Past Belief

I knew this road when it did not end here, high in the hills at the fringe of grey water. I want to go on down into the village, down the drowned road to my sunken home.

In my dreams I go there often. I can walk and breathe, but there is no sky, only a heavy fog pressing down on the deserted streets. All the doors stand open and I can enter any of the little houses and shops, the library and the church. But if I do I feel trapped, as if the fog will condense and flood in upon me. The trees are leafless and there is over everything a silence that is even more oppressive than the fog. Yet always at the edge of my hearing there are noises, children’s voices from the schoolyard, the hum of traffic, as if the sounds had ceased only a moment before. The silence has suddenness about it, as if it had just fallen. And about my feet there is the feeling of running water, soundlessly pooling and slithering, telling me that even in my dream I cannot long remain.

But I want to stay, I want to find the children, see the cars and buses trundling down the narrow streets as once I saw them years ago. I want to visit the churchyard and see my friend Jamie standing by his headstone, waiting to greet me. I want to tell him not to run out from the schoolyard to the shop, not to fall beneath the bus wheel, not to make that horrible crunching noise, not to destroy himself as surely as he destroyed old Joe Evans the driver, who hanged himself the following Winter. I want my parents to be lying there not Jamie. Lying there in quiet sleep and not scattered in the hills above, as close as I could take them to the place where they had grown and married and settled to wait for night; until the waters came and pushed them out, spilled and tumbled them up over the hills to a flat in the growling city. They left most of themselves behind and never again rested easy.

How much of me drowned here? It seems that in the years since the water finally rose to the shoulders of the encircling hills more and more of me steals away to sink beneath the surface there, to flutter down through the lightless water into the shrouded silence. I stand here feeling the cold slap of the wind beneath spitting clouds, wanting just to walk on down the interrupted road and force the water to admit me. I go slowly down to the very edge of the water. The wind stirs up wavelets to greet me, hurrying forward to lap my shoes. I know that just ahead, below the surface, the road runs down gently to the edge of a steeper slope, where it begins to zigzag back and forth across the hillside, until it runs down to the valley bottom and the houses begin.

I remember sitting by the road at the brow of the hill with Jamie on a day not long before he crunched and spurted (but did not scream, so suddenly did he die). The summer holidays were coming and the sky was already china blue in anticipation. Yes, china blue: a beautiful fragility of space and time held faded but intact in my memory. I find it hard to picture Jamie intact. I know that down there in the churchyard in my dreams I am always much relieved that he is not mangled and twisted, so that all will be well if only he will listen to me. But try as I might the silence swallows my words. I cannot remember now what we talked about that day. Once I was able to recall every word but they have mostly slipped away beneath the water. When I walk down there in my dreams I constantly strain my ears to catch the echoes of that conversation.

I know we sat and looked up at the clouds and saw one speared by a vapour trail. Jamie said it was a skyscraper. I told him that a skyscraper was a building, and he told me not to be stupid – how could a building scrape the sky if it couldn’t move? So easy then to laugh and dream, so easy then to look up and see clouds not smothering fog.

I start and jump back as the chill water laps over my ankles. The coldness invades my body and I shiver, as the village must have done when the waters rose. I turn to walk back over the bleak hilltop as the wind rises and the rain falls heavily.