River Bifurcation

By Molly Harley

 

 

It was dusk when Clarrie returned home to Mayl. It had been eleven years since she had lived in Mayl and, inevitably, so much had changed.

Mayl was a small town in the south of France. Quiet and still. Everybody knew everybody but nobody recognised Clarrie on her return. Her fast paced walk was as quick and jittery as the hand of the clock that indicates the seconds moving on. The people of Mayl walked with no urgency like the hand of clock that signals the hour, they were slow and methodical. Unbekown to Clarrie, the locals thought she was a tourist as she did things a local would never do. For example when entering the Green Shop, she pushed the handle of door instead of pulling it. Any native of Mayl would have known to pull, not to push.

Clarrie had returned to Mayl thinking her her old nostalgic senses would greet her. However, her senses had not intended on greeting her pleasantly. Sight did not show her the old pathways she and Raya would race down as children. Sound did not greet her with her birth name or the paddling of the small boat in the stream. Backwards forwards. Backwards forwards. Touch had ignored her plea to feel her mother’s soft, fragile hands. She had sent a short prayer to Taste in November to allow her caress her lover’s coarse lips if she returned home. Taste answered this prayer in a dream and the answer was satisfying. But somehow as time goes on and we become older our dreams only deceive us more as to what we want and what we have. Smell was the kindest of the five. Smell would permit a fleeting moment in which memories of the past met her. But Smell had only allowed Clarrie a few seconds to remember a whole childhood. So perhaps Smell was the cruelest of them all. Clarrie’s mind was racing. Backwards forwards. Backwards forwards. But the forest remained still.

The sun cowered away and curled through the trees of the forest as Clarrie walked through the small town. The forest had revolted against her return. Her skin, once brown and glowing now looked like it had been painted pink and left under intense heat for five years to crumble and crack. Her face lacked vitality, compared to the young girls in the shopping street in Mayl who she walked past.   

She had forgotten how people shouted at each other from their windows. How children and cattle would roam free on the street with no pavement to contain them. How washing lines cascaded like cotton waterfalls from large windows onto the street. How she had loved and wished away this provincial french town.

Clarrie was born and raised in Mayl. Her childhood was filled with long hot days playing on hay bails in the famers field and summer evenings by the river in the forest. When she was 17, Clarrie began working for her friend’s father in the city about an hour and a half away from Mayl. She would work long hours. Day and night, delivering post and coffee. She was disposable but she was liked and so she worked there for another 6 years. When Clarrie was 23, her friend’s father was transferred to the New York office. He asked Clarrie to come with him to be his personal assistant. She said yes.

Clarrie had hoped for a success story, for love, for a cinematic life in New York. Instead she found she was not destined for those things; none of those things came to her. She thought about what her life might have been if she had stayed in Mayl but she immediately thought of Raya and her heart began to ache.

Raya had been Clarrie’s best friend in Mayl. They became friends in the Green Shop which was owned by Raya’s grandfather. The shop’s proper name was ‘huit a huit’ implying the shop was meant to be open from 8am to 8pm. But it never was. So Mayl renamed it ‘the Green Shop’ because that, it was. The shop sold anything from small foam sweets, to wine to sharpeners to small plastic rings. Clarrie would visit every Friday after school with her mother and was allowed to spend 50 cent. Raya had noticed Clarrie’s frequent visits and overtime anticipated her arrival. Clarrie was one of the only young girls from school who went to the Green Shop with their mother, so she stuck out to Raya. Raya and Clarrie would idly chat about sweets and the thin-papered magazines over the counter, unknowingly making friends as children so often do. Overtime the pair became closer. They would put their money together to buy more sweets and more thin-papered magazines from the Green Shop and after would run down to the forest together and share their loot. One for me, One for you.

They were attached to one another through water and childhood. They were forged in a river so blue and so deep that it would seem darkness was inevitable. See, a friendship between two children is something of a miracle. With no agenda, only freedom; innocence reigns. Their friendship was like a river; always moving. Sometimes with tenacity and vigour knocking pebbles over pebbles creating grooves on the river bed. Sometimes they would flow, allowing the sun to rest upon their movements as they swirled through one another. Just like a river.

‘River bifurcation’ is the scientific name given to the process of a river splitting. A sad but slow event that happens over thousands of years. A single powerful force of water…splits, making two separate and distinct streams. And perhaps the saddest thing of all is that the river does not split to become two adjacent streams. No. The river splits and at first the two streams run close (enough) in parallel but as the streams take their course, rocks and wind and trees and banks of grass form to allow the streams to become distant and detached. Wading through the world, alone.

Almost every one of her childhood memory came back to Clarrie as she walked around Mayl. The memories hovered like low sullen rain clouds in the sky, drops of the past falling all around her. Her mind couldn’t avoid the past even though her body was immersed in the present. When Clarrie walked past her old school she thought about the day she left. She would never know how Raya had felt that day, the rift she felt deep within her heart.

