Pretty Like Lucy

We rode to the forest, spokes clacking on empty roads. Outside, three bikes – red, yellow, yellow – lay across the tarmac. Lucy said: I’m scared, and clamped hold of my hand. We passed kids, backpacked and high-socked; one was crying.

The Eye hovered, elephant-sized, a leash of red vein binding it to the earth. Its pupil, vast and sad, darted about the forest. Birds clattered overhead; the sun shone. It looked at me when I stepped into the pine-carpeted clearing, took me in, then looked away.

‘Holy fuck,’ I said.

*

David and I took a blood oath that we wouldn’t tell anybody, specially not adults, about the eye. The girls took it too and whined for the night about the sting. But then Sandra, that stupid girl, told her parents.

The next day, in the summer rain, police in mackintoshes and hats wrapped in cellophane strung up yellow tape. They had pistols attached to their hips. As it grew dark, their flashlights sent beams out into the forest. Tall shadows revolved about the trees. If someone neared the eye, they would approach, flashlights up, frowning. Who are you? What are you doing here? This area has been sanctioned from 8PM and is now off limits.

We issued beats to Sandra. For a while, we toyed with the knife. It’d be good, we reasoned, to cut a chunk out of her. An inch here or there. Someone said something about an eye for an eye. Tears swamped Sandra’s face. But then Lucy, always the soberest member of our group, elected to shave a patch from Sandra’s hair instead. She cried during the removal, shoulder-heaving, wet sobs. But after, the group felt a certain equilibrium restored. The status quo now thoroughly in effect.

*

The Eye made the news: wobbly helicopter footage, reporters on scene – finger pressed to ear, in the fore. A ticker tape – EYE FOUND IN FOREST CLEARING – scrolled.

For three days, on every channel, experts – elbow-patched, corduroy abundant – explained the eye’s cultural and cosmic significance: where it came from, who, if anyone, it belonged too.

Whenever school closed, the kids made their way, on scooters and bikes and pedal-buggies, to the eye. We milled about, two hundred of us, a certain nervous awe in the air. Cars packed the road. Police looked sheepish. A cult formed; flyers plastered the town. One of their pamphlets described Zanton, the demi-god. There were meetings in church basements.

Sam, profiteer of a rusty double-decker, advertised in far-off towns. COME SEE THE ELEPHANT-SIZED EYE!!!! TICKETS ONLY £200. In the heat, he jammed his bus with tourists, kicked a wheezing air-conditioner into action, and read from a makeshift script. Sam showed his clientele the sights of our town – some fictionalised – and concluded with the eye, hazed in the hues of sunset, pulsating beneath the setting sun.

*

Reporters, of course, told stories about their stories.

*

I came in from school and found my father beneath thin grey blankets with the curtains drawn. Husks of dried rice on the pillow beside him. Sometimes, he would adjust and try to see me in the light.

Downstairs, the sounds of race-cars played on the television. Mom slept in the easy chair, her glasses crooked on her nose. I worked around her, clearing away the cans.

On Abyss Days, mother called in sick for my father. She spent the first ten minutes of her day pacing around the landline, rehearsing her lines. At night, I would find her smoking a cigarette on the back step – arms crossed, right foot tapping. At some point, she would say – I’m going out. She would return drunk.

When the sun was coming down, she found me in my room. There was no alcohol on her breathe. She was in her raincoat, hair in a bun, strands like spirographs. We drove out with a thermos of hot chocolate. There was rain and it was the sort of rain which doesn’t give the windscreen wipers a chance.

Tourists in plastic ponchos snapped photos in the semi-darkness. The eye stood out; magnificent. I need to touch it, she said. Her progress across the forest floor was shy but steady. Raindrops framed her slumped form. It turned to observe her – a second – then looked away. She reached for it. When her fingers touched – just for a moment – I saw her smile. A happy, worry-free smile.

*

Scientists arrived in buses and set up tents. In the mornings, they gathered around gas canisters to fry sausages and bacon and mushrooms. Some, the specialists, stayed in a hotel – its carpark chock with cars.

They constructed polyethylene barriers around the eye. Men in yellow hazmat went in and out. From inside, we could see shadowy somethings. Flashes of pink and orange and blue; the eye quivering.

Soon the eye no longer levitated. It lay, surrounded by the hazmats holding clipboards. There was always a tool bench. Always someone cleaning a tool. Out on the forest road, a truck was parked, on its back were industrial tethers.

