Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett

Author:Claire-Louise Bennett [Bennett, Claire-Louise]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Short Stories, Fiction
ISBN: 9781906539467
Publisher: Stinging Fly
Published: 2015-05-09T23:00:00+00:00

A week or so before Christmas I was standing at the kitchen worktop in my friend who lives nearby’s house, maybe we were sharing some kind of toasted snack, I don’t remember—I was wearing a hat, I remember that, and perhaps I’d intended to go somewhere that day but due to some humdrum hindrance didn’t really go anywhere. He was getting some things together but was attentive and forthcoming nonetheless. Because he works from home and his work involves materials and equipment and his home is quite small there is always a lot of stuff on the worktops and table and even across the sofa and often while we talk I’ll fiddle about with some item or other and may even pretend to steal it in a very bungled and obvious fashion. Oh I remember now. A few weeks before, he’d found a make-up bag in the road and he wondered if I wanted anything from it. That’s not the reason I called on him though, as a matter of fact I’d seen him several times since he’d found the make-up bag and I’d almost clean forgotten about it but then, as I was coming out of his bathroom, I thought of it and asked him if he still had it. When I opened the make-up bag there was that deep-seated scent of sweet decay, and the cosmetics inside were very cakey and dark. What’s that, he said. Concealer, I said. And this, he said. I think that’s a concealer too, I said. Do you think it belonged to someone older, he said. No I don’t, I said, the opposite. How come, he said. Check out this lipgloss, I said. There was nothing in the make-up bag I wanted—bar a pair of tweezers. That’s all you want, he said. Yeah, I said. Then we put everything back into it and he put the whole lot in the bin and then I noticed the pair of pliers on the side. Where did you get those, I said. You can have them if you want, he said. Can I, I said. You probably need it for your cooker, he said. Yeah I do, I said, big time. And I was about to reach for them when he said they needed sterilising first. Put them in boiling water for a few minutes, he said. What for, I said. They’ve been down the toilet, he said. And he wrapped them up in a clear plastic bag and I put them in my pocket, along with the expensive looking tweezers. Give me a shout when you get back, I said. Might do, he said. Have a good one, I said.

By the way it turns out I depicted a number of things quite inaccurately when I was discussing that book about the woman who is the last person on earth—for example, the dog, Lynx, belonged to Hugo and Luise, the couple whose hunting lodge the woman was staying in when the catastrophe came about. The dog

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