The Shifting Pools Read online

  ‘A beautiful, moving story that skilfully stitches together the fragments of a brutalised and shattered soul so that it just might fly again.’

  EMMA JANE KIRBY

  ‘Effortlessly moves between the internal and external reality of a deeply traumatised individual. Using a unique style Zoë conveys how we bury unspeakable fears. It’s as if she finds a new language to express the inexpressible. This heartrending story will transport you to an imaginative new landscape that expresses the true nature of our everyday reality.’

  LONESOME READER

  Fleeing war and the death of her family, Eve Lanner has carefully constructed a new life for herself in London. Yet she is increasingly troubled by vivid, disturbing dreams. For years she has shut away the darkness of her past, but now those walls are crumbling. She must choose whether to reinforce them, or face the elements again.

  As she is drawn further into her dream world, she finds herself caught up in a fresh battle for survival, caught between realities. Thrust back into war, she must stand or fall. Will she find the lost pieces of herself, or abandon them forever?

  Lyrical and insightful, charged throughout with the beautiful urgency of life, The Shifting Pools offers a unique way at looking at the wounds of war, the act of remembering, the inexorable seeping of the past into our present, and finding a way home.

  And how all we have lost remains a part of us.

  Zoë Duncan spent her childhood in Africa and the Middle East. She has a PhD in Middle Eastern geopolitics and a background in teaching, policy advice, art and writing. She divides her time between Cornwall and Buckinghamshire with her children and cats. The Shifting Pools is her first novel.

  Read more about Zoë and her work at www.zoeduncan.co.uk.

  The

  Shifting Pools

  by

  Zoë Duncan

  Published in 2017

  by Lightning Books Ltd

  Imprint of EyeStorm Media

  312 Uxbridge Road

  Rickmansworth

  Hertfordshire

  WD3 8YL

  www.lightning-books.com

  ISBN: 9781785630361

  Copyright © Zoë Duncan, 2017

  Cover by Shona Andrews

  Typesetting and design by Clio Mitchell

  The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

  For you Han.

  Always

  x

  Echo

  Come to me in the silence of the night;

  Come in the speaking silence of a dream;

  Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright

  As sunlight on a stream;

  Come back in tears,

  O memory, hope, love of finished years.

  Oh dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,

  Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,

  Where souls brimful of love abide and meet;

  Where thirsting longing eyes

  Watch the slow door

  That opening, letting in, lets out no more.

  Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live

  My very life again tho’ cold in death:

  Come back to me in dreams, that I may give

  Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:

  Speak low, lean low,

  As long ago, my love, how long ago.

  Christina Rossetti

  Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night.

  I miss you like hell.

  Edna St. Vincent Millay

  Contents

  Pomegranates

  Battle

  Shadows

  Window

  Abundance

  A Golden Age

  The dark mist

  Under a canopy of stars

  Still somewhere else

  Creeping chill

  Cracks

  Crossing the field

  And then the world changed...

  Dislocation

  Life raft

  The flooded maze

  The separation of lives

  Hiding

  Hanging

  Bubble

  Wreckage

  Haunted

  The ice bridge

  Sea glass

  Incantation

  Our abraded lives

  Metal monsters

  Exhaustion

  Conduit

  Numb

  Collapsing house

  Into the wild garden

  Torn fabric

  Passages in the mind

  Ashes

  The shearing of worlds

  Shame

  Lost

  Room

  Punishment

  Oracle

  Shadow Beast

  Unlocking

  The field of covered bodies

  Drowning

  A shift of worlds

  Firelight

  Little Bear

  Exposure

  Escaping

  The things that fall in war

  Newport

  Feeling with a thousand fingers

  Wings

  Trying to fly

  Shifting worlds

  The Shifting Pool

  Doubt

  Connection

  Finding a place

  The Sea Holds Dreams

  Meeting the wind and taking flight

  Breathing in the sea

  This sensory world

  The Craven

  Hunted

  The bottom of the ditch

  Fog

  The flooded maze

  The Riven and the blade

  The Beast comes

  Elemental

  Talking to the Shadow Beast

  Reaching out

  The many paths we have

  Summoned

  Adrift in the darkness

  Flower

  New dawn

  Reclaiming the land

  Completion

  Acknowledgements

  Citations

  Home: 25 years ago

  Pomegranates

  Pomegranate season was her favourite time. She liked the way the fat balls would hang from the trees, dangling their temptation over the walls of gardens, enticing you to quickly swipe one as you strolled back from school. All her friends did it too, and although a few owners would come out and make a comment, most of them did so good-naturedly, disappearing back into their gardens with a small smile and a wry shake of the head. School kids.

