Green Lake

The locket, which was heart-shaped and had once fitted snug as a pebble into Rannie’s hand, now arced through the air, the line of a silver chain trailing behind it like the slipstream of some fallen star. An inaudible splash, barely a ripple, then the same pale green plane of the lake, unchanged, unyielding. What had she expected?

Looking over the water she felt at the place where the necklace once rested, high up on her neck, in the hard cradle between her collarbones. For a moment she could feel it, like an amputee might feel his lost limb. Then the feeling was gone and with it the last material thing binding her to a life no longer recognizable as her own.

‘There is no room for beauty in this world without trees’, her mother had once said. ‘But you were always the hopeful one.’ And with these words she had handed over the locket.

‘What do I do with this?’ had been Rannie’s reply.

In little over a century the locket had had over a dozen owners. Fickle as a cat, it found its way into the homes of families and into the pockets of husbands and wives, adorning the lives of it’s possessors through generations, and from the old world into the new.

The locket had been made during a time when precious stones and metals were still exchanged for money by a long since forgotten jeweller and was bought by a poor and dangerously romantic fiddle player, for his wife who he loved more than anything.

In time the fiddle player had grown sick of heart and, as is the case when a person no longer has anything to give, he in turn became sick of body. He soon passed and his wife, unable to bear the weight of their remembered love had sold the locket to a young and shrewd antique dealer with a mean and keen eye for riches.

The dealer who until then had found his luck to be bountiful, soon came upon a thief who having identified the locket as being of worth killed the young man, taking the locket from his neck. The thief was caught and jailed and in this way the fateful locket would once more change hands. This time by way of an old police sergeant for his mistress. Though the mistress never saw the locket, it remained in the sergeant’s possession for years, out of sight but retaining all of its cruel beauty.

I do not mean in anyway to say that the locket was cursed (though the locket’s record may of course suggest this), I mean only to describe the item’s history so that you may feel with a greater precision the weight of its existence, the scope of its life as an object and its immutable testimony to a world now sunken beneath green lakes.

‘As long as you keep this with you, you will be safe’ Rannie’s mother had said. ‘This is our last tie to a lost world.’

For years Rannie had felt a profound sense of duty, of guardianship over this lost world, over the idea of it. She had heard such stories, of the rolling green, not the pallid bilious green of lifeless lakes but the green of fresh shoots and leaves and life spanning as far as the eye can see; a green thrumming with the carnal festivities of the living, of raucous wild calls, fearsome creatures and unimaginable abundance. Such a world was a fantasy, a thing of dreams, a taunting un-reality; a ghost wandering the blackened shores of a new world, and though Rannie had fallen in love with such fantasies, she found beauty in much of what entoured her: in the dereliction of the fallen cities and in the remnants of the trees, now a vast troupe of blackened pins.

For some of the dead trees around the lake, Rannie had made clothes to cover their limbs, scarves and gloves and little hats. She had marked eyes in the trunks with stones and crumbled brick and in this way had grown a world of her own.

A lesson of the lake: Loss maddens more than anything. The loss of wealth, of love, of life, of beauty itself.

Rannie, unlike her mother and her sisters and the many other pockmarked faces of the laketowns, had not endured the final death rattles of the natural world. She had been too young and so, like the other children born to the new world, her trauma was circumvent, a residue of the trauma of others perhaps, but not so acute as the trauma of loss.

When her sisters had gone she had remained with her mother. Her mother had tried to make her leave but she had not. Instead she had gone out each day and foraged the algae from around the lakes, dried them in the sun like she had been shown and in this way provided for them both. She spoke lightly to her mother about the beauty of the bleary-eyed sun and of the smog layered before it like a cataract. In those moments of Rannie’s appreciation, in those final days, her mother would look at her strangely and would turn her face away as though her daughter’s hope were an unbearable affront.

‘I wish you would say something’ Rannie said. But her mother did not reply. What could she say that would not cut her?

Rannie’s mother had traded for the locket at a time when such luxuries had already lost their value. She had paid for it in food, a maddening decision that Rannie’s sisters had condemned vehemently, but which Rannie’s mother had explained away, telling them all with poetry typical of her tongue that:

‘In every locket there is a heart shaped lake, and in every lake a locket and in every person there is a dream and this dream is heart-shaped and is abundant and green, for what is life without beauty?’

Standing at the edge of the lake with the charred and clothed figures of the trees behind her in witness, Rannie thought of her mother’s poetry, of her sisters and their harsh pragmatism, and of the murky world of lakes and sunken buildings. She imagined the locket sinking through the water to the muddy depths and from there she pictured it rising back up through the water, through time, sinking backwards: up from the lake, through the air and into her hand, fastened then around her neck, handed then to her mother, from her mother back for food and so the long chain through time, the many guardians, from police sergeant to thief, to the fiddler’s wife, to the jewellers and the gold merchants, and on to the refinery, to the miners and back finally to the rich soil.

That stuff of fantasies.