- WHITE CAT BOOKS -
inspirational reflective fiction, semi-fiction, non-fiction, about humanity and relationship

She was wondering why we only know what something means when it has gone past. Wouldn’t it be much more helpful, no, efficacious – that sounds more erudite, she thought – if we understood a thing for what it meant, when it happened? Then surely we could take advantage of situations for what they offer, instead of having to shoot in the dark and get it all wrong?
 

– Mixed metaphors there, sorry.

(She said this without really knowing who she was apologising to except that she was used to having these philosophical, no, quasi-philosophical conversations in her head with her alter ego, though even ‘alter ego’ seemed to lend them an undeserved gravitas. Perhaps ‘stooge self’ is more appropriate, she decided.)
 

– It’s like sex…

– Now where did that come from? There must have been a link somewhere.
– Why can’t our minds follow logical sequences? Or at least leave an audit trail of what’s happened?

– Come back to the sex in a bit, perhaps.

– Thinking about it, though, it’s not much about sex, more general really.
 

Then picking up the theme she went on…
 

– We’ve been lying out here on the grass for a while, grasping hands, that human affirmation thing that seems to be more powerful sometimes even than a hug or a kiss, we started off talking about something, but the balmy afternoon air has got to us and we’ve just gone quiet – I’m sure she’s gone to sleep, she’s been very still for a bit – and I realise I can’t actually feel her hand any more. Unless I move my hand or turn and look, which I don’t want to, I can’t be certain she’s even still there.

– I might be getting my wires crossed, here, but bear with me for a little longer… I’m the one awake, after all.

(Yes, it's you she's talking to, reader)

– So, if I move my hand, a squeeze, a stroke, whatever, it makes what was there before, what it was. In this case, it makes it that her hand was entwined with mine, as opposed to her not being there at all, which would actually have felt exactly the same. I think that was why the sex bit came in, you know, if you stop moving nothing happens and in the end you don’t feel anything. I suppose it’s why we talk about sexual drive, not sexual quiescence. I don’t think there’s many people can make an orgasm happen just with their mind.

– It was actually Sara that got me started on this ‘no meaning without change’ tack – that’s what I’ve come to call it. But there was nothing to do with sex in it when she tried it out on me. It was music. Yea, that’s right. She plays one of those native American flutes, the sort that sound like dusky pan-pipes and have funny tuning. She doesn't use written music and her melodies sound quite mystical. She says she never knows where they’re going. She can play a note, she says, and listen to it, and it seems to be one thing, and then she plays another one  to follow it and the first one sounds different completely, even though now it’s only in her head. “It’s like there were two notes all the time really, one following and one leading, but both there, at the same time.” That’s her trying to explain it best she can, but I take a bit longer to digest that sort of stuff.

The silence suddenly becomes tangible, like a presence of something that has no presence, hanging, as if all motion had been suspended, an ephemeral comma in life’s progress. Then, slowly, this gives way, like a film fading back in.
 

– … sorry, I had to take a break there …
 

– I remember we were out walking one day. We’ve got a lake near us, if you didn’t know you’d think it was natural, but really it’s a reservoir, there’s a dam at one end, but not one of those huge ones that rise out of a valley so vastly – is that a word? – a great grey wall, and you imagine what massive destruction it’s holding back, and you’re glad when you get well clear to the side… anyway, not one of those, ours is just a grassy slope to climb to get to the water. And the lake itself almost disappears out of sight at one end; it must be quite shallow because it has islands, quite a few when the water is low, and they’re all flat and covered with brush and bushes and stunted trees, and look like Robinson Crusoe islands. We walk around it often, not right round, because that would be too far now, since Sara... well, just since, but there’s lots of places which aren’t far and you can walk down to the water’s edge. It’s a strange experience when the level’s down a bit, then you are walking quite a long way from the path, you’re on the lakebed where the water has retreated, but it’s still damp and gradually getting damper. The closer you get to the water the more sparse the bushes, and the trees are fewer and smaller until all you see are stumps protruding from the mud like ghoulish sentinels. I don’t like going down there evenings, I think I worry about not finding our way back to the path. We’re both different that way and I sometimes wonder how that can be and us still be so close. But I suppose differences add interest, so long as you’re bonded deep down.