  She liked the perfume that they left on the breeze, the stickiness of the juices as you cut through to the little scarlet gems – and the intricacy of mining out those jewels.

  She walked home without her parents now she had turned 11 – that still gave her a little thrill – a feeling of independence just around the
corner; the awakening of something she couldn’t yet grasp.

  As they turned the final corner before her home, she smiled when she caught sight of her little sister Laila stomping around the garden on her chubby legs. Laila squealed as she saw Eve, her leg-speed increasing to a pace that her coordination couldn’t yet keep up with, sending her stumbling onto the grass. Eve swooped in, school bag slung across her shoulder, and, still laughing, swung Laila around, eliciting the bubbling brook of giggles to which toddlers alone hold the secret.

  “Look, Laila – for you, sweetie.” Eve offered up the ripe pomegranate that she had stashed away for her baby sister.

  “Pom pom,” gurgled Laila, grabbing the fruit, and setting off determinedly to the kitchen where, she already knew, help would be on hand in the form of a sharp knife and a willing family member.

  Eve glanced around the garden before following Laila inside. Everything was ripening – the figs hung heavy on the trees now, and little pockets of sweetly scented jasmine air were everywhere. She liked helping her parents in the garden. Not so much the cutting back and pruning – she actually rather preferred the wild abandon that the honeysuckle, hibiscus and bougainvillea strove for. But she loved seeing things that had been planted many weeks or months before shyly peering out into the world for the first time.

  She heard the strains of her mother’s piano playing as she turned back towards the house, and she smiled again as she wondered whether Hugo was home yet: he’d promised her a trip down to the beach with him and his friends once he got back from school. Eve ran up the steps to the verandah, and into the house to find her snorkel and mask.

  The house was always full of music, whether drifting out from the cassette player, or from her mother’s hands at the piano. Right now, her mother was playing the Enigma Variations again, the notes echoing around the house. She smiled warmly as Eve came in, allowing her hands to continue drawing the beautiful melody from the keys.

  “Oh I love this one, Mummy! Tell me again about why this one is special!” Eve said.

  Her mother smiled, knowing that Eve already knew, but that there was pleasure in this repetition, these little rituals. She managed to keep the music flowing as Eve ducked under her arms and clambered up onto her lap. Eve was getting too gangly really for that now, but her mother always just opened her arms a little wider, and made it possible.

  “What is so special, Evie, is that the parts at the end are saying, on paper, the exact same thing that was said at the start. But the magic is that they sound completely different; when they are played out loud, they say a completely different thing!”

  “That’s not possible, Mummy!”

  “That’s the magic, Evie – they are saying something different to you, because you can now hear them differently. The music has taken you on a journey, and without that journey, the start and the end would sound the same to you. But with that journey, you can hear the difference. Magic! Life always finds a way.”

  Dream

  Battle

  The fug of death filled my nostrils, permeating me from the inside. The air was too thick to breathe in. It was a moment strung out like the unending stammer of the machine gun. A soldier ran at me, wild eyes screaming, his ragged breath close enough to share my air. The pop of small arms fire, and he lurched sideways – a red water-bomb exploding on the side of his head. My feet slipped on the heaving mass of failing life carpeting the ground. I was standing in the middle of the battle.

  And then I was floating. A witness. A survivor. Invulnerable yet impotent. No bullets could pump into me up here, but I had breathed in the insidious death. My hidden wound would do its silent work.

  The sergeant in charge was drunk on blood: ordering suicidal attacks and brutal butcheries. A little girl ran off into the woods. The sight began to unpick the seams of my own sanity. My brain distended painfully to accommodate a new comprehension of normal, like a balloon bulging too far, too fast. He couldn’t be judged. And then it went quiet.

  There was now only one soldier left. Him. Only him. Me. Only me. A witness. And a perpetrator. My wings unable to beat strongly enough to keep me above all of this, away, I floated slowly down to corporeal reality. The world around me was cloaked in silence. Unbearable silence. Incensed fumes, perfumed with death, wafted upwards, an incantation to some god, somewhere. A tiny gnat danced in a smoky beam of light.

  I was taken to a side door – brushed stainless steel. Clinical, cold. I took in the raised platform that the entire carnage had been enacted upon. A stage, a modern-day gladiatorial arena to entertain and amuse. Stage hands were humming to themselves as they knelt underneath the creaking structure, tinkering with this and that; one taking time to sweep the floor.

  The soldier was led down the wooden steps. Broken, confused, blood on his hands. The sergeant shook his hand, and I felt the callouses. “I hope we’ll be seeing you next time, boy; you did good out there!” He hit my shoulder hard, barked a laugh, and left me there. Alone. I was free, but floundered under the weight of what I had done. Had it been me? The wrench from one reality to another was agony. Dislocation from oneself. And no quick push to shunt the joint back into place.

