The Pit and the Sky

It has been a week of solo parenting with a raging cold for me, so if the daily stories are a little more feverish than usual, that may be why. The weekly story, on the other hand, is older: any feverishness there is entirely down to me.

This week's daily stories

Monday

We got one last crop from the garden, those soft white berries that don’t grow anywhere else. I put them in boiling water to take off their thin, bitter skins, then cooked them down to a thick jam. Winter air curled in through the open windows, and I turned my face away from the steam. Afterwards, I scrubbed the pan and the spoon and put them back in their place in the garden shed. I peeled off my gloves and dropped them in the bin. I put the jar at the back of the larder with the others, in case I ever needed it.

Tuesday

The leopard in the library scared people away. There was no pretending otherwise. She stalked the shelves while you were browsing and made it very hard to concentrate. But she had never hurt anyone, and she always had her library card hanging from her collar, and she read and read and read without so much as creasing the pages. So the head librarian said she could stay, and that made me feel safe.

Wednesday

Eventide was a sort of paste, with little crystalline grains suspended in it. You spread it across your eyelids when you went to bed and it kept the dreams off you. Monstrously expensive, but everybody bought it. It was all the more frightening to dream when you were the only one doing it. My mother worked in the Eventide factory, and they would be searched going in and out. The black market got going all the same. Half the time you got the fake stuff, though, and in the end I thought that was even better: you dreamed, but nobody else knew about it.

Thursday

She was a cat by night, and used to wake with the taste of blood in her mouth, but as her fur greyed all that was too much. In those colder, darker nights, when the cat-dreams came she leapt from her own bed and padded over to the box room. In the daytime, her son never mentioned the strange cat that slept on his bed. Perhaps he thought he dreamed it. When they were older, and the cat-dreams no longer came, he said he had held his tongue in case she didn’t let the cat come in any more. She said no, no, no. That could never have happened.

Friday

On the lawn of Safflower House, a unicorn lay sleeping. You could see how it rested on the tips of the grass, barely bending them. It must have weighed little more than a sigh. I wanted nothing more than to go out to it, rest a hand on its nose, feed it from my hand, whisper rhymes into its ear. But nobody else seemed to be paying it much mind. They were busy with talk of places I hadn’t been and people I didn’t know. I watched it through the window, always looking past it like I hadn’t noticed it was there. That’s how I remember it: a blur, an uncertainty. When we came back from dinner, it was gone.

Saturday

When I want to forget a thing I did, I make myself a trophy, and it goes up on my shelf. It sits next to the plaque I got for falling asleep at work, the cup I won for throwing up on my sister’s bridesmaid, the foot-in-mouth shield that gets my name engraved in a new place every few months. On Sundays I take them down and polish them until they sparkle, and I look into the gold and see my face reflected back, smiling.

Sunday

She was on the cover of all the magazines: those obscure trade ones that lie untouched on a coffee table while you wait for a job interview; the fifty-six issue limited runs where you build a model of the Titanic; the smudged-toner zines that are the only things still worth reading. She looked different on all of them, but it was always her. I drew a moustache and glasses on her face with the free pen on the front of Puzzler. Nobody knew who she was.

I have been reading...

• "Our Lady of Resplendent Misfortune" by Seena Ahmad, the latest issue of One Story. One Story's gimmick is that they publish one story at a time in a cute little chapbook; I only wish this wasn't unusual enough to be called a gimmick. Thanks for the recommendation to Katherine Montalto, whose poetry capsule machine concept should be less unusual too. Put one on every street corner.
• I enjoyed "Six Stitches and a Scar" by Jane O'Sullivan at Fictive Dream, and it also prompted me to get Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities down from of the shelf where it has been sitting since I bought it. I enjoyed that too, though it wasn't my favourite Calvino; I suspect I am more of a Mr Palomar than a Marco Polo.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

This week's story: The Pit and the Sky

There’s a hole in the meadow that nobody ever talks about. It’s always been there, and it never fills up with rainwater or dead leaves or rubbish. I’ve never seen anyone chuck anything in it. Nobody even goes near it. God knows I never have. It’s narrow, but not so narrow that a person couldn’t squeeze down it. Bigger than the ones I’ve seen in potholing videos on YouTube. Those make me want to go and stand in a wide open space under a wide open sky for a while. The meadow is the widest, most open space near here, but I don’t go there when I get that feeling, because of the hole.

It’s not that the hole makes me uncomfortable. It’s that if I went near it I think I would climb down into it. That’s the peculiar thing about a claustrophobia like mine: it’s as much a calling as a revulsion. Like people who are scared of pubs because they’ll drink themselves to death if they go through the door. I don’t want to be in a small space because I won’t be able to stop myself crawling further and further in, until the walls have closed in so tight that I can’t crawl out again. I suppose that’s why I started noticing the hole, after years of very carefully not noticing it. You can’t ignore something you want to climb inside.

So, I noticed it, and the next thing I noticed was how everybody else didn’t. And then, how I knew that I mustn’t go near it, mustn’t disturb it, but I didn’t know why. I thought: I can ask Jenny about this. See what she thinks about the hole, or if she thinks about it at all. I can talk to Jenny about anything. But I couldn’t. I physically could not push the words out. My throat closed in like a cave narrowing around me. It was like trying to tell my grandma to fuck off.

Which left only one option. But I couldn’t do it when anybody was around, and there are always people around the meadow. You would have to go at three in the morning to be alone. But who wants to squeeze into a little hole like that in the middle of the night? To not even have sunlight to show you the way out? If your palms don’t sweat thinking about it then there is something very strange going on inside you.

