The Slithering

I am in love, thought Eleanor. I was inclined to be cynical when people said that if you are, you don’t need to ask, you just know. But they were right. She had never imagined it could be so contradictory; could make her so restless and so calm, so fulfilled and so yearning, and as if she were a banal shadow when she was not with Owen. Her hands ached for the touch of his hands, her lips for the touch of his lips, and her whole body and soul for the waves of tempest and tranquillity that came when he lay with her. 

     It was as if there had never been a time when they had not known each other, and had not been all of the world to each other. But though they had known each other when they were children, they had not been childhood sweethearts, and had drifted apart in their adolescence and as they became adults. After Owen’s family had moved out of the area, for years, for more than a decade, they only kept in touch through their parents’ Christmas cards, and met again as adults quite, or so they thought, by chance, in the most prosaic of settings, the reception area of a bland hotel on the edges of a modern town. Owen was staying as a guest and Eleanor, who was a buyer for a fancy goods company, was at a conference there. They recognised each other at once, though they had changed, and not just grown taller. Was it love at first sight? Perhaps. Eleanor once said that she thought it was more knowing at first sight, as the love had always been there, hibernating through the years and the seasons. Owen said it didn’t matter, and perhaps he was right. 

     Sometimes she remembered a troubling quote she had read – Thomas Mann, she thought it was – that the one who loved most was subservient and must suffer. But she and Owen loved in equal measure, with equal completeness and striving, equal simplicity and complexity. It was almost as if they defied time itself, as it sometimes tarried, sometimes raced. 

     But sometimes, just when time was tarrying and just when it seemed as if they were soaring to the stars or sinking down into the deep fertile earth, each knew the other was afraid. Not just worried, not just uneasy, but with a terror that gnawed and knotted and screamed at them in the most profound silence. They clung together, and whispered, in spontaneous unison, “I will keep you safe, my darling, it will be fine” but they were empty futile, fickle words.

     “It is back,” Eleanor whispered, “And it will never be gone.”

     “It can’t be stronger than what we feel for each other.”

     But at times they feared it could. It did not need the dark night or the hidden places. It came in summer daylight on crowded streets, and as a beautiful sunset seemed almost to defy the stars. It came when they were alone together, and when they were with others, but it only came when they were together. For sure, when they were separate, they felt that uneasiness and fretfulness sometimes, but it was not the same, and they could attribute it to their separation.

     “I wish it would at least show its face!” Eleanor exclaimed.

     “I don’t know,” Owen said. “Perhaps it would be worse.”

     Eleanor did not want to think about how it could be worse. Sometimes they heard it; they heard footsteps, not racing, not rapidly pacing, but steady, inexorable, rhythmic, almost. Sometimes they experienced it exactly the same way as each other, and sometimes it was different, one of them feeling as if a snake were twining and hissing, unseen and poison-tongued, the other as if a furtive, soft-pawed, sharp-toothed wolf were in patient, padding pursuit. It could take on unseen human form, could flutter like a trapped and predatory bird, could scuttle across their skin and their souls like a spider and scamper like a rat. Perhaps the worst of all was when it seemed to be some sodden, slimy aquatic creature.

     They talked about it sometimes. Not because they wanted to, and not because it helped, but because they had to. At times they even laughed and said it was as if they had their own invisible menagerie, but the laughter had no mirth in it, and little defiance. 

     Of course their friends, both separate and mutual, didn’t know about that, but they did know that the two of them were, as Eleanor’s down to earth colleague Betsy put it, “More than an item.” She did once add, “But perhaps a few early nights just for sleeping might be no bad thing.” She broke off, because she was a good person and only wanted the best for her friend, “Sorry, Eleanor, that was crass and childish. But you honestly don’t look well .”

     “Isn’t that one of those veiled insults you’re not supposed to say?” Eleanor asked. But she knew that Betsy was right. There were shadows under her eyes that no concealer could mask, and Betsy wasn’t the only one who had noticed her air of fragility and weariness.

     Owen was a freelancer, for the most part, working as a translator, so he didn’t have to listen to the comments of his colleagues as much as Eleanor did, but his friends remarked on it sometimes, and behind his back they remarked on it even more. He once inadvertently overheard such a conversation. “It sounds absurd to talk about one of those toxic relationships you hear about, because Eleanor seems like a lovely person, and I’ve never heard anyone say a bad word about her …..”

     “I know what you mean,” the other said, “If this is what being madly in love does for you, I’ll settle for a night in with a box set and a bar of chocolate. He looks AWFUL!”

     It crossed his mind to let them know he had heard every word of it, and he’d thank them not to talk rubbish about him – and more importantly, about Eleanor – behind his back, but in the end, he didn’t. Because he was just too tired, and because he knew it wasn’t entirely rubbish.

     That night the two of them went to a concert. A local folk band was playing at the town hall. They called themselves the Mondegreens after that term for mishearing lyrics in a song as some of their own songs depended on that very device employed wittily and deliberately. No-one had ever seen them cup an ear or heard them adapt a nasal whine, and they had a following among those who generally did like folk music, and those who would normally have run a mile before listening to it. 

