by Geoff Sawers
She grew obsessed by something she hadn’t wanted or hadn’t valued when she had it. She’d seen faults everywhere, in everything, everyone, but perhaps they were all in herself, in her perception? Like looking at the world through a crushed pair of glasses. It was nauseating that she kept getting this feeling of it being too late for her, too late to start, to be anything new. But the sun rises every day, you have to do something. She gave notice at her job and to her landlord, gave away her furniture and most of her stuff; turned up back at her mother’s place with just what she could fit into her little car, a big potted yucca plant strapped into the passenger seat. Well, what now? said her mum.
Maybe she could go on holiday. But I just quit my job. And maybe I’d just be sitting on a beach thinking well, what now? I can do that at home. Her mother sighs. I’m going to town tomorrow morning if you’d like to come, she says, to the bakery and then the hairdressers. You might find something at the library. No thanks, she replies, but in the morning she has changed her mind and tags along. At her mother’s hairdressers she accepts a cup of coffee but doesn’t join in the general pleasant chatter, instead she sits with one of her old college books that was up in the attic and reads about power dynamics in Foucault. No one asks what she’s reading about. When a lady coming in trips over something she leaps up and half-catches her, steadies her on her feet, then goes back to her book. She can sense everyone looking at her now, like they’ve just remembered that she exists. Her mum is part of this place, but she totally isn’t. Her mother’s friends call round, they all seem to assume she must have just broken up with a boyfriend. She feels more like she just broke up with herself, but it’s a lot easier to let them believe what they want than try to explain that. There are foxgloves coming up, putting up pale tall flower-spikes but not yet in full purple. It’s hard being back in the country. Do you want to go and watch the hunt? No, mother. No I don’t. I might fantasise about hunting the hunt myself though, in some way that doesn’t hurt the horses. They didn’t do anything wrong. She thinks she could be a tree, a tall, smooth beech tree and live out a solid life of a hundred and fifty years or so and then get cut down, sawn into planks or pulped, rolled out into long sheets, trimmed to size, printed on and bound as a book. And then she’d be back here once again but bearing information this time.
Geoff Sawers’s newest book is ‘Widdershins Walk’ (with Peter Driver, Peculiarity Press 2025). He lives in Reading, UK.