So in the end I took my cheap little head torch and I lowered myself in there in broad daylight on a Tuesday afternoon. The dog walkers ignored me like my grandma pretending she hadn’t heard me tell her to fuck off. Of course they did. I took one last breath of fresh air and slid my head below the ground.

There’s a hole in the meadow that nobody ever talks about, and it’s been on my mind my whole life. I must have tried to get down there a hundred times as a kid. Of course my parents always stopped me, but then we never talked about it afterwards. They never said “that’s dangerous” or “we don’t do that”, they just pulled me away and eventually I got the message. Of course, it didn’t kill my curiosity. But there are so many other things to be curious about, so many bigger worries, and they only get bigger the older you get. So it wasn’t at the front of my thoughts. But it was lingering there, and it was only a matter of time until I acted on it.

It felt a little bit shameful, going over there. I guess the shame that’s put on you as a kid doesn’t go away easily, however silly it might seem as an adult. But I’ve learned in my life that shame is just a signal: it’s up to your thinking brain to choose. So I strode over there, dangled my legs in, and slithered down like it was a water slide. The damp smell of earth.

There’s a hole in the meadow and it’s my favourite place to go. It’s like the world is breaking the rules: a hole like that shouldn’t be there, down into that loamy ground. It certainly shouldn’t have stayed all these years, unfilled and unfenced. Sometimes I feel like that too, an aberration that persists just for the sheer petty fun of it. So we are at home there, me and my hole, and sometimes I whisper a secret to it or drop down some beautiful thing I have found that I think it would like. And I don’t wonder what’s down there because I already know. Everyone does, I think; it’s just that most people feel scared more than they feel excited, which makes a sort of sense, I suppose. I’ve always figured that I’ll go down there when the time feels right. You don’t have to rush when you know something will always be there.

In the end it felt like falling in love with your best friend. That total comfort and calm and trust that seems like it must be all you need, until one day you realise you need more. And if you’re as lucky as I am, there’s no fear or pain or doubt. You just know that everything is going to be OK. And you fall, gracefully, gratefully, below the surface.

There is a hole in the meadow and I am teasing myself with it, feeling the good hurt that comes from not allowing yourself something you really really want and knowing that you will have it, but not yet, not quite yet. The hurt that’s only bearable because you tell yourself it will be over soon, though you have no intention of it really being soon; you intend to stay a little cruel to yourself as long as you can manage. When I’m bored or I can’t sleep or someone just will not stop talking, I think: there is a hole in the meadow, and I am going to climb down there, maybe even tomorrow.

And when the moment finally comes it is more perfect than I ever imagined, that feeling of coming home as my head drops into the dark of the world.

There is a hole in the meadow and I don’t understand why Jenny won’t come down there with me. It’s like she’s afraid. And I know we’ve all heard those stories of caving accidents, of people stuck dangling upside down until their lungs fill with fluid and they drown in the guts of the earth; of breaking legs because it’s the only way to get them around the bend and then never getting them around it anyway; of sudden rain washing a dozen young adventurers out of all known existence. But it’s not some big terrifying cave where a rockfall might seal you in, and it’s not a grasping crevice where you empty your lungs to squeeze in and you never fill them up again. It’s just the hole in the meadow, as ordinary as home, where we belong.

Because it’s Jenny and I can say anything to Jenny I know she doesn’t mind that I keep talking about it. She thinks it’s weird, but she thinks a lot about me is weird. It’s why she likes me. Everyone says. But I don’t like how she acts like I’m joking, like I know it’s a silly idea and my insistence that it’s serious is just part of the act. I know maybe I’d do the same to her, but surely she can see that it hurts me. I don’t mind her making fun of me as long as she takes me seriously while she does it.

All in good fun but a little bit serious too: that’s what we’re doing tonight. Sitting by the hole in the meadow, her sometimes pretending she’s going to flick a cigarette end in, me pretending I think it’s funny, her goading me playfully, saying “Why don’t you just jump in like you always say you’re going to?”, me reminding her I always say she’ll be coming with me, and then my legs are dangling, and I slowly shuffle forwards until there’s nothing below my feet and nothing below my arse, and I grab the hand she’s holding out so she can pull me up but I’m not grabbing it to be pulled up, and as my head goes under I can hear her scream start to echo but I know it will all be OK as soon as she’s down there with me.

There is a hole in the middle of the meadow and Jenny is getting impatient with me about it. She says she doesn’t understand why we would wait. I tell her I get how she feels, really I do, that it’s hard to do or to think about anything else while it’s waiting for us, but that the important things in life cannot be rushed and that we should go when we know it’s right, not just when we want to. And she says she does know, she feels it in the soles of her feet where they meet the earth, and it scares her to think that I don’t. And one day she calls, when she never makes a phone call, when I’m pissed off and headachey trying to fix the gears on my bike, and as I try not to get grease on my phone she says she’s going right now and I can’t say anything to stop her, and I ride with the cable disconnected, struggling stuck in the highest gear, sweating and swearing. But I get there just in time to see her wave and smile as she slips away, and I throw myself after her, grabbing her hand and letting her pull me under, face first.

There’s a tree in the meadow, a lone tree that grows outwards as much as it grows up. Its branches reach out wide and flat, like when you pour molten aluminium down an ants’ nest and dig it up. It’s a good tree to sit in, and I sit there a lot, enjoying the meadow, the quiet belied by birdsong and crickets and rustles in the grass. It makes you feel held, right down to the roots. All it’s missing is someone to sit up there with me.