Short Story: Lake Calm

Short Story: Lake Calm

‘My name is Emma, and I’m afraid of lakes,” echoed that gentle voice of hers, like the sound of a small bottle breaking on a tiled floor, echoing and diminishing in a room that seemed endless from all possible perspectives. Possibly because it was a long, narrow, glassy-reflection-like white conference room turned into a meeting place during group sessions for people with all sorts of phobias.

Emma was dead afraid of lakes.

Every Saturday she went to these group meetings. They discussed various things, Emma and the other group members; though Emma was rarely willing to speak, partly because she was too shy, but also because she resented discussing water. Especially when everyone was staring at her.

Every Saturday she was heartily encouraged by her mother to attend this meeting – a petite elderly lady Emma’s mother was, never seen without two stripes of red lipstick on her skinny lips, always to be spotted smoking secretly on the kitchen window in the mornings, extinguishing the little red-lipsticked fag on one of the old scarlet brick aside the window and closing it abruptly just before everyone came down for breakfast. Emma despised this little habit of hers, while the poor woman thought she was keeping it a secret very successfully.

Every Saturday her dad would give her a hearty hug, squeezing tight the little body of hers upon his chest, convinced more than ever that his beloved Emma was close to letting go off the fear. Then he’d sit and read his newspaper, while Emma ate her toast and looked out of the window, her mum pouring tea and humming a tune. ‘Halcyon Days’ was the tune she was humming. Emma would stare out of the window from across her side of the table and sip her tea. She often wondered if the sky reflected the lake, or whether the lake was a mirror-image of the sky. She often thought of the weather.

Every Saturday she would send her parents off to either work or shopping. She would then take a shower and spend an hour or so combing her hair in front of the mirror, all the while conscious of the lake shining through the small squared window from behind her. She never looked though. She felt uneasy.

Then she’d get dressed, turn off the radio playing indifferently from somewhere specifically in the bleak background, and then she’d leave.

Every Saturday she’d come home after these meetings. They would exhaust her terribly. She would normally have supper and go upstairs for a read. She’d cry herself to sleep, wondering, half-way to sleep, whether she would ever be able to overcome this fear of hers.

One Saturday was unlike all others. Emma woke up at about five in the morning, sprang out of her bed and went quickly over to the squared little window opposite her bed. The sky was grey, clear, misty, dark, bright, all things merged together into oneness. She dressed minutely and slowly, so as not to wake her parents, and closed the door behind her. Then she ran.

Not stopping for about five full minutes, Emma finally came to a point where the entire lake was in view.

‘Such a calm, calm lake it is,’ she thought, or whispered, or said aloud. She could not decipher herself from everything else surrounding her, for it seemed at that moment that reality and fantasy were intertwined, and a sense that the real and the surreal were indistinguishable. She remembered the hours she spent playing by the lakeside and how she would sing to herself tunes long forgotten, tunes her mother would sing to her at night, old Scottish lullabies, and old Irish nursery songs.

She would play with the sand very close to the water – a thought which awed her now – and would repeat to herself certain nonsensical strings of words. She knew then the calmness of the lake.

‘Calm lake,’ she thought, and remembered how she’d repeat and repeat and repeat this simple phrase of two simple words – simple, yet of unearthly significance.

‘Calm lake, calm lake, calm lake, calm lake, calm…’ and she stopped. And then went on.

‘Lake calm,’ she whispered to the wind, as if informing it of something ancient, secret. ‘Lake Calm.’

‘Lake Calm’, she said aloud, and jerked. It was the name of the lake. ‘That’s what I called you,’ she said, and smiled, her lips twitching.

There was a boat lying abandoned on her left, just beside the water. She went to it, shaking, for she was still in her nightdress. She went to it running.

She pushed the old little grayish boat towards the water, falling down and standing up again, groaning as she pushed, bruising and cutting her arms and elbows, struggling not to fall back on her knees again. Once she reached the water with it, she stepped inside the boat, looking afar. The lake seemed endless.

She realised there were no paddles. She didn’t care. She sat and started paddling with her two bruised hands. She kept paddling and paddling, all the while hearing more and more clearly the tune of ‘Halcyon Days’ hummed from somewhere above, somewhere low and deep in the hills of Scotland and Ireland and England, by a voice feminine, and ancient, and soothing. She kept paddling without stopping until she reached the mid-point.

Then all of a sudden she stopped. She stopped, rested her elbows on the sides of the boat, and looked around. She was alone, in the middle of the lake, surrounded by thin morning mist, sunlight and blueness from the sky. The hills were visible, but not the shore from where she had set off. It was quiet, except for a tune, a certain tune, that celebrated seven consecutive days of peace, of freedom, of bliss, and of limitlessness.

She shrieked like a wounded bird and began sobbing. She sobbed of past grief, and of present happiness. She cried and smiled, inhaling the freshness around her, relishing the soothing calmness it gave her.

She smiled because she was no longer afraid of the lake.

She cried because she felt calm, because she remembered Lake Calm.