Copyright © 2014 Alby Stone
A river, wide and frozen, set in a deep bed of snow and crystalline trees. He trudged along one bank, leaving an even trail of footprints, the only marks on an otherwise unbroken sheet of crisp whiteness. Whenever he glanced to his right, to the bank opposite, she was there, distant and silent. Sometimes, he tried to call to her, across the river and through the bitter cold. But all that escaped his lips were foggy spurts of breath.
Were they travelling upstream or down? The water did not move and the riverbanks were mirror images, seemingly parallel lines stretching toward an invisible horizon, offering no clue. Looking back was not an option; whenever he tried his neck locked and excruciating pain shot across his shoulders. If he looked down he could see the prints, ankle-deep, as his feet rose from them. He had no idea where the first had been made but he feared there would never be a last. He had always been walking. There would be no end to this journey. Wherever it led, this route was pre-ordained. The riverbank was his only path and there could be no deviation.
The blue-grey sky never darkened, never grew lighter. Sun and clouds hovered in place, unmoving and unchanging. No birds flew or sang; no beasts disturbed the snow. On and on he walked, always cold and afraid, and nothing ever changed.
She really wished he would shut up. The man’s voice was clear and insistent, saying things she didn’t understand, weird stuff. It sounded oddly familiar but she couldn’t place any of it. No one else seemed to hear him, though. She wanted to scream at him to stop, but didn’t dare to in case the people around them thought she was the crazy one. She wondered if he might be dangerous. Best not to look at him, just in case. The last thing she wanted was a madman creating a scene with her as the focus of his ranting and raving.
The cavity was vast, egg-shaped, lined with interlocking stones and half filled with water that seemed to glow in the soft blue light. Midway between the top and bottom of the ovoid chamber, a ledge ran unbroken around the perimeter, the liquid splashing gently over the flagstones as movements rippled the surface.
He was not alone. She swam diametrically opposite him, in the same counter-clockwise direction and keeping pace. Unless one of them changed course or stopped dead while the other carried on, they would never meet.
The sounds they made merged and echoed up and down and around the curved walls in a recursive serial whisper. Yet somehow he could hear each stroke of her arms through the water, every breath she took, with perfect clarity. Once, he thought she might have laughed – or perhaps she was weeping.
The water was as warm as blood, slippery with salts, tangy as brine when it passed his lips, yet clear as glass. Without looking, he knew he was naked. Presumably, so was she. The thought did not arouse him. It simply felt right, the way it was supposed to be.
He didn’t understand why they were locked in this endless, aquatic dance, even though he was dimly aware that rules were being followed, that they were following prescribed steps.
Was he dreaming? He could no longer tell, increasingly convinced it was the only reality that remained to him. Perhaps it was her dream and he had inadvertently trespassed.
They swam on. Time passed – hours, days, weeks, perhaps months. He seemed to have been swimming forever, thousands of circuits, a million; the first was lost in a history that had no beginning. He was tired, so tired by his eternally scissoring arms and oscillating feet. And he had always been tired.
At last she dared to raise her eyes. As expected, he was staring in her direction – but he wasn’t really looking at her, only gazing emptily at a place somewhere a long way behind her, beyond her, beyond even the glass and aluminium that confined them. A thousand-yard stare. She’d heard the expression many times but this was the first time she truly understood what it meant.
The man’s lips twitched now and then, but his Adam’s apple bobbed continually. He was subvocalising, delivering a lengthy internal monologue and not being particularly subtle about it. And she could hear every unuttered word as if it was a shout so loud the ambient racket could not drown it out.
Curious, she studied him more closely. He was unkempt, dressed in mismatched clothing, tightly clutching a plastic carrier bag advertising a women’s clothing store he was unlikely ever to have visited. He badly needed a shave. It wasn’t what they called designer stubble – there was nothing ‘designer’ about this guy. And he was shivering. Perhaps that was a side-effect of some kind of medication. His expression was oddly blank and indecipherable. He had the look of a psychiatric out-patient, like the strange, solitary old man who’d lived up the road when she was a kid, the one she and her friends all laughed at, though secretly everyone of them felt sorry for him.
The fire separated them, smoke and leaping flame blurring her features as he watched. Branches and twigs crackled as they burned, tiny glowing embers lifted by the thermal current, soaring into the night sky like fireflies. Around them, outside the pool of flickering firelight, there was only an infinity of darkness. Fire, the comfort of the ages.
He sat on the dry sand, regarding her across the dividing blaze. No matter how long the wood burned, it was never consumed. The fire never consumed more fuel than it had when it was first lit. That had been such a long time ago, as old as the first fire kindled by human hands. And they’d sat there ever since, immobile, waiting. But waiting for what?
He tried to stand again, failed again. Movement was restricted to a single reaching out, both arms extended, palms outward to warm by the fire; or a small adjustment to his position to relieve the discomfort. Whenever he made these small shifts, she moved too. It was almost like gazing into a mirror that reversed more than polarity – not only left to right but also man to woman, dark to fair, unremarkable to beautiful.
Unexpectedly – unprecedentedly – she stood and addressed him.
‘I was ashamed,’ she said.
Did they still say ‘care in the community’ in these days when it was only too obvious that communities didn’t give a damn about people like him until and unless they did something bad? Was there a home with family, people who loved him? What had his life been like? Who was he? Did anyone care about this man or listen to his bizarre ramblings?
No, of course they didn’t. She was sure now that the others couldn’t hear him. His speech was intended for her alone. She didn’t know why she could make out what was evidently inaudible to anyone else. All she knew was that she wanted him to stop it – that or get up and walk out and go as far away as possible. As far as she was concerned the lunatic could keep on walking forever, to Antarctica or the North Pole, anywhere just so long as he left her alone.
As she thought that, a solitary tear trickled from the man’s left eye and ran slowly down his cheek to the corner of his mouth. And with that she realised that his expression was not blank at all but was that of a man struggling to suppress great fear and a terrible anguish. It was the face of someone who was pained in a way she would never have to endure. Her heart went out to him and she regretted her reluctance to listen, her dismissal of him as a madman. Her face burned with shame.
When the train pulled into Waterloo, the man and woman sitting opposite each other rose at the same time. For an instant, their eyes met. He nodded curtly and gave her a brief, shy smile. She smiled back, though she seemed embarrassed, no doubt because he was a stranger. They left the train together and strode in spontaneous lockstep to the barriers, inserting their tickets in adjacent slots at the same time. She turned left toward the tube station. He crossed the concourse and took the escalator down to street level.
Outside, it had been snowing heavily. He added his tracks to the thousands already there.