Starting Again
By: Svetlana Smith
Tags: Short Story, Loss, Fiction, Literary Impulse, Relationships

Starting Again

Olivia moves to Cornwall to begin a new life

Photo by Jake Hinds on Unsplash

The birds always sing most clearly in the woods just behind the cliff edge. You can wander down the little path, through a gap in the dry-stone wall and you’re lost in another world. Away from the salt winds and cries of the gulls. The bitter grass which clings to the soil, cowering away from the storms, and the twisted dwarf trees, which grow almost parallel to the ground.

Here the trees grow tall, the earth dappled with sunlight which shifts in the breeze as the robins pick fights with each other from rival branches. I find a tree to sit and lean against amongst the foxgloves in my favourite glade and watch the midges bimbling in the sunbeams, no plan, no direction, back and forth, up and down. Just like me.

When I moved here, I imagined something more romantic. The old shepherd’s cottage on the cliff edge, where I could paint, be inspired by the storms out at sea. The tales of wreckers and the broken remains of the ships which still loom from the sands at low tide, slimy and blackened with age. How could I not produce masterpieces here? How could I not be free from it all? But it clings. I hear his shouts in the wind sometimes. I’ll run outside, hair scraping across my face and flying upwards in the gale, but of course it’s just me, and the odd sheep. There’s always an odd sheep.

‘Never run away from things. Be a bull, not a rabbit,’ my mother always tells me. ‘Stand strong, stand up for yourself. You can triumph over most things that way.’ She’d never met Sofia though, there’s no way that anyone could triumph over Sofia.

The first week or two here was so exciting. I was so busy I forgot to miss him. Unpacking, dusting, painting. Realising that the roof leaked and the toilet didn’t flush and that the local plumber’s idea of ‘next week’ wasn’t quite the same as mine. I’d take long walks along the coast path, my summer dress flapping around my knees, and my ankles grazed by the gorse bushes. I sketched the rocks over and over, looming, jagged. Teeth ripping worlds apart, fingers clawing their way free from the earth. I imagined the finished pieces as huge powerful things that would stun the local gallery owners into acceptance. ‘Let us put on a private show for you next week!’ they’d cry. Posters boasting ‘a new talent’ would be displayed far and wide, and James would see them and realise what a mistake he’d made and come back.

But he took my talent with me when he went. Packed it up amongst the Christmas gifts from mutual friends which he now claimed were his. ‘Sofia really likes this lamp, do you mind?’ As if I’d want it in my house after that. I let him have the bed too, I couldn’t sleep in it without images popping up. Them laughing together, at me, at my stupidity, my gullibility. In actual fact, I’m sure they were too busy shagging to give me a second thought, but at 3 am on a Sunday morning that doesn’t feel any better.

Needless to say, my private shows never materialized. The pictures were too dark, the owners said. ‘People don’t like this gloomy stuff. I mean, it’s all very avant-garde,’ their mouths twisted around the words like an insult, ‘but no one wants this on their walls, do they?’

A few months ago, I cracked and started painting puppies and kittens, chocolate boxy stuff. The landlord of The Rose and Crown wants a picture of the pub, all postcarded up with hollyhocks growing up in front of the windows and a climbing rose over the door. Next up it’ll be the little darlings of the builder, but with the permanent food smears around their mouths carefully painted out. Turns out my artistic integrity isn’t up to much once I’m down to the last bag of rice.

The glade has gone curiously still, even the midges seem to be frozen, spots of silver against the dark of the trees. A butterfly dances in front of the large beech tree at the southern end. I feel a great sense of peace wash over me as I watch it and it’s joined by a second, flittering around each other, towards and then apart, and then back together again. In the distance, through the rustling of the leaves, that curious sound a forest makes when it’s trying to be still, the roar of the surf against the rocks pounds away.

I notice a movement on the other side, a white rabbit lollops slowly into the glade. The butterflies are only momentarily startled, but then ignore it, carrying on as they were. Together and apart, chasing each other around the blossom on the hawthorn trees.

The rabbit hops closer, and closer. I hold my breath, it’s so beautiful, my muscles are tensed with the effort not to move. It’s so close I can touch it, and then, it jumps up onto my lap, its nails digging into my thighs. I reach out to stroke it and its ears flatten to accept the touch — it must be a pet, I think. It’s very used to being held. I should take it home, try to work out whose it is. It can’t survive here.

As I make ready to move, it looks up at me and says: ‘You’re on the right path. You need to go home now,’ and with a whisk of its fluffy tail, disappears back into the forest.

I wake up with my own highly undignified snore echoing around my head. My legs are dead, and my dress is covered in twigs and leaves from the forest floor. I struggle up, stretch, shake myself out a few times, and start to head back home.

The air on the cliffs wakes me up fully of course, even on the calmest days the air wuthers around your ears, scouring your skin and buffeting you off course. It’s a brutal ancient world, which I feel completely at home in. Far more at home than with the puppies and babies and hollyhocks. One dark January day, a storm blew in from the Atlantic and I came and stood here, leaned into the wind, and opened my mouth to scream, feeling the air support my body and whisk my words away. I woke up the next day with a tan from the windburn, and looked healthy for the first time in months.

There’s someone waiting by the front door when I get back. Saul, he says his name is. He’s come on behalf of the plumber, to fix the boiler. The boiler which was going to be fixed ‘next week,’ about a month ago. I’m not really in the mood for it, but let him in any way, offering tea and biscuits and preparing to write the evening off. Saul takes his tea with two sugars. By the time the pot’s brewed and I’ve wandered back through with the tray, I expect him to be in the bathroom, tinkering away, but he’s still stood in the sitting room, staring at the cliffs — the jagged, howling teeth and groping fingernails, ripping their way from that world to this on my sitting room walls.

‘These are amazing,’ he quietly tells me. ‘How do you do it?’

We talk and talk, of an art club which he’s part of with his wife, who want to start doing shows of work. ‘Could you be our first?’ my artistic new plumber begs me. They’ve got grand plans for a gallery in Truro, and from there, the world. Or so he’d have it anyway. It’s a long way from Truro to London, let alone New York. I pour us wine, feeling the warmth spread through me.

When he leaves, three hours later, my boiler is still broken, but one of my canvases is under his arm and a cheque that will keep me in rice for three years is in my pocket.

‘Come for dinner,’ he calls. ‘Ellie would love to meet you; she’s heard all about your paintings from old Jeff. Been trying to think of a way to angle an invitation for months!’

That night I dream of the white rabbit. I dream of waves that rip rock apart and trees which shelter butterflies beneath their fragile leaves. I dream of hope and a future. I dream of galleries and friends and fun. The one thing I don’t dream of, for what feels like the first time ever, is James and Sofia.