The Pond

Mist hung low over the long grass.  Light and dew promised a clean slate, allowed a fresh start, pushing aside the mess of yesterday.  Dara pulled on a red flannel shirt, floppy with age, and jeans.  At Chanar’s window she tapped and whispered, “Come on!”  Chanar emerged, tousled and innocent.  Both of them are thrilled with the sudden realisation of what they are about to do,  both up at this hour, the start of a real adventure. No permissions, no promises, no predetermined actions or endings. Freedom.

Where had the idea come from? It was a favourite walk, a wood far enough away from watchful parents and teachers.  A haunt with reeds, swampy edges and sparkling brown opaque water, with rippling depths.  They lay at eye level at the edge many afternoons, and watched the flicker of fish, skimming swallows, hovering dragonflies.  Reedy, marshy smells of fresh earth and light beckoned Dara into its sunlit, heavenly centre. Cool, inviting, singing with life and joy.  Dara spent a lot of time alone here, watching, thinking, dreaming..  She loved the solitude, the freedom to think.  The desire to get closer had been Dara’s idea.  She had painted Chanar such a picture of ease, heavenly floating in sunlight, a promise of nature and quiet and freedom. Chanar had been transfixed from the start.

They struggled with the rolled up inflatable raft, the pump, oars and a picnic in stuffed backpacks over rocky paths and through fields, across a  barbed wire fence at a place where it had been pulled to the earth. It made a smile in the fence, a benign rusty agreement that it would turn a blind eye to such innocent transgressions.

They were both such good girls, never caught for anything, destined for university where they would become useful doctors, make good marriages to productive, helpful men and grow old gracefully, respecting tradition and their elders until they in turn automatically gained that place for themselves. Chanar accepted this.  Dara thought about it, contemptuous and afraid.

Chanar, at 15, was warm, with floppy, skinny, relaxed joints, inviting and friendly arms, and a soft centre, with long dark perfectly straight floppy hair silent and silken, falling over her face, which she habitually brushed back with an impatient gesture. Dara can picture it now. She imagines the smell of her - baby powder, an inoffensive, innocent smell. Sometimes there was a hint that she smelt stronger somewhere hidden, in the soft damp beneath each breast, perhaps.  Under her arms, between her legs even,  as Dara surreptitiously watched her in the changing rooms at school. Chanar was all seriousness, a hidden wit, darting eyes kept low except when she couldn't resist a challenge. 

Both of them, a credit to their families.  Dara’s father, a pathologist, was proud that his daughter did so well in her studies and was destined to follow in his footsteps.  Chanar’s father, a neurologist, wanted her to do research.  Chanar’s passion was nuclear physics - she was drawn to the abstract possibilities of quantum dimensions, talked about this endlessly to anyone who didn’t just walk away. She was going to be a quantum physicist. She spent all of her time poring over books, wondering about the nature of consciousness and particle entanglement, and spooky actions at a distance. She rarely came out, never swam with the others in the lake, didn't play childish rough games and never snuck out to do anything when she could be reading.  Dara was extra pleased that Chanar had agreed to come this morning. 

At the side of the pond Dara inflated the raft, watching it swell and unfold like her own life before her. She threw in her backpack with the breakfast picnic and a novel. Chanar carried her black backpack on her back, with the everpresent notebook, pencil case and her plastic covered, hard backed huge quantum physics text that she never went anywhere without. Dara didn’t quite understand what her fascination with quantum physics was. “Why do you always take that monster with you?”  Dara teased her mercilesslessly. “It’s going to weigh the whole raft down!” Chanar covered her mouth and her laugh was like the sound of clear running streamwater. 

Their goal was to float weightlessly in the middle of the pond in the sunlight, reading. Unassailable, unfound.  Laughing, they tumbled in and took a paddle each. The light, wing shaped plastic paddles splashed, ineffectually hitting the water sending up bright sparkling water droplets into the sunlight, catching their shrieks of delight up into the air with the circling swallows disturbed from nests in the reed beds beside the pond. 

"Okay," Dara finally spluttered, laughed out and lying tangled with Chanar in the bottom of the dinghy. "Let’s at least get out into the middle of the pond." But they are pointing the wrong way, into the dark tangle of weeds, and they need to turn. "Push your oar away, no. Backwards. No, not like that!" and they kind of want to give up, the sun is hot on their arms and faces, and Dara is sweating slightly. But somehow, pushing and pulling and grunting and shouting, they maneuver the little dinghy into the sunlight. Now, forward! Dara yells. 

They dug deep with their paddles into the depths of the murky water, first Chanar, then Dara and the raft heaves sideways with their efforts. First right, then left and  they cannot get synchronised, the raft teeters wildly on its edge in the water and time stops.  Dara felt rather than saw what would happen next, in slow motion, with a rising disbelief, a palimpsest etching itself on her memory before it happened. 

Chanar is suspended for a moment in the sun, sparkling; a dewy, silent moment where she stands, almost straight, arms thrown out at full stretch, head back and eyes wide towards the sky. It is not a jump, but all things sped up, time halting and rushing out of control. She lay in the air parallel to the water, her legs jackknifed straight her arms flung wide to embrace the sun and eyes wide with the surprise of the knowledge of what she sees, staring, unblinking in the the great blue cloudless morning sky. What did she see? Dara always wondered. Dara sprawled beneath her in the raft, caught in her shadow. She towered, tilted crazily away and a gull screamed once, breaking the spell. And then Chanar was gone. A lightning-shaped rush of churning water closed over her and heaved at the raft. 

"Chanar!" Dara  screamed, scrabbling over to the other side of the dinghy. But the boat was recoiling, spinning wildly away, turning and sliding across the surface of the water into the path of the sun carved out from the east on the brown reflective surface. Dara can no longer see exactly where Chanar fell.  Dara called, screamed. She looked for bubbles on the broken surface where Chanar should have popped up, gasping and laughing, any moment. But she didn't. The water shimmered, no stillness anymore, as if some giant was trembling with delight at the magnitude of his reedy find beneath the surface. The stillness crept back but sinister now, blanketing Dara, a humming, knowing silence, all consuming. All that was left was Dara’s cry, small in the heavy silence of the new morning.