The Weight

From the moment he walked into the cottage, he felt her there. Her presence, her voice. The first night they stayed, he dreamt of her. She sang to him and he woke with the dream lingering, feeling her still within him. And all the subsequent nights they stayed, seven in all, he dreamt of her again. A weight settled in his stomach. Somewhere between pain and joy.

He could not understand it. They were in the west of the country and she lived or had lived in the east all her life. Yet she haunted his visit so much, that he began to wonder whether she too had holidayed in the cottage and something of her remained. But what did that mean? What something? Then against his will, he thought - what if she had died here? He rushed to calculate her age. What would she be now? He was forty-seven, so even though she had always resisted telling him exactly how old she was, he knew she was at least twenty one years older than him. So that would make her sixty-eight or more now. This took him aback, the sudden realisation that now she would be an old lady and that she might very well, for whatever reason, be dead. He had never thought about her this way. To him, she was always the age when he met her.

So it was possible, of course it was, that she had died. But he reasoned, it would have been an unbelievable coincidence for him to be staying in the same cottage that she might have died in. Maybe she had passed somewhere else, on the first evening that they had arrived, and somehow - that weak unfaithful, somehow, her soul was now around him. But he found it hard to even trust that. It felt vain and self-indulgent. Perhaps he lacked psychic faith, but even if he did, he still could not dispute the utter truth of her presence.

He spent the holiday existing between two dimensions. He was at the cottage with his new partner Diane and yet he wasn´t. Diane didn't notice it, for it wasn´t that he was noticeably absent or vacant. Even though it rained almost the whole time, he was content in her company. It was enough and when they left the cottage he did feel less kidnapped by the feeling. They walked and they talked, they visited a glass factory nearby, they tucked into the ubiquitous cream tea with scones and jam. They went to the beach and hiked on the ever misty moors. It was just that his nighttime dreams were so intense, that he was never able to shake the mood of them. They clung to him like a needy child, so that he felt he was never free, but rather that he was carrying someone else inside him, pregnant with her presence. She was reminding him, showing him that she had been a great love - one that he´d not been brave enough to face up to; denied and tried to bury. Now in death, she had exhumed herself from the shallow grave he had dug and was pointing at it.

Years had passed since their time together. Time, if it had not healed, at least had blurred and impressions were fainter. But now he felt them all coming to life again. It had the effect of making him feel intensely aroused the whole week and Diane felt this in him and responded to it. She understandably thought it was the effect of a well-deserved holiday and rest. He felt guilty, but still they made love in the morning, in the afternoon and when they went to bed in the evening. If they woke in the night they made love then. And the more sex they had the more they wanted. Yet each time, he was not making love to the woman in the bed beside him, but to the woman who was inside him, knocking at the door of his soul, singing to it.

One night, she woke him and he let her presence move through him completely. Anyway, there was no choice. She came to him in the bed, kissed him, ran her fingers through his hair and over his face, as if she needed, like a blind person, to remind herself of the topography of his body and commit it once again to memory. Her hands sought his chest and then he felt her straddle him and take him inside her. He quietly came in the darkness. She laid her head on his chest, sang silently to him, her voice that he adored - in its timbre, everything that he had always wanted to be and have. He felt utterly calm, listening to the sounds around him. Beside him, Diane slept on, her breathing a faint reproach.

The bedroom window was open but there was no wind, nothing stirred and he became aware that the weight in his stomach had left. An owl hooted somewhere out in the darkness. He knew a little of them and their calls. A barn owl, surely.

It was then that he had the strongest sensation that she had come to tell him she had left this world. Tears began to stream down his cheeks, yet they were not his, but hers. If he no longer knew what love meant, he knew she was the greatest desire and longing of his life. He let his memory glide over those past moments, trying to bring back the sensations he had felt when he first saw her as he walked by the window in the small market town where she worked. Still a boy. The way she looked at him, like no other woman ever had, how she continued to look at him as he passed and how she would look at him each time he found reasons to have to walk by that window. Lying now on the bed, he tried to recapture how he had felt - the fear, the rapture, the excitement, the adoration. The way simply by watching him and with that knowing flick of her auburn shock of hair, she entered him, collapsed him and made him hers. Yet because he wasn't dreaming, something eluded him.

