Free Pond: Stories by Claire-Louise Bennett Page B

detailed and lasting memories. There are of course a number of regions in any abode that areforemost yet unreachable. Places, in other words, right under your nose which are routinely inundated with crumbs and smidgens and remains. And these ill-suited specks and veils and hairpins stay still and conspire in a way that is unpleasant to consider, and so one largely attempts to arrange one’s awareness upon the immediate surfaces always and not let it drop into the ravines of smeared disarray everywhere between things. Where it would immediately alight upon the dreadful contents therein and deliver the entire catalogue to those parts of the imagination that will gladly make a lurid potion from goose fat and unrefined sea salt.
    There were grains, of course. Grains and seeds, and a swan in fact. A tiny white swan, with beak and eyes hoisted as if regarding four or five swans walloping through the clouds above. Poor little white swan, so realistic and wistful, I’ll put you back where you were. Which was, I believe on the corner of the mirror frame. How did you get here little white swan? I turn you about between my thumb and forefinger and cannot remember for the life of me where you came from.
    South Africa. South Africa! Can you believe it! It turns out my little stove comes all the way from an incredibly distant continent! I can see chickens with extraordinary manes stalking atop the flaking hob rings, pieces of caramelised corn wedged in the forks of their aristocratic claws. And all these big root vegetables with wrinkles and beards and startling fruits and rice hissing out the sack like rain. Everything red, everything yellow. I know nothing of course; I remember standing chopping vegetables for a salad in a kitchen in south London very many years ago and a man from South Africa stood beside me and showed me how to prepare the cucumber, that’s all. I remember he scored the cold lustreless skin lengthways with afork several times so that when he cut it at an angle there were these lovely elliptical loops of serrulated cucumber, and I have sliced it that way every time ever since. It looks particularly chi-chi in a short tumbler glass of botanical gin.
    Dear Salton of South Africa my cooker is on its knees please help. Perhaps send the parts I need upon a cuckoo so they arrive in time for spring—on second thoughts a cuckoo is a flagrantly selfish creature so feel free to select a more suitably attuned carrier from another imminently migrating species— but please not a swallow because they don’t get here until sometime in May, which will I fear be far too late, and anyway I’m sure they’re far too dextrous and flash for such a quaint assignment. I live on the most westerly point of Europe, right next to the Atlantic Ocean in fact. The weather here is generally very bad, compared to the rest of Europe that is, and that might be a reason why not too many people live here. The fact that the population is quite low might in turn account for the fact that the country’s basic infrastructure is very uneven which means, for example, that the public transport service is stunted, sporadic and comprehensively lousy. Fortunately despite all this, and its history of starvation which did in fact take many hundreds of lives hereabouts and beyond, the exact spot where I live is pleasant overall and taxi drivers often remark upon what an unexpected piece of paradise it is and how they never even knew it was here. I mention the famine, Salton, not in order to establish any sort of sociohistorical affinity, which would be a very crass contrivance indeed, but simply because my mind is currently more susceptible to images of hunger than it has ever been on account of the fact that I am running out of matches, so to speak. This is not the time of year to be eating granola and salads and caper berries, let me tell you. Oh Salton of SouthAfrica, do you even exist? I rather fear you do not, the attempts I made to discover your