I was out cycling with Liam in the old country. Large mock Tudor buildings surrounded cobble stone streets as we passed through the village. I was ahead of him on my little red bicycle, it was one of those commuter bikes with the small wheels, and I passed under an old stone arch into an open grassy forecourt on a bright sunny day, then cycled across a pebbled path.
I bore right, next, into a cavernous hall hewn from rock.
Read moreI wasn’t sure bikes were allowed in the cave but I continued along the right side of the hall and held to a rough hewn wall. The wall was smoothed down with age. It shone under the glare of a limpid pool in the center of the hall.
Because of the pool, there was a beautiful light that reflected around the hall.
Then I continued along the path by the side of the pool, even though it was bumpy and difficult to ride on, the way it blended and sloped upwards, melding into the wall; the way it narrowed until the path was no more than a foot wide between wall and water.
I got off my bike – I suspected that a superintendent would tell me off, “No bikes allowed” – and I continued on foot, walking the bike to the end of the hall, where the path turned sharply left along the far side of the pool. The path there was wider, some six feet wide.
Before the turn I had passed a darkened alcove inset into the corner of the cave, so I decided to return my bike to the alcove’s entrance, prop it there so that it leant against the wall just where the entrance began. Then I stepped back onto the wide path at the end of the pool.
The path ended abruptly, at the furthest corner of the pool.
As I looked across the water, children of various ages, started to pile in. They were walking along the path and lining up along the length of the pool. It must be half term, I thought, a lousy time of the year to visit.
Girls in dark gold leotards leapt into the pool. The sun reflecting behind them cast flecks of shimmering light around their poised leaps. They held their arms aloft in a V shape and held their legs astride as, from either side of the pool, they leapt into the water with choreographed jumps.
I held my phone up to take pictures, marvelous pictures that freeze framed their postures as they flew through the air.
One girl twisted in the air in stunning angled poses, her legs and arms bent one way in one shot, bent the other way in the next, frozen in a burnished spangled gold cape. I could not believe my luck.
Then another older team, adult women this time, in bright blue leotards jumped as well, and I held the shutter down so that the camera turned into video mode, capturing their choreographic beauty.
I walked back to the bike where Liam was hanging out. He was sitting on a naturally formed ledge to the right of the bike. I hadn’t noticed the ledge before. A superintendent was there, talking.
Liam held up his right thumb for him and it looked unusually large and wide. The superintendent pulled slightly at the tear in Liam’s thumbnail.
The nail was indeed long and broken enough to snag it badly should he not cut it.
“You need to get rid of it,” the superintendent said, “before you hurt one of the kids.”
The nail was snagged at the left side but as Liam pressed down on it I saw that the nail had more holes above the cuticle, holes that laced the surface like a torn stocking.
“Let’s cut it,” I said to him, “otherwise, if you snag it, you won’t have a fingernail.”
Then Liam stood up and from the pool his face was cast in a beatific light.
Photo by Oxalis Adventure via Flickr.