Jane Hartshorn

'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. […] Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me.’

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                 – Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

​

The past year has felt like traipsing through some kind of
expansive dreamscape, between partitions of glass.
Memories fold over and into one another. Places of
significance have warped, lost their shape. Houses appear
where once there was marshland, a thin burn threading
between them. 

*

The hyacinths are pushing through the soil; closely packed
flower-heads like purple conifers. Planted to mark the
graves of guinea pigs, they were in bloom when I returned
to Ayr a year ago.

In March 2020, I wrote in my diary;

‘The rhododendron flowers open as the purple hyacinth
dies; its stalks lying bare on the ground like overcooked
spaghetti. It was only yesterday I saw the pale sherbet of a

bee clasped in its starfish mouth, fizzing apricot with
pleasure.’

I haven’t lived anywhere for more than a year for the past
6 years and the re-emergence of the hyacinths signals a
looping of time that is unfamiliar to me.

*

Everything has myriad memories attached to it. There are
places where time congeals, overlaps, becomes knotted.
Sticking points that hold multiple versions of myself. I
circle these places like I’m haunting my past, looking for
evidence that I once lived there.

The details of these memories are not always clear. If only
I could scratch at the soil, uncover layers of sediment,
watch the past materialise like charcoal leaf rubbings.
 

An altercation at the end of Dornoch Park. My sky-blue
corduroy jacket. A kirby-grip in my pocket.

*

A school friend once told me a man in a long coat flashed
her down by the river. Her house backed onto the river,
and there was a path that connected it to the school
playing fields.

On breaks between lessons, my friends and I would hang
about the concrete playground adjoining the car park. The
only thing that prevented us from walking towards the
river was fear.

*

On the short walk from the bus stop to my house, I used
to try to remember the grooves of the pavement, the
places where the tarmac had sizzled in the heat. I would
slide my feet across the oily bubbles, wonder if the
pavement recognised me.

*

I’ve returned to my childhood home 17 years after I first
left, which also happens to be half my lifetime. I'm finding
it difficult to connect the roads and paths of my present to
the places of the past, to re-place memories, and join the
dots between changed landscapes.

I wasn’t born here, and didn’t have a deep connection with
the town growing up; the site of so much teenage misery,
but this hasn’t prevented feelings of bewilderment and
disorientation from arising.

The air feels thinner, as though I can move between states
and periods of time. As I lie in bed at night, the smells of
my childhood come back to me: Sudafed, Calpol, Twist &
Squeeze, 10p mix-ups. Pink and violet light filters through
my curtains, waking me. I don’t know what year it is.

*

I remember once walking to the end of the cul-de-sac I
lived on. Even as a child, I had a feeling I shouldn’t be
there. At the end of the street, I wedged my toe in the gaps
between the stones in the wall, and peered over the top.
There was a diamond of grass, luscious and overgrown. It
was flanked on each side by a high wall, missing a gate or
door to admit entry.

I search for this diamond of grass on Google maps, but all
I can see are the striped rectangles of mown lawns.

*

I don’t drive and I am dependent upon my mother to take
me places. 

We return to the site of the old campus. Up to our ankles
in mud, a fenced-off section, a playing field. Paths through
the grass that trail off to nothing. We walk alongside a
fence that seems to hold no function; behind the posts and
wire lies tufts of grass, hillocks, and brambles.