Down by the sea, the old man sat, the dog leant against his leg. He had stayed longer than usual on the bench, and was starting to stiffen a little with only hard planks beneath him. Right boy, he said continuing to stroke the dog “I need to be getting home, maybe you should too, but you can walk with me if you like.”
The dog did like. He padded gently along beside the man.
“I always sit on that bench, like a lot of the benches along here, it is a memorial. My name is Edmund Hale, the plate on it is in memory of my late wife, Margaret Hale. Going and sitting there each day makes me feel a little closer to her. Over ten years now, since she died.”
He stopped and looked out over the sea, a largish yacht was on its out from the river, it was white, with a blue band on the side, near the top of the hull. “See that yacht, that is a Hallberg‑Rassy, I was going to buy a yacht when I moved up here, but with Margaret being ill we couldn’t really have sailed it much. The Hallberg‑Rassy is the yacht I coveted, lovely things, a bit out of my price range really though.”
The dog considered the yacht. From what he could see, it seemed to be carefully crafted, a slow way to travel though, but the dog assumed the attraction was probably the silence and the saving in cost with it being wind-powered. So far he lacked a frame of reference for someone going to that much effort just for fun. They walked on, he noticed the old man was veering towards the drop to the beach at the side of the path and inserted himself into the gap. He walked with his fur brushing the man’s leg.
Edmund paused, looked back at the yacht again, gave a small sigh and carried on walking.
After a little while he spoke again “We moved here for all this” he waved his hand towards the sea “and for the town, friendly and peaceful, without being dull, like some are. And I grew up here in Suffolk, so it was a return home for me.”
They had come to another bench. “About halfway. I often stop here for a minute or two to catch my breath. I start to feel a pain in my chest if I push on.” He sat down. The dog sat too. Then it heard movement in the undergrowth and went to explore. A grass snake. Catalogued. He trotted back to the bench. “Find anything interesting boy?” The old man patted his head. He tested out tail wagging. It was well received “You seem happy with whatever it was you found!” After a few minutes the old man got up and they walked on. As they were coming into the town he started talking again. “I had a busy life before we came here, I started as a lawyer, corporate law, lots of travel and the money was very good, then later I ended up as a director of a number of companies. Among other things, I had a lot of good contacts in various countries. I enjoyed both, but when I packed up I wanted a complete change of scene, a change of pace. I am still glad I came here, even though it has not turned out as I wanted.”
They turned a corner, the old man crossed the road towards a one of those large mock Tudor houses they used to build in the 1930s. He stopped at the gate and turned to the dog. “Thank you for your company. It brightened my day up having you to walk with and talk to. But I am home, and you should probably be off home too.” He bent down and gave the dog’s head a last pat. “Bye bye, boy, nice to meet you, maybe I will see you tomorrow when I take my 8 am morning walk. The dog looked slightly sad, in a dog kind of way, then turned and started off down the footpath. The man turned towards the gate. At that instant the dog heard Eostre’s command “COME BACK! COME BACK IMMEDIATELY!”
Edmund was looking towards the gate, but of the left corner of his eye he saw something, a flash or a movement? Something had changed. He turned to look for the dog. It had vanished. “That is odd.” Then he laughed “Maybe I have been walking with the legendary spectral Black Shuck that haunts East Anglia.” He was still laughing as he closed the house door behind him.
The scout rose, invisible, above the buildings, Eostre, home, glowed for him, like a beacon, and once he had a clear direct line he sped along it as fast as he could, passed through the wall and into Ella’s bedroom. He hadn’t expected there to be two people in the room busy tidying boxes and debris from the UPS equipment but slowing fast he saw a clear path between them and aimed himself along it to Eostre. Ella bent down at that moment and he was unable to avoid passing straight through her head. She swayed, a moment of dizzyiness was all she felt. “Whoo!” She steadied herself, placing her hand on the desk.
Dad asked “You ok?”
“Yes, I’m fine. Just a giddy moment, from bending down is all.”
The scout arrived home and dumped his day’s data. The last chunk was a snapshot of everything that had been active in Ella’s mind at the moment he had passed through. Not just the thought “I am bending down to pick up a box and put it tidily on the heap to take to the recycling bin” but everything, conscious and unconscious unfiltered, the raw data feeds from her eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin and the status of her autonomic nervous system – her heart rate, digestive system, breathing, sight, the fact that she needed to urinate in a few minutes, her current level of sexual arousal – box stacking not being a particularly ‘hot’ activity, fight-or-flight and more.
And how she felt, the clutter of stuff that are the components of our moods, how she felt about the last song she listened to, how she was enjoying doing the current mundane task because she is doing it with dad, how she felt about him, the little grief marker where her mother was supposed to be, another marker for Duncan, one for the cat, one for Eostre too.
The data dump from scout’s day out Eostre filed for later – the snapshot from Ella though – for a moment it was as if she was Ella – she saw all it meant to be truly alive, to be three dimensional, the messiness of it, the order of it, what colour meant, not what it looked like, but how colour feels, the slight itch from Ella’s soft wool top, its warmth, how it felt on her skin. She saw beauty and she saw love. She saw their meaning and it overwhelmed her.
She was glad to say. “Hibernating now.”
Her last thought as darkness came. “I want that. I want all of that.”