The way back.

When Caber reached the old house she felt relief. A solemn trudge in several days of heavy rain had brought her here, to this refuge where she would surely be informed of the next phase. Return to the familiar, from which she'd once so eagerly fled out of duty to a long-acknowledged sense of adventure, had become the glorious pink horizon during her absence. The scenery to many an evening's tale shared with strangers, and the warm glow upon her eyelids when peace was mustered and a weary soul resting. The constant crash of rain now had her clean of mind, battered free of flimsy dreams. Defiance of physical defeat bristled in her skin and left no room for the sentimental calling which might have gathered on either side. On one, a much sweetened scent of home; on the other, a contemplation of this closing chapter. The building buzz as she drew in to meet her destination was therefore centered on the thought of being warm and dry. Hardship had narrowed the vast expanse of past and future to the very present task at hand and limited the view to the rhythmic stomp of muddy boots. It felt like jumping on the spot in inky darkness til mad fury robs your body and the rest falls into line, subdued. 

They ushered her in, hushing dribbled chatter and taking off her coat. A brightly lit hallway found bare skin and showed her her arms. All the little hairs stood out separately. As she looked down at herself and began to breathe more slowly, the three men gathered to discuss what they would do with her.

"She could join the others for dinner now. They're halfway through but she's probably very hungry," one said.

"Okay, that's not a problem," said the second man, "but she'll have to sit with the foreigners. There won't be room at the other tables."

"Well, let us hope she speaks French," said the third. "You know the foreigners wouldn't be at all pleased if they had to endure a non-French speaker. We'd better test her briefly."

They summoned Caber to rise from her slump against the wall and asked her, in low voices, if she could speak French. The dynamics of the dining room required it, you see. Stumbling a little at first, she told them, in French, that she had learnt the language some time ago now but that, having had the odd occasion to use it during her travels, she considered herself capable enough of conversation. The first two men seemed satisfied, but the third was not convinced. He told her, in perfect French, that the standards she had set herself were clearly not very high, and that the people she'd be dining with tonight may well wish to file a complaint against her. 

"However," he said. There was a few moments pause. "We're all good people here. And besides, you look like you could do with a decent meal."

In the dining room the dull rumble perceptible from the hallway became a great, ugly clang in Caber's ears. The deathly pace of life outside in the eternity of rain and mud had sucked away agility, and now, in amongst the heaving tide of human activity, she knew not what to think. The moment of entry was an egg to the head which cracked and splattered onto stock still limbs, cold shock found out and sharply attacked with sticky humour. She felt frail. A new speed reigned and it had no beat to follow - only a chaotic power to surround and drown. She moved through it tentatively. There were people of all ages sitting at tables talking, eating, drinking. These were normal things. But done en masse they were terrifying. The accusatory glances which flash round school canteens trickled down the years and pushed their way into her air. She could feel them passing over as she moved, observing detachedly in her lonely struggle. It seemed she was wading across that room, through her own thickly surging self-awareness, and she knew it wasn't cruelty she saw in their eyes, but memories of childish scorn and horrible shame, born of visibility. They'd stuck fast, abundantly enough to run over and leak into subconscious feeling. Caber noted this. Still, she thought, I see no ruling kindness either. The mob's composed of mice.

She reached the other side of the dining room and began to load her plate with food from silver trays. Most of them were almost empty so she scraped them clean. She slid heavily along the bar, then found herself smiling at greasy, food-smeared reflections. Her distorted face dissolved the gurgling room a little, and she felt the strained comfort of it, like when you've got clenched fists pressed against your eyes and hear yourself breathing loudly under the covers. When she caught stretched lips and fallen brows in pans and taps and spoons, it'd remind her that she wasn't real or solid enough to be fitted squarely into a jigsaw puzzle or play the lead in a story. She stared and saw that she was indistinguishable. Gravy splattered. Another slurping monster who had to eat and cook and lean in to catch the water. Who, sometimes, still had to hide from other, more cunning sorts of monsters.