     They thought that the concert was bringing them one of those respites that helped them maintain their sanity. The Mondegreens gave fine performances of their funny, insightful, catchy, thought-provoking songs, and played the gamut of instruments they had mastered – the throb of an acoustic guitar one minute, the ethereal notes of a flute the next, the atmospheric jingle-jangle of an overstrung piano the next, the voices of the ensemble, three men and four women, in utter unison that split into playful polyphony like a kaleidoscope turning.

     As well as their own songs the Mondegreens liked to perform some of the traditional and well-known folk-songs, too, in a way that was both faithful and respectful and gave them new life and a new twist. They asked the audience to call out requests, and rumour had it that they had never let an audience down and not been able to oblige. But nobody requested anything particularly obscure that night.

     After they had sung Scarborough Fair and Linden Lea someone called out a request for Barbara Allen. It was a popular request, and the audience settled down to enjoy that melancholy ballad. At first, Owen and Eleanor clasped hands and let the music drift over them and seep into them.

     To only the accompaniment of a solo, soft violin, one of the women, in a plangent, sweet, infinitely sad voice, sang, All in the merry month of May, when green buds were a-swelling, young Jemmy Grove on his death bed lay, for love of Barbara Allen.

      Suddenly, Owen and Eleanor were no longer gently and safely holding hands. Their nails gripped into each others’ palms, as if they were welded together. Deaf to the mutters of annoyance of the others in the auditorium, they ran out of the building, pushing past people, stumbling and shaking, pursued, forever pursued.

     They cowered in the doorway, their eyes closed, and yet knowing they were seeing the same thing. They were seeing themselves, as children, when their families lived next door to each other. They were seeing a spring day, and a year unfolding, and hearing and seeing children playing by a village pond. It had all been innocent and happy, and certainly none of them had any particular malice towards Jeremy Burton, whom everyone called Jemmy. But he could still be a nuisance. He had a habit of trying to do things he wasn’t capable of doing, and he was a clumsy, uncoordinated child. Eleanor’s mother, who was a teacher at the junior school all the village children attended, had once said, not unkindly, that his legs didn’t seem to belong to him. Jemmy wasn’t exactly a slow learner, but he wasn’t exactly a quick one, either, but in other ways he was quite mature for his years and he certainly had a fixation on Eleanor whom he thought (and others would not have disagreed with him) was the prettiest girl in their class.

     But she did not want to be bothered with Jemmy. Owen was teaching her how to do the back stroke, and that was far more interesting than his splashings and inept attempts at juvenile flirtation. 

     Children are often not wholly aware of their strength or of the consequences of their actions. And OF COURSE they didn’t mean a word of it when they said, “Let’s drown him!” They only meant to give him a bit of a fright and a mouthful of pond water so he’d leave them in peace for a while. The children were ALWAYS ducking each other, even though they all knew they weren’t supposed to and that if their parents caught them, they’d be in trouble. “Okay, that’s enough,” Eleanor said, and they waited for him to bob up to the surface, spluttering and cross. He did not. “Stop acting the fool, Jemmy,” Owen said, “Okay, we’re sorry! It was out of order. We don’t blame you if you tell.”

     Most of the other children had been playing on the makeshift rope swing over the pond that the adults worried was dangerous. But they realised something was horribly wrong. “It’s Jemmy! He’s gone under!” Eleanor screamed – and yet, even in her panic, she held her tongue about what had really happened. 

     The postman was passing on his bike, and realised, hearing the children’s yells – for now they all knew about it, or thought they did – that there was an emergency, and ran to their help, discarding his bike and his boots as he did.  He was a strong swimmer, and a brave man, but it was too late.

     “We must never talk of this again,” Owen whispered.

     “It would do no good,” Eleanor agreed. “It won’t bring him back.”

     It was true they were asked a few questions, as they had been the nearest to Jemmy, but they were gentle questions, and it never occurred to anyone that the schoolteacher’s daughter and the village doctor’s son, who were nice children, could have had anything to do with it. 

     There had to be a post-mortem, and it turned out that poor Jemmy, apart from anything else, had limited lung capacity. Most children would have survived going under for that period of time.

     For a couple of years, the pond was fenced off, and bathing or even splashing about there was forbidden. But the fence fell into disrepair and new people moved into the village, and the “Danger, no Bathing” Sign was concealed by the dandelions and nettles. But by now nobody had much inclination to swim in it. It was stagnant and uninviting, and the alga they called Ginny Green Teeth had colonised it. Anyway, a lovely new swimming pool with a save machine had opened in the nearest big town, and that was far more interesting.

     “We weren’t to blame,” Eleanor whispered, as they crouched together. “Not really.”

     “How could we know?” Owen agreed.

     But even as they spoke, they heard the sucking and the swishing, and felt the sodden, slimy presence and longed for the slavering wolves and the sharp-beaked birds.