Raya was 17 when Clarrie left Mayl. For a while she felt incomplete. Clarrie had been Raya’s closest confidante since childhood through to adolescence. There for everything and nothing. Raya looked in the face of adulthood alone.

With Clarrie making something of herself in New York, Raya was eager to do the same. To make something of herself. At the age of 24 Raya got a job in the city as a concierge for a 3 star hotel called La Palme. She would travel from Mayl to the city every morning and night to avoid the high cost of rent. She greeted guests of La Palme with illustrious tours of the city and its neighbouring towns. She enjoyed her life and her life without Clarrie seemed fruitful. Like a magnolia in spring, hopeful. She knew Clarrie was fine and Clarrie knew Raya was fine. They were both fine and that was okay.

Raya met her husband when she was 26 years old in La Palme. His name was Louis. He was a guest at the hotel and asked Raya where the good bars were in the city. She told him then he asked her to go with him. She said yes. They fell in love quickly. He moved to Mayl quickly. They wanted to have a family quickly. So by the age of 27 she had made something of herself, she was in love and she was happy.

When Clarrie was alone she would think about how Raya died. What was the weather like? What was the funeral like? Did the women of Mayl lay out flowers on the road for her? Did the men carry her coffin down the flowered aisle? She would never know. So as Clarrie walked through Mayl, a 34 year old woman, she could not help but think of the days and nights herself and Raya would spend by the river or in the forest or in the Green Shop opposite Auntie’s house. How they would talk and laugh about everything and nothing. How they would draw each other using the mud of the forest floor as a canvas and twigs for their young lips and eyes.

Mayl had stayed exactly the same but Clarrie was lost. She knew Mayl was the place she could find solace, but she had to reconnect to the flora, the fauna, the people and her past. Clarrie stopped by the yellow wooden bench and sat for a while. She eventually landed on the idea of visiting the Green Shop. A place where, as a child, she had been so immersed in Mayl, she would forget that any where else existed. A place filled with her mother and Raya and the innocence of paper-thin magazines and sweets.

Clarrie meandered down the cobbled streets to reach the Green Shop. As she approached, she noticed how much had changed. The vibrant sticky green had faded into a vague pistachio. The sign, ‘huit a huit’, had been abused by the summer storms and the old man who sat on his stool eating out of date breadsticks with mustard was no longer there. Another fatal loss for Mayl, Clarrie thought.

Just as she was about to enter the Green Shop Clarrie turned to face the street to take a look at the road she had walked down a thousand times. And strangely enough, as she turned, she saw a woman who she had also seen a thousand times. The woman was older than Clarrie remembered. She was shorter, quieter and prune-ish wrapped in a silk scarf hobbling slowly along the road. It was her Auntie. Her warm, airy Auntie.

Clarrie thought that all of her family had moved away from Mayl to the city when Raya had died. But of course Auntie would never leave. Auntie’s real name was Adette. She was Clarrie’s mother’s older half sister but everyone in Mayl knew her as Auntie. Clarrie and Raya would go to Auntie’s house frequently for tea and biscuits. Auntie would lecture them on the attitude and knowledge a young girl needed to navagate her way through life but they never really listened.

Auntie believed she was connected to this earth by the divinity of nature and of the stars. She merited relationships and encounters on their connection to the elements. She was the one who told Raya and Clarrie their friendship was that of Water. She read her almanac before making any decision and somehow all of her decisions were always perfect. She could know things without them being apparent to the traditional senses. By knowing the birth time and place of two people she could assess any relationship. People in Mayl relied on her. Loved her. Worshipped her.

Clarrie ran to her Aunt with no hesitation and wrapped her arms around her slim shoulders. Clarrie hadn’t seen any of her family since her parents came to visit her in New York four years ago. She hadn’t seen her Auntie for eleven years. Clarrie held her Auntie but just like a flower that shrinks back into itself every night, Auntie recoiled from her. She pushed Clarrie off to see who it was. Her face was confused, then bewildered, then sad. She had recognised Clarrie by her eyes. She was speechless. She was upset by Clarrie’s presence. She said nothing. ‘Auntie! It’s me Clarrie. You look well’ Clarrie spoke with urgency.

But Auntie said nothing. Stood stagnant in body and brain. They stood inspecting each other, puzzled, for what felt like years. Then finally Auntie spoke. ‘It’s been eleven years, no? How are you? Sorry, Clarrie, but I’m to catch a train to the city in thirty minutes.’

‘Auntie, I’m well, better for seeing you! How are you? How are mother and father and Corentin?’

‘All fine. Missing you no doubt. Just as I do.’. She hesitated. She was struggling for the right words to say, for an angle to take in the conversation. She wavered and words fell out of her a bird from its nest, ‘Why are you back, my dear?’