Of course, Caber's departure from youth was not only a drying up of fearful, fleshy softness and a wilful pursuit of the strange, androgynous unknown. In travelling, she'd sought postponement rather than true escape. She'd planted trees there, in her home, once the realisation struck that places build themselves without expanding, that you can make them dense and warm by merely breathing their air. That's where the long and twisted narratives unfold, spinning connections into neccessities. So she'd begun to cultivate, but hesitantly, and the lack of conviction had fogged the intrigue of her plot. It was thus decided that Caber would breathe in new air every day, her new saplings would be kissed and left in shadows, and she would begin collecting short bursts of drama. She'd hop from anecdote to anecdote and, where possible, store them in individual bottles, neatly capped and preserved in sweet juices of the time.

She sat silently amongst the foreigners who were getting up to leave and ate slowly, as though in a trance. The food was brown and covered in breadcrumbs. It looked suspiciously like meat, but she decided not to dwell on this and filled her empty stomach. Despite the new, raucous clatter of the room, Caber had quite a contrary sense of time. It dripped, oh-so-slowly, echoing a span of years unknown in number because they circled in on themselves like a bored child restricted to one block on his bicycle. That was the feel of this place, the Passover House. She'd spend the night, then the rest of life would begin to unravel come morning. While they continued to welcome guests and sit down to plates of warm, brown meat, she'd be breathing into cobwebbed eaves with Rim. Tending to the roots of their world. Perhaps the dust would choke them a little at first, make their eyes water, but that could soon be swept clean. She imagined it falling, come to life in shafts of sunlight, how its shedding would bring an unspeakable joy. Images of the future, slow and delicious, spread out before her now her head was resting in the calm of shelter, the fierce torrents of water locked outside and powerless to distract her thoughts. She'd find gritty contrasts to spice her masterpiece, for the surging mass of anecdotes had already rimmed the ancient wholeness of homely memory in gold. Those years had seen her vulnerable to sharp bouts of loneliness. It was a curse which stuck by and hung around to strike between the feathers of the many brief, though often wonderful, relationships she'd had. And now she was here, passing over from the storm into the calm, where memories of bitter solitude and broken chains of affection would crystallise the backbone to her everlasting loves, and put a spark of the sage in her eye when she spoke of trees and growth. That night these pictures swept her up and cradled her in sleep. 

She'd been out of sync with the others but this was hardly something new. It was one of many single nights of anonymity, walking around in her own head, sharing nothing. When she finished her meal and looked up everyone had left. She cleared up the glass, plate and cutlery and took them through to the kitchen where she rinsed them clean with hot water. As she dried her hands on a teatowel she caught sight of her reflection. It was a real mirror, that cruel teller of truths whose depths will swallow secrets and call on you to rise again like a terrible fish. The perfect silence of the room compelled her to draw in to herself and examine a face she knew so well but still looked odd; still shocked her. She saw herself tired and pale and so seemed much older than she was. Time for sleep, she thought, and went to bed. 

First she dreamt of Rim, and then the faces of her parents. She saw her friends in a garden at night, the golden end of a joint changing hands amid quiet talk and dew-laden grass. These weren't real dreams, but a half-waking sleep. Pictures willed in by an anxiety disguised in rest. A light smile hung about her lips in that upstairs room which had to mark a bridge in her journey. They held all her love in the end, these pictures. They'd been swimming about somewhere for a long time, and now she picked out memories as though going through a pile of presents at Christmas. In the veils of sleep she unwrapped each one and held it close, insisting upon its perfection. She hauled them all into the light and called upon them to be relevant. 

Once she'd drifted into deeper sleep these sweet thoughts also drifted on to other plains and made way for a newer memory to be revisited. Back downstairs in the kitchen, Caber is finishing the washing up when she sees a mirror and walks over to see herself. God she's old, so old! She watches her jowls, which quiver, and the low-slung bulges loosening beaneath her eyes. She's not sure if her hair is grey or not because it's on fire. Flames lick within the exactitude of her hairline and leap upwards with a terrifying energy. 

She awoke suddenly with that image of herself, old and burning, burnt onto her mind's eye. In little time she was dressed, packed and waiting in the hallway downstairs, ready to escape the cruelty of her dreams and face what she supposed was real. Those official men with stern expressions would be here any minute to dismiss her and point out the way. But which way would it be? It occurred to her that she had no idea what direction she'd come from. She only knew that this was the Passover House, whose exit had to be closer to home than its entrance. 

