I borrowed The Return of the Native from the library on a Wednesday, mostly because it was thick enough to justify the walk, and found on getting it home, that someone before me had used the book rather generously as a filing cabinet. Strips of paper — not bookmarks exactly, more like offcuts, the width of a till receipt, the kind of paper that seems to exist only to fall out of things — drifted from between the pages as I opened it. First one, then three more in quick succession, then a small flurry of them, coming to rest on the desk like moths that had given up mid-flight.
Each one had a single word written on it, in a small, careful, slightly old-fashioned hand — the hand of someone who wrote using a pencil wetted with the tongue. I laid them out in a row, the way a tarot reader lays out a hand of cards, hoping they will do the thinking for her. SAILING. POSTAL. BEFORE. NATIVE. COLD. THEREAFTER. GREEN. THUNDER. BREATHING. WHENEVER. SICKNESS. Eleven words, sitting on my desk like eleven small hatchlings waiting to be fed a meaning.
I tried them in alphabetical order, which proved nothing at all, the words looking faintly embarrassed at having been asked to stand in a line for no reason. I tried them in an order that I imagined made more sense, which gave me something worse — a sentence that sounded like a telegram sent by someone short of cash.
By the third arrangement I had convinced myself I was getting somewhere — a note passed inside a book between two people who couldn't otherwise be seen speaking, a confession, or a plan of some kind, abandoned mid-sentence, the way a bird abandons half a nest when the weather turns. NATIVE, I thought. Something about travel. Someone going overseas, or returning from it. Had they lost their nerve, or lost the book, or both. Was SICKNESS to blame? Or perhaps THUNDER.
I spent the whole of that evening on it, moving eleven small strips of paper around a desk as though they were the last unmapped territory of somebody's private life, and I was the only cartographer left alive who cared. But to no avail. I tried anagrams, acrostics, even a brief and ill-advised experiment with alphanumeric substitution, which only left me more confused than the words had managed on their own, like trying to translate punctuation into a language that didn’t need it.
I could not let them go. I copied them onto a slip of paper and carried them in my wallet, the way other men carry a photograph or a rabbit's foot or a very small, folded piece of luck. I began saying them to myself, almost like a mantra, every morning while brushing my teeth and at night, lying in the darkness that arrives just before sleep when the day has stopped pretending to be necessary. They were now inscribed on paper and in my mind, in a totally random order that made sense only to me. But that no longer had the same importance. The words in their new order had a meaning of their own — a small, rhythmic prayer I offered up before leaving the house, before starting the car, before eating a meal alone — and reciting them settled something in me, the way a superstition settles a person who no longer quite believes in it but has grown fond of the shadow it makes.
A few days later I borrowed another book from the same library; a slim volume of poetry, the kind that looks unread out of principle. A strip of paper fell out as I opened it. Three words, in the same careful hand, or a hand so similar I chose not to examine the difference too closely, having already thrown the originals away: FIRE AND ICE.
I added them to the end of my sequence, where they seemed to fit with the treacherous perfection of a jigsaw piece that belongs to an entirely different puzzle but has, by pure luck, the right shape.
SAILING. POSTAL. BEFORE. NATIVE. COLD. THEREAFTER. GREEN. THUNDER. BREATHING. WHENEVER. SICKNESS. FIRE AND ICE.
The following afternoon, reading the poetry book over afternoon tea, I came across a poem by Robert Frost and sat up so quickly I nearly choked on a chocolate digestive. Fire and Ice. There it was, on the page, doing nothing more mysterious than being the title of a poem I had simply not yet reached.
I sat with that for a while and mulled over the significance of my latest discovery. And the more I mulled, the more obvious the solution to the mystery became. Someone before me had simply devised a small, sensible, entirely unmysterious system for finding their place again — jotting down the next word before closing the book, the way a person ties a bit of string around a finger, trusting the finger to explain itself later.
I felt, for a moment, exactly as foolish as I deserved to. And then, a moment after that, something closer to grief — a faintly ridiculous grief for a lost companion who had never existed, a fellow-traveller I'd invented out of eleven scraps of paper and my own willingness to find intrigue hiding between the covers of a book. I took the slip out of my wallet that evening and looked at it for a long time under the kitchen light, the way you might look at a key to a door that, it turns out, was never locked.
I did not throw it away. But before returning the poetry book to the library the following week, I tore a fresh strip from a notepad and wrote on it, THE END. I then slid it into a completely random page in the book.
The Bookmark is taken from my collection of short stories, The Small Print, that follow Douglas Fitzgerald through the absurd embarrassments of English life.
I'd love to now what you think.