Diane stirred beside him, but did not wake. Still, it fractured his reverie. Now beyond the immaturity of his shame, he felt the sadness that he would never love a woman like he had her. That the feeling would never come again and since then, his soul was dancing a dance with every other woman. He was not free to love and would be forever performing love.

He left the bed, with its cosy floral pillows and duvet, that were so how a country cottage should be, slipped on his dressing gown, bent his head to avoid the low beams and stepped carefully down the open wooden stairs to the lounge, avoiding the step that creaked. He sat in a burgundy-upholstered armchair and looked into the night through a small window set into the thick stone of the cottage wall. Its white wooden framework was worn and cracked. Now that it had finally stopped raining, the sky was clear and very dark. A half moon was on its back, the man in it, as if he was resting in a hammock, looking to all the world like he owned the heavens. He heard the owl comment again, yes a Barn absolutely and wished he understood what it might be telling him. Still, it managed to beckon him to come outside and he released the bolts on the two halves of the stable front door and stepped barefoot onto the porch. The wetness of the ground teased his feet, sending a shiver up his back. The cottage was isolated with no sign of life around. Just him. Stars glinted, winked, reminding of those dances of love. The man in the hammock mocked him, but gently; he just rocked back and forth and told him he was no different to all the rest. And that he, the man in the moon had seen them all.

He lost himself looking at the stars, comforted by their vastness, until he heard the creak of the stairs inside the house. Diane walked into the lounge, then saw him outside and came to join him, tentatively taking his hand, unsure of something.

“Couldn't sleep?” They said it almost together and both smiled and laughed lightly, but shyly too, as though the strangeness of the hour made them new to each other once again. To ease it, as he was always so adept at doing, he said a line.

“´Tis the witching hour.”

“You were dreaming,” she said. “You kept saying a woman's name, but I couldn't make it out.” She sounded a little uncertain, but then denied herself. “Something you want to tell me?” She tried to make it sound teasing.

He tensed. The weight in his stomach was returning. He did want to tell her. He wanted to tell it all. But he knew the truth would not bring any comfort to her, even if it did it to him. He knew she loved him more than he could love her and he only saw the selfish purging of his own pain if he told her.

“You look sad,” she said quietly, she too now seeking safety in half-truths. “Your parents?”

He paused and then danced the dance - “Can't help thinking of them here. How they loved this cove so much.”

There it was - out, done, denied. Another shallow grave dug.

“I had a strange dream too,” she continued.

“Oh?”

He knew yet feared what she would say before she even began.

“There was a woman in bed with us, except it was you, you know how dreams are, weird like that. It was like you were two people. You kept moving, kind of morphing back and forth between this woman and you. We were in some kind of harbour in a small boat, except that the harbour was dry, there was no water and then you rowed out into the open sea, and then you threw the oars away - well, wait no, actually I think the woman did and we were drifting out to open sea. I was frightened. Suddenly you, well the woman or you, I could not quite tell, dived overboard and I was left with the woman in the boat. You know I don't like water because of what happened to me when I was young, so I woke, like I made myself wake up.”

She paused. “And you weren't in the bed.”

“Yes, I dived overboard and came down here,” he quipped, denying her a second time.

He looked up again at the night sky. It seemed the moon man was no longer lolling in his hammock, but more upright now, paying attention to this fragment of life below.

“What did she look like then?” he asked, denying her a third time, the hoot of the Barn owl masking the slight tremble in his voice. It swept by them, a mouse or a mole wriggling on the end of its claws, singing its fear into the night.