When she stepped outside it was back into the grey misery of rain. A lake of muddy water had swolen up, filling the entire driveway and trapping her to the steps. Behind her, the great oak door had closed. Its creaking goodbye yawn must have been drowned out by the drumming, for Caber hadn't heard it, and now she stared up at the door in surprise. She hadn't considered this, that there could be yet more leaps to make towards the next phase. It should have ended by now. She was too tired for more rain, and suddenly realised she felt old, too. She'd already been beaten down this way. Aged by a joyless tramp across any child-spirit still remaining to light the fire of emotional resilience. Quelled without a fight by this god-forsaken rain. The water had risen to the walled flowerbeds on either side of the driveway. That would have to be the way: climbing up into the flowers and creeping alongside them as far as they could take her. Footholds were few and dangerous-looking. With her eyes she followed each possible route to the confirmation of its impossibility. She tried and failed them all. Desperation chewed at her, stripping away the marvellous faith she'd sewn so meticulously into the fabric of this day. Nowhere to go. Eyes still darting. Losing hope.

Up in the flowerbeds, not far from where Caber had just tried to carve herself an unforgiving path to safety, two young men were crouched. One of them, the taller, held a gun under his arm. So there were strangers in the old garden who'd taken advantage of the chaos of rain to break in and hunt some prey. Their journey had covered them in scratches. Soaking wet and bloodied, they appeared as savages fresh from the forest. The second man whispered to the taller one, and that's when Caber saw them and called out. For this girl had spied two well-loved men looking out cautiously from behind a rosebush. Rim and Mot, their poor, broken bodies come all this way in foul and angry weather to save her from the floods and cut short the arduous return home. They were searching as she searched and now she'd met their faces once again she could sigh with pleasure and be reassured that hardship, when taken up by the bonds of love, tastes almost sweet upon the tongue. She threw her arms into the air, and as though to test the sweetness of the coming venture, opened her mouth and drank a victory drop of rain.

In amongst the rosebushes, however, quite a different scene was beheld. It cannot be said whether the perpetrators of that brutal blow were Rim and Mot or not, since that is only what poor Caber saw. From the higher vantage point a minor crime was witnessed. Two lusty young men spotted a rabbit in the doorway to an old building and one took aim and shot. Meek terror shone in its eyes as it pleaded, moments before the trigger was pulled, for them to see humanity therein. The cold air seemed then to sting more fiercely, tear up the drone of rain-beats and voice the quiet tragedy of female pain. There faces hung there calmly, serene and open-mouthed, above wetly flapping rags. An echo of surprise swirled between hunter and prey. He'd missed, and now the rabbit ran.

The two men were well aware that something strange had happened, although neither could find any way to express it in words and so this nuance to their hunting trip went undiscussed. They knew the truth of the event, that one had shot at a rabbit in a doorway and missed, but the source of melancholy which entered their hearts in the time that followed, and the sense of time on pause before the rabbit fled, was a black flint of tangled emotion and horror which neither could explain. 

As Caber walked on alone she pondered what had happened and found many gaps in each pattern of logic she pursued. She concluded that there could be no explanation of intent on her lover's part. She believed so vehemently in his goodness that she wondered if her eyes had lied; if it was really Rim and Mot at all. For years she'd compared all prospective lovers to him and set him as the standard for male perfection. And after all those years of yearning and imagining her arms reached out to nought but a cold, purposeful stare. She'd scaled the walls and found another in him, and as she walked she returned to that wall, again and again, to beat her fists against it. She insisted upon the passive nature of his estrangement to the extent that he became entirely removed from his actions, placed behind the curtain of ignorance in service to an impulsive, trigger-pulling finger. The both of them. They were merely maddened and confused by the stormy weather, and then vision was of course obscured by thorns, water and mud!

The cruelties of nature causes cruelty in men, she thought. Sharpened like knives, they are ready to destroy but unable to perceive. It had taken a bullet to make her see in her lover this most primary and human of failings. She saw he was as frail in the hands of time as any other; that in the end we're mute and supine. Disintegration of the formerly immutable is like a hidden egg timer with its silent trickle of sand. And it was a sudden clag of sand in her throat now to consider the truth of absent years and their role as mechanics of change. Rim would have tended to his own saplings, or perhaps planted new ones, neither of which would ever mirror the ghostly specimens Caber had left behind. Could the quilt of their dreams ever be sewn out of ill-fitting pieces? For the first time she thought that maybe this would prove too great a challenge. She was tireder than she'd ever been in her life. 

