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From her vantage point in the shade beneath her favourite tree, Susan enjoyed surveying the movements of her fellow man. The shade gave her the confidence of sunglasses, of the seeing yet remaining unseen. Picking off with laser-sighted accuracy the lovers and enemies, the passing acquaintances, the lost in their own worlds, the fiercely observational, the flirtatious and the nervous, she sat and played at being mankind's cataloguer. Pinning down her samples and scrutinising the minutist differences and trying to find within their surprisingly similar natures the elusive facets of herself. It was the only way she knew of assessing her life, searching for familiar reflections in the faces of others. To examine herself truly would surely drive a solid stainless steel pin through her heart and destroy all purpose for observation. Awaking in the small hours of night she had recalled a fragmentary nightmare, but always the same vision of being pinned down on cork with familiar polyglot faces staring down and pointing out the 'interesting' features of her eyebrows, the ridge of her cheekbones, the boyish line of her hip. Then the involuntary shuddering, the death throws constrained by pin and board.

But beneath the beech tree, in daylight she could turn the tables. Comfortably seated on an orange woven mat she held a paperback in her lap, reading it only if she was noticed. The tree grew unobtrusively in a coniferous grove at the corner of the village green, nearby a public footpath and shallow steps led down to a minor road and pub beer garden.

By peering over her left shoulder she could look down at the unshaded picnic tables littered with empty crisp packets and pint glasses. Every hour or so the landlady would gather the glasses up, holding them in a towering stack which she would feed into the heavy duty glass washing machine that the brewery provided and had plumbed into the utility room at the back.

Since moving into the village Susan had not actively sought to become involved in community life. Her efforts to evade notice had ironically caused the opposite to occur. Her neighbours took a greater interest in her comings and goings and regularly when she answered the door she found herself invited to barbecues, domino evenings and village fetes. It was the landlady who let her into the secret of keeping a low profile.

"Go along to these things, tell them about what you do, especially the mundane bits. I tell you what dear, the best way to lose interest in someone is to find out about them. Mysteries are very seductive, Agatha Christie made a fortune out of them, but even our most private secrets sound very bland when they're shared. People like to have gaps to guess at, to fill with their perverse fantasies."

"What perverse fantasies have you heard about me then?" flushed Susan, wondering but flattered.

"Well, a reliable source told me that you were lying low out here to escape the attentions of an older but obsessive ex-lover."

Susan laughed, "That's funny, because I've just re-established contact with my ex, I. . ."

"Really dear, I don't want to know. I hear so many personal secrets across this bar that I assure you are not as important to me as the people telling me seem to think they are. You seem like a perfectly dear little thing and I simply don't believe any of the rubbish people say. But if you're bothered just tell 'em the truth, it'll get them off your back for sure."

The advice had worked almost too well, she had spoken frankly to prominent members of the Mother's Union at coffee mornings and had been the centre of attention at the Keeling's barbecue. Then, just as she had begun to enjoy their scrutinizing, news of the church warden's affair with one of the flower arrangers blew her fleeting celebrity away. The invitations to various get-togethers still came, but her status was now one of casual aquaintence rather than glamorous outsider.

For three months she had lived in the anonymity she desired and now, feeling that she was no further along the way to knowing her own mind, she was seeking company again.

From her vantage point she spied a teenage couple, the boy with his arm around her back, the girl tucking her hand into the back pocket of his jeans. He was whispering aggressively into her ear and she coyly giggled. His hand abruptly rose and clasped her ribcage tightly, the back of his hand nudging her unformed breast. Susan squirmed in recollection. Before the couple passed around the corner, behind a crop of trees and out of sight, the sun caught the girl's back and sinuous shadows outlined her young muscled shoulderblades and thin delicate vertebra. The warmth of the sun caught Susan by surprise in her shady den. She turned her eyes down, involuntarily, to the book and re-read the opening passage, "Do you remember the fragrance girls acquire in the autumn?". She liked John Updike's style, despite herself. He seemed a most troublingly masculine of authors, yet it was evident in his prose that over the course of a lifetime he'd gathered a wealth of knowledge concerning the opposite sex and in the process had somehow developed a wonderful affinity for how Susan often thought she should feel. In his early stories however, from time to time, his voice seemed to take on a nastily sexist tone, a mysogeny only glamorous to the young. She read the story carefully, a well turned tale of recollection and then looked up to brave the world again.

Currently, the scene before he was deserted. The absence of a figure with whom to identify forced her to be herself. As the day drew on this became progressively less of a chore. The sun, the peace and the sense of kinsmanship with an elderly Pennysylvanian dripped contentment to her soul. Every muscle in her simple frame relaxed and feeling as though her body had become an amorphous mass of jelly she slid back onto the grass and dozed happily in the heat. Subconciously she listed sounds and in doing so became entranced: the rustle of leaves along the boughs, the whistle call of a bird and the chirruping reply from a distance, the crumpling of her trousers against the mat, a breath in (so quiet), a breath out (less so), a pop in her ears and the liquid feel of peristalsis, then ever so faintly the sound of a radio, no, not a radio, a group of people, coming closer.

"Hello Susan."

She peered, squinting, towards the voice and recognised Raymond, a friend of her mother's.

"Hello Ray."

"Out enjoying the weather? It's so rarely this nice these days, but when it is there is nothing nicer than heading out to the 'Bull & Trumpet' for a couple of drinks and a ramble."

"It is lovely. How's mum?"

"Same as ever, same as ever. You should pop into the café more often, she worries about you y'know?"

"I'm fine." she smiled.

"I know, that's what we all keep telling her, but you know what parents are like."

"Yes, I do."

"Well, I'd better go and join the rest of the gang." he looked down at the beer garden, where members of the Kidderminster Rambling Society were laughing gaily and taking their pints of lager out into the sun.

"Nice to see you again Ray." She nodded as he made his way down the steps.

"Same here." he replied, and was gone.

She sat beneath the tree, ordering her emotions diligently. She'd enjoyed the casual chat, the superficialities of brief acquaintence, she decided that maybe solitude was becoming a boring indulgence and that although she had no desire to become a social animal it was high time that she renewed some old friendships. She stood up casually and shook the matt. The banter at the tables below was infectious and with a light skip and light heart she strolled down the path to join them.

©Mark Sexton 1999

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