, for he was, as we are learning, a simple creature in both thought and deed. 'Deer aren't allowed in people's homes.'

'Why not?' said Clelia.

 The deer thought about this for a while and could not find a suitable answer, other than that he had been warned from the earliest moment he could remember to keep away from humans and the places they lived. Not that that advice had prevented him from entering their fields and, on occasion, their gardens, to see what easy pickings could be had. And here he was again, breaking that cardinal rule and now even conversing with one, so he said, 'All right then, I'll come and see where you live,' and he twisted his lips into a deerish smile.

 Clelia got her stubborn legs moving again and hurried over to the deer, flinging her arms around his neck. She placed her head next to his. The deer was taken aback by this action but nonetheless, deeply touched by it. In turn he nuzzled against her, rubbing his cheeks against hers, and against her small curly haired head.

 Though the summer was long gone, and the new mid-winter year was just around the corner, the sun seemed to oblige the misfit ramblers with its strongest rays, holding off, briefly, the coming freezing cloak which stifled it in the long dark months. Clelia looked up towards it, squinting. For a moment, a strong beam captured her in its glow, bathing her in golden light, so much so that she looked like a disabled infant prophet making friends with the beasts. She imitated, in coincidence, the sickly-sweet propaganda art found on religious pamphlets. The kind given out on street corners by the credulous, as they try to brainwash the gullible people that they sometimes meet.