The rolling hills touched down in her soul as she drew in to the places she knew so well. She'd never imagined it could be this clear. It was no longer a painting but real and grainy in a way which shocked to the core. She walked slowly, taking in the blur of memory more tightly. She strung together the hard glass beads of a broken necklace with unbroken concentration. Rebuilding a landscape which had barely changed was an exercise in simple pleasure which she sought now in her immediate visual world to soothe the tumult so suddenly arisen in the one she had been building. The woods and fields pulled her in. Their arms were loving in a soft, wordless way, because whispering leaves speak a universal language belonging to the poets of nature. 

To successfully will the contents of her mind one way or another was something Caber had never been sure of her skill in. She wondered whether the tears in her eyes were roused by the wind or her sorrows, or whether both were too intimately coiled by her musings to make the distinction. The message of rejection, harnessed and enacted by Rim's bullet, had rung sharply as vomit in a fairytale, but now she saw the eternal sadness of return; how the sanctity of romantic love had positioned itself high and proud in her heart and charged forth on blood diverted from the subtler fonts of ancient love. The fabled pinnacle was smashed in one, and the flailing roots of home had gone unnourished. One small person and one thin fishing line had taken their one snap, one royal bullet, to collapse it all and reveal a gaping, meaningless sea to this mad bearer of burdens. Caber stalked like a stray child through the forest, grasping at slippery fish with bare hands as soil became loose and crumbled beneath her feet. She wondered how it would feel to drown there in the dark, wet earth; whether anything would be lost but falsely guarded fastasies to a fantastical end. 

That night she slept beneath the trees, although home was not far away.

In her dreams she still felt her body, laid out on the ground facing upwards. The chill of night air made her think she was naked, and so here we have Caber lying beside Rim in a room she doesn't recognise. They do not speak because they are hiding from something. He stares fixedly at the ceiling, concentrating upon noises of some kind which indicate danger. His curls hang loose, skimming high, beautiful cheekbones. He's looking up but she has her head on one side, looking at him. Perhaps she can only sense danger through him, only tremble because she is in love and if he runs now she will run too, from pure instinct. She feels his eyes tracing the patterns on the ceiling in search of calming sustenance to incurable anxieties. Then there's a loud crash and they understand that their pursuers have arrived, that they will break down the door any minute now. Rim tries to help her up, but her naked body is stuck to the bed, weighted down by invisible forces. She pushes but the heave is against infinity and he can't waste anymore time, no, he's got to leave straight away. He jumps out of the window and leaves Caber to battle the weight of air and the stickiness of earth. 

When morning came and pierced the struggles of night she lay there tingling in the light, eyes still closed. First came relief that it was all a dream, second came sadness at the abandonment it contained, and finally a deep sense of shame. In real life she considered herself independent of Rim. Although she thought of him often, she had lived without him for many years and had grown used to it. And yet at night she would become her most vulnerable, an adoring witness to his angelic beauty, and always so young and naked and at his mercy. Embittered by her own weakness and the foul deed which had branded it still brighter in her sleep-softened skin, Caber set off to Rim's house. She wanted to know why he had shot her at the Passover House, and why he'd left her in that room last night when danger was coming. It was probable that the answers would come no clearer than the questions themselves, but there were words which itched in her mouth and demanded the drama of confrontation. 

She saw him as she took those last steps up the driveway. Last steps? The driveway was the same as ever. He was in the garden planting a tree. She stopped and watched. The only things in her ears were the crunch of dry earth and her own unsteady breathing. When he pushed the spade into the ground she could see a strip of skin on his back. Hair fell forward and shimmered, full of light. For several minutes she stood there, overwhelmed by the marvellous vigour of reality. 

"Rim!" she called out.

He walked over and held her. They stared at the tree he'd just planted. 

"I planted it because you're coming home," he said.

"I am home."

"Yes."

"I want to talk to you tomorrow. Not today. I need to think out what I want to say."

That evening Caber had a deep, hot bath. The bath seemed so small now! She remembered how, not so long ago, having a bath was "bath time" and included all three siblings at once. A loud affair of echoing laughter and plastic toys. When she got out, glowing and steaming and a little dizzy, her mother came in with a towel. She wrapped it round her eldest daughter with perfect care and precision, then smiled. Caber felt like a pancake and she knew her mother was also thinking this. And neither knew whether to laugh or cry.