Let’s Go Round Again

1. 200

The canal’s tinge is grey suds and the level is too high, but these things are not our concern. Come out from the overhanging canopy still dripping the remnants of a shower into the lapping water, and creamy chippings glare, the sky the bright but dark blue of high summer. A storm has come and gone, not even a black smudge at the edge of memory. Our location is undisclosed, while the lush deciduous woodland gives way to something harder, more concrete; pavements, roads, walls, houses perhaps, workshops maybe. A child’s moon peers down, yet the sun is everywhere, and everything is painted as if to blind or at least to stun. The man on the train spoke French, or Spanish; either way, a language dripping warmth and confidences. As we perched on high stools at the counter of the dining car, he leant in and whispered to his colleagues to pass their cups, which he filled from a tall silver coffee pot, the liquid turning to blood red wine on contact with the fine bone china. He smiled at us, teeth as gleaming as his uniform. Hands above his head gently fluttered as the battery fizzled out around one.

2. 150

When we awoke some hours later and descended the steps to the stones beside the railway at the top of a steep bank leading down to a dense copse of trees and a forest floor that released heat from the moss around our ankles and a recollection of psalms some Sunday long forgotten, we realised that we were at a loss to explain how or why we were here. My watch appeared to have stopped at two, whenever that was. Our sneezes disturbed the dormant undergrowth and first a rabbit appeared, then a gamebird the likes of which we had never seen: a ptarmigan, a capercaillie; who knows. The rabbit rubbed its eyes in the white light and the bird yawned and stretched, then both rustled away from us, towards roofs reflecting the silvered surface of an overfilled channel of water, sides slopping as if a vessel had recently passed.

3. 100

Standing, sentry, a heron, one weary bead surveying our approach, the other reflecting the starlight up high, as those very same heavens opened and the leaves of the ancient oaks and rowans and birch and beech reached tipping point and drizzled their moisture onto us and the truffling wild beasts. A cat appearing then disappearing pointed to the source of a desire line traipsing from the trees to the makings of a town, or rather a village, with rattlings from the other side indicating the disturbance of sleepers. A church chimed three, petering out before we reached the path’s culmination.

4. 50

The saltpetre flare of the whitewashed brickwork made it impossible to look at, impassable at this time of day, or night. A clock struck four, carriages trundled along, a boat puttered, we sought shelter beneath trees from a sudden downpour. Without the correct codes, we would need to come back.

5. 0

‘Let’s Go Round Again’ features in Sarah-Clare Conlon's debut prose pamphlet, Marine Drive, published by Broken Sleep Books in September 2022; order here. It originally appeared in the zine Mid Life Crisis: The Alice One, edited by Sally Barrett.