Sometimes, the news would run reports of the scientists progress. Towards what? – the reporters would say. Discovery! – the scientists would say.

One of the scientists said: ‘What we are looking for, I think, is some sort of explanation as to what this eye is, why it has appeared and whether we, as a species, can learn anything of significance from the eye. That is our mission. To understand something more of the universe. To identify a clear purpose.’

At school, the ample-busomed Mrs Richardson, sentenced me to three weeks after-school detention.

I went to the Eye in the late evenings with the anoraks, the white-collar workers, the milk-smelling middle-aged, the religious in ankle-high dresses. The lonely people, the lost people. It would be us, in the darkness, staring. And the eye staring back.

*

The scientists left; the reporters left. We hunted for the eye and found it, shrivelled and yellow, left, half in, half out, of the river. Clotted red veins had appeared across the iris. There were hack marks and gouges. It’s blood, we saw, was purple.

After stacking our bikes against a log, and huddling in the forest, we decided to take its life. David sharpened sticks with a swizz army knife. Sandra found a rock the size of her head.

Out in the creek, we worked at it for ten minutes. It was tough to pierce, like the skin of a tomato, and it quivered in pain throughout. We were soon bloody to the elbow. I walked away, leaving the stick, and threw up by a sycamore. I could still hear them working at it from the forest, the slap of arms on flesh. I can remember scratchy bark beneath my hand.

When I came back, it was done. The iris had drooped towards the ground. Streams of purple criss-crossed towards the river. Crows appeared, dozens of them, and began to feast.

*

It was a Tuesday in May when my father took a handful of pills and passed. Mother found him after work, mouth agape, coated in spit.

I was at my aunt’s, making pineapple upside down cake. She took the call in the hallway. When she returned, she sat down, and then, with violence, pecked my forehead. Mother arrived in Dad’s mackintosh. She stopped the car, twice, to cry.

We held the funeral in the forest. No Churches, pointless – that’s all his note said. We did not recognise the people who arrived. Men from the buses, pub friends. Lardy men wiped sweat from brows. We scattered his ashes across the creeks and woods of the valley. Everybody said what a nice day it was for it. Exactly what he would have wanted. I can remember confetti and a banner, lacklustre, with the name Simon across it.

Come eve, the sky scarlet, Mother drove home slow. She turned the radio off – she could not stand the radio. All that talking, those garbled not-there voices. I pressed my forehead to window. We passed the scientist’s empty camp, their experimental tent like the shed skin of some vast plastic snake. We passed an inn, the backs of two hikers. Finally, we passed a sign for cigarettes. There was a vast ocean of anger in me. I could feel it, at night, in the quiet, its waves breaking against the shores of myself.

*

Lucy and I lost our virginity together near the end of the summer. She arrived in denim shorts with a condom in her back pocket. We sat on my bed, holding hands; outside, a car went whispering past. She asked – ‘do you wanna?’ and meekly, overcome by a new kind of shyness, I surmised. She wore lime-green underwear, with white frills.

There was something, I realise now, about the summer evenings of teenage years. The summer would leave, quietly, before we knew it. There would be new places, new people in town, and time would march on. David, a few years later, while swimming, would be caught in a cross-current and be pulled under. Sandra, then married, would press her forehead to the coffin edge and wipe mascara from her cheeks. The summer then would feel distant and unknown. But there was something. A half-light. No money. Bounty all around.

Lucy kissed me on the walk home, beneath the pink umbrella of a freshly blooming cherry tree.

‘I love you,’ she said.

I looked at the stars. They didn’t shine for us; they did not compliment the mood of the evening; they didn’t even know we were there. But they were pretty all the same. Pretty like Lucy.

_____

Post Script: In 2030, Nikolo Szizek, then ancient and gnarled like a tree, writes an essay entitled Discourse on the Twenty Foot Eye which Haunted the Forest around Wanopop Lake for a Mere Forty Days and Forty Nights. It is not his best work. It is not even considered among his best work. In it, he suggests the eye captured public fascination because it satisfied the criteria of the unexplainable. (The essay contains a list of seventeen points). Like thunder to the ancient Greeks, he advises, the eye enabled us to re-establish our bond with primitive unease, that is: the known unknowability of the world, our helplessness at the feet of cosmic indifference. It was this argument that enabled Szizek to describe the eye as an act of absurdity on behalf of a great creator and nothing more. A humbling. As of yet, I have not found a better adage for the events which effected Wanopo Lake between October 15th and late November.