  I stumbled out of the theatre of war, past the old façade of crumbling gargoyles and plasterwork – posters already advertising next week’s show. A crowd of screaming women were ordered away by uniformed men: the women’s distress clashing painfully with the expressionless eyes of the guards. Their tidal wave of grief crashed over the building, and left behind the flotsam of despair and loss. Thousands of bits of crumpled paper stranded on the coast between hope and reality. The papers jerked in the breeze, so fragile, so vulnerable. I knelt slowly to pick some up. The heaviness of their meaning made them difficult to lift. Letters, photographs: moments and faces lost forever. That abrupt lurch one takes from existence to non-existence in the space of a breath.

  London: the present

  Shadows

  I’m going to see a psychotherapist. I still find that fact slightly amazing. I’ve never felt the need before, but now I do. I just can’t keep everything together at work, and these nightmares; they are clinging on to me all day, restraining me in another place, another time. I’m feeling stuck – as if my feet are caught in thick treacle, just yards from where I actually need to be. I can’t move them.

  She has come highly recommended, this therapist – Claire – with all sorts of accolades to her name. I just need her to get me moving again. I have so much on at work, and I know that people are beginning to see me slip, to be nagged by creeping doubts when I’m asked to take on important pieces of work. I hate that – I want them to see me as they always did – as competent, capable. If that is what they see, then that is what it is easier for me to be.

  But these nightmares are relentless now: I had another last night. I sat up in bed abruptly, like a free diver kicking desperately to regain the surface. The shroud of the nightmare still clung to me as I clutched at my throat and gasped to refill my lungs. The legacy of the dream dripped off me in glistening droplets that lurked in the shadows of the room. I turned and clicked on the night-light beside my bed. Most of the shadows then retreated, but the soft glow of the lamp was not enough to obliterate them all. Some simply tucked themselves behind the chest of drawers, the stool and the pile of clothes on the floor. They always do. I see them. They never leave me alone. The dark places in the shell of who I am.

  Turning to the small notepad and pencil beside my bed, I wondered how to make sense of any of this on paper. Still, I started to write. Hesitantly at first, trying hard to grasp at the fleeing remnants of my nightmare. After a few moments I stilled my hand, letting the dream come back to me, claim me, inhabit me. When I opened my eyes again, my hand sped across the page, the limits of human mark-making frustrating me, as the images started to pour out.

  Should I tell Claire about this dream? She had advised me over the phone to write them
down, but last night’s was so graphic that I feel uncomfortable about sharing it. I’m not sure I want her to see so much.

  I climb out of the chill of my bed, kicking off the sweat-stained duvet that never keeps me warm enough, and wander to the shower that never seems to wash me clean.

  Dream

  Window

  I had the strangest sense that as I looked out of the train window into the night, another world, another reality was somehow just there, just beyond the glass, millimetres from my fingertips on the pane, hurtling along just as I was, keeping pace in an entirely different realm. Was it looking in on me here, pressed to the glass as I was? Was this invisible barrier between me and the night also the boundary of something beyond?

  The window was the strangest thing. Something you usually can’t even see, which light passes through. And yet, when the light levels are so much darker on one side, you can not only not see through, but also everything around you is reflected back to you – an illusion of the fullness of this reality, this room, this life.

  Home: 25 years ago

  Abundance

  As Eve dived down into the water, she felt at home. With the water cocooning her, holding her, she looked for the fish. They soon found her, collecting around her in a small shoal, clicking their curiosity through the muffling liquid. She grinned over at Hugo, a stream of air bubbles escaping from her snorkel and wiggling upwards. Hugo smiled back, and then took out the little bag of breadcrumbs they had brought with them for the fish. Within seconds, the space around them was alive with flashing colours, eager streaks of vibrancy. Gentle clown fish – curious, but never wishing to stray too far from their protective anemones – the grumpy-looking groupers, striped zebra fish, the darting lyretail anthias in their orange swarm, and the stately emperor angelfish. The parrot fish always ignored them unless they got too close, preferring to carry on breaking off tiny bits of coral with their beaks – a noise that could be heard reverberating through the water.

  She loved this – loved watching this dance of nature, coloured in such spectacular palettes. She had always liked the contrast between the stark sandiness of the landscape outside and the overwhelming burst of colour that came as you put your head under the water. A kaleidoscopic garden. The way the fish just hung there suspended in front of you, free of gravity in this other world. And she loved these times with her big brother.