The Path

The path between the village and the town lasts approximately a mile and half. The fields retreat into the distance and form patches of neatly arranged beauty. The eye naturally sweeps upwards to the sky towards the distant shots of a hunting party across the water split the winter air. Pockets of grass raise their bushy heads to the surface. Across the river from where she is standing, pockets of coppiced trees fringe the river; dotted along its edge beside the pathway are breaks in the earth, shallow pools and banks low enough to allow the summer swimmers to enter the water.

Walking between and across them leads the woman towards the concrete path of The Backs. In the middle of the first field there’s a deep furrow six metres across. The impression carved into the land around its hollow is of a sunken trench. The twenty five or so metres between the trench and the pathway leaves the casual tourist ample time to take in the flat expanse in each direction leading down to the water’s edge. On the flat land sound moves differently; some days she hears the football players shouting across from her but it is too early for shouts or cries of sound.

The woman left her car back by the stile at the edge of the village green.

She is here alone.

She walks along the furrowed ground, picking her steps through indentations in the earth. She knows the route. She has repeated this walk several times in this last year. The marshy spaces. The indentations in the sodden grass where the soil gathers in drifts and where to step lightly to avoid the rain soaked clumps.

She sees the boy before he sees her. It’s hard to know if he sees her at all. Does he see anyone. He stands as if in grey. The eyes unmoving staring ahead. Distant shouts filter through the coppicing making the place an echo chamber; the shouts carry oddly from tree, grass, river edge and seem to move from one side to the other without direction. The fog sits in pockets along the field, meshing with the winter’s drifting solid see –through air.

Standing at the edge, eyes fixed forwards, he sees her and looks straight through. His skin is grey smoke. His hand is raised as if to ask a question but there’s no sound. His face ashen. This boy is dead. She knows this now. He’s been dead for longer than he’s realised. When they kiss there is nothing there because his mouth can’t feel hers. Only skin touching skin. No feeling. Any feeling she has is her own. He can't feel a thing now.

He can’t speak to tell anything the day or the feeling of his feet imprinting onto soil. He can’t know the heat of the sun nor the game he’s walked out of to get this place. At the edge of the field he stands there with her. Not with her. His eyes look across the field, passed the Cam and over the sweep of the hunting field with its low hedging and sweep of green, crops and sky. But his eye isn’t following anything moving there.

Sometimes she’s passed pamphleteers handing out red shiny protest leaflets to passing walkers. Ban the hunt.

They normally wear red or blue anoraks, the hoods up round their eager ruddy faces. They wait here for up to four hours. She’s seen the same group still here from the time it takes to walk to the town and back to the village.

There is no protest today and no walkers come by here this morning. They should be here but there’s no one.

She walks to the water’s edge. He follows. His feet follow hers down to the river.

They remove their clothes down to their underwear; the cold hitting their skin or at least hers. She steps into the river; its reeds are visible like floating hands in the centre of the water. If there were a boat they would step into it but there isn’t. She pushes off the muddy shallows, feet stuck into the yellow brown mud, sinks herself into the river and starts to spread her arms to feel the water’s embrace.

He stares blankly ahead.

She looks back hoping to see something behind his eyes but there’s nothing left to feel. She can’t see anything there now.

He makes his way slowly out into the water, staring ahead; he still wears the white shirt he had on when she asked him to follow. It blooms with water as the river gathers around his legs then his chest. She judges the distance between her circling arms and his slow moving body. The reeds string out in blooms of green beneath the water. The current carries the looping frilled edges of rushes and reeds with fronds two metres or more across, heading downstream in constant motion. She forgets to look anywhere but at the reeds. Their movement is a comfort: they continue to wave in the current be it day or night. Their pulse doesn’t end with this place or this moment. They loop in fronds of green, lime always caught on the current.

She takes his hand, still held slightly out as if to ask something and lifts up his other arm as if to hold him in a swoon. But the movement is harder than she thinks. His body won’t be touched easily; he won’t surrender. His body won’t float. He can’t.

The reeds help her. They start to attach themselves to his ankle, his foot. Without his arms to help him swim he starts to sink. First it’s the hands, then the shoulders, then the neck, the grey eyes looking up at her that stare right through her and the water. The head starts to sink. The bubbles start to make their way to the surface, from the nose, the mouth, then upwards. His whole body sinks beneath. The reeds are there to greet his waiting body. As his arms open out as if in prayer she circles above. Should she shout for help. Her eyes narrow and she cries out to stop it but then the feeling returns. This is a kindness. Lay the ghost to rest.

Eyes like glass stare under water. The fronds circle his face; his hair spills outwards, his skin white. She hovers above, peering into the pool.