Demeter could not easily differentiate between one shape and another. Her toes would stroke over objects at night and she would wonder what she was sleeping with - an old shirt, a newspaper, a biography. Everything seemed differently arranged and she would act surprised and say out loud, ‘Oh is that what it is? It doesn’t feel like it...’ The hawk in the aquarium seemed to confirm what she already knew: that it is only by looking at the edge of things that you got their drift. So she wandered through life looking for edges, for small movements just where your eyes nearly lose interest, and so even when she stumbled over the present she always retained a sense of the peripheral. The thing that was there just at the corner of her gaze was only waiting to be introduced. She saw shadows everywhere and could not be left at night in the house without her believing she was not alone, that other things were there. She had been an awkward child and her late teenage years brought out a luminosity that her clumsiness superficially contradicted.
Her school colleagues would look at her, and then pass on unsure what to speak on. Her attractiveness didn’t give them a way to reach her except in small portable exchanges about time-tables, long queues for lunch and essay dead-lines. Demeter veered from apparent carelessness about her school existence to a kind of unresolved aversion. She spent time gazing out of the window and only her English teacher seemed capable of drawing her back to this world. When all her class rejected Hardy for his relentless fatalism, Demeter unnerved them all with her passionate defence; she left the room red-faced but curiously enervated, seeing in Hardy shapes of intimacies too rich to tell. She loved Bathsheba more than Troy or Oak, yet did not kid herself that her affection was one of identification. Demeter knew what she was not: her problem was actually knowing who she was.
Article comments