– There’s a café at one end of the lake and a beach that’s been made for swimming and people have pedalos and things and on a nice day like the one I’m thinking about, it’s a popular spot – there’s usually quite a few on the café terrace, all ages. It’s nothing very riotous, but you can guess, two girls, obviously about the same age, summer clothes, there’s always a couple of unattached lads saunter over sooner or later…

– No, I'm… I’m sorry… I shouldn’t have gone on this tack.

– But I'll try again. Because you’ll be thinking you know the rest of the story. And you might be right, but only so far. Anyway, usual chat-up stuff from the lads, each one trying to outdo the other – why do blokes always look on two girls sitting together, yes, close together, friendly, maybe holding hands a bit, and for some reason it’s a challenge? It bothers Sara more than me, I get to the point of telling them to get lost, even taking them down a peg or two, making fun, ridicule, you know, but she, well, she’s become more sensitive, as you’d expect. It’s not that she wants me to protect her or anything, though we are different personalities anyway, but it gets to a point where she just pulls back in company like this, but then sometimes that makes it worse. Depends on the lads, but they can take that as a challenge or even a ‘come on’, and it really isn’t, so in I go with my size 7s, and scatter the enemy to the four corners, and then we both have a laugh when she’s back to her normal self and we’re on our own again… but there was something different with these two. I felt it just in time, no, that’s taking too much credit, I was actually getting really pissed off with him, the one who was so full of himself – telling her how he’d got a first in microbiology or something and he was in the college first team and scored the winning try in the tournament and he was going to be captain next season, and his friend could see I was getting near to blowing my top, but he didn’t know why of course, and he was holding my gaze, eyes drilled into mine, and seemed to be willing me not to intervene, and then in an instant everything happened at once…

– A guy from the bar who was well drunk and had been eyeing up Sara, launched himself and tried to take her off. She screamed and started shaking violently, the rugby player spotted the drunk in time and got between them, and kneeled on the floor shielding her, while landing a swipe behind his back to the guy’s legs that floored him, at the same time as he was starting to talk to her, not lovey-dovey stuff, nor the great ‘I am’ any longer, just calmly talking, like he was telling her a story.

– His friend released me from his gaze (which was a relief) and took me aside and said, “Thank you for not taking him down. It wasn’t what you were thinking. He’s done all that stuff he was saying and his father won’t even go to his graduation, says he should have been doing real work and paying something back.”
 

– Near miss there then. I breathed a sigh of relief. Oh, and Sara survived. The guys didn’t pull, of course. But they seemed OK with it anyway.

She was wondering if she should move, not disturb Sara, no, just a tiny curling of one finger, and perhaps then she would know what it had meant when they’d lain down there on the grass. There was nothing intended, as far as she could remember, just going with the flow of a balmy bright blue afternoon, which was little by little turning grey along the distant horizon.

There had been another afternoon when time had seemed to just slip away, as she felt it now. They had been walking along a sea shore, she couldn’t remember where, except that it was sandy, and damp, because the tide was on its way out, and Sara had stopped suddenly and made her turn round and look back where they had come, the trace of their two sets of footprints, so many dents in the sand, slowly disappearing back along the shore as the damp sand gradually levelled again. It must have been the setting and the wide open spaces of sea and sand and sky, a very primeval scene of primary colour, which could have rested undisturbed for æons. Undisturbed but not unchanged, she thought. We've been there. Then too, for all the peace and tranquillity, she had felt this same impatience – yes, that was what it was – for something to happen. This was difficult to understand, because right at that moment in that place it was perfect, so was it that she needed something to change in order to prove that? Do we always need something to move so that we know where we’ve come from? She chuckled.
 

– Is that the sex thing again? If you don’t move nothing happens, or, if it doesn’t change it was never there.

– That sounds a bit like saying that we need constant affirmation - we’re not content unless there’s someone telling us they see us, that we’re ok?

– But then isn't it a small step from there to saying we’re no good on our own?

– Though couldn't it be ok to want it that way? I mean, not comparing. Just perfect as it is.

– That’s what lots of people have said when they’ve seen the two of us together… Just perfect. I’ve wondered sometimes, are they jealous because they’ve never been so close?

– As if nothing could ever change…

– They are forgetting about the next thing. It always has to come, so we can know what has been there…
 

– Her hand has gone cold now. Very cold.

– So I know she has been here. All my life in fact, to the minute, more or less. It wasn’t a dream.

– “Just leave”, she’d said, “I won’t be there after.”

– So, I suppose I should… just go now.

– That’s it.


('The Next Thing" by Simon Cole, author of the White Cat Collection)