The Woman and the Lake

Her name, she knows, is Jane. She knows it like she knows the basket will be there every morning, floating outside her door, the waves gently lapping against it. She knows that inside the basket will be a meal, still warm. She likes it best when it is a loaf of fresh bread, warm from the oven, with a golden pat of butter at its side. There will always be a ream of coarse paper, its leaves roughly cut, and pen and ink when she needs them.

This morning, as in all other mornings, there is a message in the basket stained with wet. This one reads: “Please say something.” The roast chicken she sets on a plate in the kitchen, with the asparagus roasted in olive oil and sea salt. She will eat it later, in the doorway with the plate on her knees, tearing with her hands and letting the juice run off her chin. The message she tucks in with the others in the room of letters, a pile of letters, of alphabet and time.

It seems to her that there are two Janes, the known and the unknown. She writes down the things that she knows, and the things that she doesn’t. There is a shelf-full of knowns and unknowns in dark ink and candlelight.

She knows that she lives on an island, that it is a hundred paces long and scarcely half that wide, that its trees are tall but too smooth for climbing, that the stones on its beach are round and black with wet. She knows that the house in which she sleeps was once brightly painted, with wood now faded and paint cracked. She plugs the holes with grass and mud, where she can find them, but the wind whistles through the ones she cannot find.

She knows that she was not the first. There are etches in the wood, scratches in stone, of names and people and places. She likes to imagine who they were, or where these places are. She remembers a city where she could walk and walk and not run out of things to discover. She remembers the warmth of skin touching skin, of smiles and laughter. She does not know what Kuala Lumpur is, or who Lucas must be. She does not know why these names have stayed, only that they are there, a shadow of something, other.

She used to sit at the desk, straight-backed against the hard wood chair in peeling white, casting her mind into the past. A fisherman on a twilit sea looking for bottled words. She keeps what she finds. Here in this house on the island on the lake there is no music, no golden strings nor proud trumpets. She remembers Ravel, Rachmaninoff. She hears their music reverberate in echoes of terrible joy and incredible sadness. She holds on to their melodies, tightly, like a child clinging to her mother.

She knows how to cradle a child in her arms, and to sing a heartsong to a loved one.

Most of all, she knows that she cannot leave, though the wooded shore across calls to her. She could swim across, she knows, without interference. But she remembers a troubled water, and her in it, gasping for breath as the current drags at her body. She used to feel bitterness like a stone, pulling and pulling and pulling. Now she only feels ethereal, translucent, a skin stretched too tight over a drum. She is wilting, she thinks, like a plant deprived of sunlight.

“Why do you keep me here?” she speaks to the lake.

“Because I am selfish,” the message says.

“I don’t understand,” she says, the day after.

“I do not want to be alone,” it says.

She rises at the dawn, as she has done before, and lets the morning in. All the windows must be opened, the door spread wide, for amber glow and calling birds. She remembers a cat, its eyes shut tight as it sits in the sun. She drinks it in deeply. It is not ugly, the place where she stays. There is clear running water that fish dart through, and vibrant trees, and birds in the sky. There are mountains, sometimes, when the light is just right and the peaks glow. It feels like a place out of time, though she does not know if it is.

She has stopped counting the papers sent her.

She has learnt to take pleasure in the physical, a beetle tumbling in her hands, the smell of ozone and rain. She does not know why these things have become important to her, the feel of cool water, silky smooth; the play of shadows on the wall as night falls. She lies on the grass in the evenings, as the stars make themselves known, as she feels the warmth of the great earth below.

“What do you want from me?” she asks.

“To stay here on my island, and eat of my food, and play by the water, and sing the songs of your youth, to be a fire so bright that I cannot but look at you,” says the message, finally.

“I cannot,” she says. She trembles, and whispers, “I cannot.”

She lies awake on the bed through the night, looking at nothing in particular.

“Who are you?” she asks to the water.

There is no reply the next morning, but within the ream of paper there is a bundle of pressed lilies.

She breaks the wooden desk and throws the pieces through the windows. She tears at the sheets and knocks over the shelves. Papers scatter over all the floor, a carpet of memories.

When there is nothing left to break she cries, and the lake outside begins to churn and froth. Waves crash on the shore, and the wind howls in frightening need. The spray cuts at her skin and blurs with her tears and the lightning strikes in a thousand blazing strokes. The thunder follows, rolling across a divided sky. Then a path in the storm opens up, the wind and rain parting in great silence, and at the horizon there is a boat.

There is a boat.

She clutches her knees with both hands and shivers. She is soaked to the bone. She watches it come closer, the man with a pole pushing the boat along.

“Who are you?” She asks of him. He is tall, and robed with grey, his sleeves briefly touching the ground as he bends.

“I am the ferryman,” he says, “and I am come to take you away from here.”

“Where will I go?”

He says, “To the end.”

She looks at his eyes, the colour of silver and blue flame, and nods.

She climbs aboard and sits at his feet, at the prow.

She does not look at the house on the island on the lake.

She does not look behind.