Gathering the Water Read Online Free PDF Page B

were those among the onlookers who resented me being there; but those too, I was gratified to find, who were beginning to show some interest in my work, and who disguised poorly their enthusiasm for their own departures. The people here seemed to me like the poor soil of the place, laid down begrudgingly generation after generation, but sustaining little, of little value, and easily lost between the rock below and the wind above.
    Children paddled in the few inches of water which rose into the enclosures of Low Syke. They threw stones for the simple pleasure of causing a splash. Some of the older ones stood ready with sticks for the rats they were certain would soon emerge from the doomed building, but which, like their shipboard cousins, had gone long in advance of the water. A solitary rabbit ran awkwardly along the flooded bank of the far shore, too distant for their stones.
    A shout went up to indicate when the lap of water into the empty building came level with the water outside. There cannot have been more than two inches over the whole of the barn’s floor.
    I went to the water’s edge, and in an effort to stamp my authority upon the occasion I took out my notebook and wrote in it. Simple enough details, but ones which settled a silence around me. Another man might have listed all the other buildings to be lost and then drawn a line through the names as they went. Was a place lost when it was nolonger accessible because of the build-up of water around it, when it was first breached by that water, or when the uppermost coping of its roof was finally covered? Those standing close to me looked over my shoulder at what I wrote. I noted that it was no longer raining, but that the rain from two days previously still flowed in the tan-coloured channels. I noted that in addition to the abandoned barn, the once-cultivated land of its small enclosures was also flooded.
    I surreptitiously counted the number of people present and made a note of that too. It will be interesting to see how these spectators increase or decline as the process continues and they are made ever more forcibly to understand the irrevocable nature of what has been set in motion here.
    I closed my notebook, fastened its thin binding and returned it to my pocket. Another man might have thought a short speech appropriate, might even have said that we were witness to History.
    I returned to my lodgings following the line of the river instead of the rising track, leaving myself a steep final climb to my door. I met a man who had been present at the gathering and I learned from him that there had been other strangers there besides myself. I asked him who these men were, but he said he did not know, guessing them to have come from a neighbouring valley or one of the downriver villages. Had they expected some kind of celebration, I asked him. Again, he did not know. The world was full of men content to witness the loss and suffering of others, he said. The slope exhausted me and I stumbled frequently in the wet grass.

13
 
    My interview and appointment, my leaving the south, my coming north: all this was to be my new start. Upon losing Helen I entered the dark, uncharted territory of grief and longing; I had no understanding then, no vague awareness, even, of the true dimensions of loss and how it might be measured, let alone how it might be contained and endured.
    Starting anew, I began to discern the light and the landmarks of the possible future. There was a time in between, of course – a period of confusion in which life went on and I acted out my part within it – but it was never starting anew, never a rebirth, merely a succession of lesser endings, during which I severed my ties one after another – my family, my work, my connection to Helen’s family, to hersister, to my colleagues, and finally, upon reaching the shapeless centre of that darkness, my hopes and expectations of the future.
    How shocked and surprised they would all