Clarrie’s face and heart sank to the ground. Auntie was hurt by Clarrie’s arrival and did not know how to handle such intense feelings of love and anguish. Clarrie knew it was because she had left Mayl for New York and in the eleven years of absence she had only written 5 letters to her Aunt, most of them sent in her first few months away. Clarrie was overcome with regret and shame.

‘Auntie, please don’t hate me, I’m sorry! But I’ve come back to stay…to stay in Mayl!’

’Clarrie.’ Auntie said, exasperated ‘Your essence is still that of a child. How hopeful and foolish. But your soul is tainted, my dear. So dark and pitiful’ She paused again looking deep into Clarrie’s eyes, ‘Mayl does not want you, you can feel it in the air’ Clarrie took a step back. An emotional wound Auntie had inflicted on her. Auntie saw Clarrie’s immediate withdrawal and continued, ‘I still love you my dear and I miss you every day. But I miss Raya every minute of every day.’ She paused to follow the wind snake in and out of the trees, ‘Every day I think of the two of you. How you, Clarrie, were always too big for this town, too big for marriage and children. I understood your decision to leave. I support it and understand it. But to not return for Raya’s funeral, Clarrie. Do you not feel shame coarse through your blood like sap in a tree? How could you not even so much as write to her family. How could you not…’. She stopped herself.

Auntie never got carried away especially not in anger. Clarrie apologised quietly and politely like a child in trouble. Her Aunt told Clarrie that she could stay in her house whilst she was away for a few days and then when she was back they would talk more. ‘My dear you might have become more than Mayl but you must never forget that you are Mayl and Mayl is you.’ She said.

Auntie gave Clarrie two kisses. Kiss. Kiss. Then walked away. Clarrie felt a very large hole just above her belly button as she watched her beloved Auntie leave.

Now Clarrie had a few days in Mayl on her own but she felt like she was about to fall hair first into an abyss of memories and regret. Clarrie knew where she had to begin her reconnection with Mayl. She knew it began with the water that went missing from her heart when she left Mayl. Clarrie’s limp hands rose from her side to her chest and latched onto her shirt. Under layers of blood, muscle, fat and skin was her heart, so full and empty of Raya as she took the forest path to the river.

Clarrie would never know how Raya died. She would her know that Raya’s husband had had an affair with his boss in the city. This made Raya believe she was never enough. Clarrie would never know that Raya had suffered through a miscarriage, alone after the news of her husbands affair. How Raya felt so empty and had the pernicious feeling that, everyone leaves and that no one ever stays. Clarrie would never know about Raya’s subsequent depression. She would never know that Raya had gone down to the river that night to seek solace, to find clarity, an answer of sorts. But an answer never came. Raya immersed herself in the water and let it take her. Her soul, her body and her water-full heart. Clarrie would never know because Clarrie was not there.

It was a Tuesday, 2 years ago, when Raya died. Mayl was damp with darkness that day. The sky was mournfully grey as Raya and her unborn child’s souls joined the myriad of looming clouds. A man named Ipsang was the one who found her. She was lying in the water by the river bank, barely alive. Ipsang pulled her from the water and lay her on his lap on the first floor. Her breath was slow and deep, her face was resting upon her right hand. She was still. Her face was sullen, not the face of woman who had been alive and beautiful for 32 years. There was nothing Ipsang could do and there was nothing Raya wanted him to do. So as her body lay in his arms, both of them helpless and regretful, he sang her a lullaby.

Dodo, l’enfant do,

L’enfant dormira bien vite

Dodo, l’enfant do

L’enfant dormira bientôt.

And as Ipsang sung, Raya’s eyes reached for the river where mosquitoes danced upon the shroud of mist above the water. The sound of the pacing river filled her with a deep longing. The longing coursed through her body until it reached her eyes. Feeling this, she relinquished a single tear that fell from her left eye. She imagined the tear taking on a life of its own. Trickling down her cheek and on to the ground. She imagined the tear meandering through the grass and the weeds to meet the river bank where it would fall and join the river so that a part of Raya may be always at one with the river. She imagined her salt water joining the fresh water and they would dance and dance and dance in unison forever. She imagined her water-full heart would be free. Finally.

But imagination is strong, especially the imagination of a dying woman. In actuality the tear did not take on a life of its own. It did not meander and wonder and it never joined the merry dance of the river. In truth, the tear released itself from her left eye and did not even make the effort to roll down her cheek. Instead it sat in a pool of its own situated between her tear duct and the bridge of her nose. Wet and uncomfortable. It almost immediately sunk back into her skin, where it would stay a part of her human body forever.

Her water-full body would be stuck. Forever.

It rained heavily that night in Mayl. The clouds sobbed, the river pulsed and the leaves were still. The only sound were the mosquitoes and crickets whimpering. The willows dropped their mournful vines and the wind carried Raya’s last breath down stream. Nothing would be the same again.