It was a slow, a humiliating exposure, a painful unravelling the stings of which he wilfully endured until, at last, mercifully, he could take it no longer.

  Armed with his small but timely inheritance, he moved out from the city, bought the derelict farmhouse with cash (an act which solidified his status as outsider) and switched allegiances. Sculpture, he decided, was open to the process of re-assembly, the reconfiguration of constituent parts. Sculptors worked with solid inanimate materials, plaster, cement, resin, wire, rearranging them into new vital forms, their original fragmentary principle still inherent. Yes, this was the way forward.

  After settling into the farmhouse, he jump-started his new artistic direction by enrolling in an evening course in the local vocational school, designing and casting garden gnomes. Before long he was churning out small concrete and wire sculptures in his outbuilding: birds, giant insects, fanciful creatures loosely based on generic Celtic mythology.

  He began to earn a living, not difficult considering the extreme distillation of his needs since he’d moved to the farmhouse. Some bought his sculptures to complement their gardens, bookending dainty lines of begonias and dusky lavender, while others considered them high art, placing them on podiums and the occasional gate pier.

  He’d once been commissioned to do a life-size sculpture of a small boy fishing. A concrete body, the rod was to be in copper, the fishing line copper wire. He wasn’t confident about his figure-drawing skills so, in place of preliminary rough sketches, he posed an old Action Man figurine (a toy he’d held on to since childhood) into what he considered to be a fishing position, and took multiple photos of it with his phone, from every angle. The intention was to work from these digital images by looking at them in a linear fashion, memorizing them, then seamlessly combining, in his mind’s eye, the varying views.

  It proved more challenging than he thought. Each photo took on an importance of its own, negating the others. He found it nearly impossible to bypass their individual agencies and see them as an interconnected whole. To counteract this turn of events, he printed out each one and snipped off all of their corners to make crude hexagon shapes of them. He then constructed a 3D form, vaguely spherical, each cropped hexagonal photo glued into its correct honeycomb alignment beside its neighbour. He crowned the structure with an aerial-view photo of Action Man’s buzzed pate.

  With this paper construct as reference sketch, he was able to sculpt a convincing Fishing Boy. Though he considered the messy three-dimensional collage to be a more accurate representation of reality than the finished concrete and copper sculpture, he knew what his client was looking for, and Reality was not it. He found out later that the buyer’s young son had been hit by lightning and killed the year before, while out fishing with his friends. The concrete and copper sculpture was placed by the river, in the exact spot where the child had been struck.

  He sold most of his cement work, while others lay sulking in the corners of his studio waiting to be repurposed or destroyed. It was a dependable income; it was enough. It allowed him to indulge in his personal work in progress, his limestone sculpting project, an enterprise he’d begun a while ago, an enduring idea that had been the primary reason for his moving to the isolated farmhouse in the first place. He didn’t discuss this piece with any of the local galleries or artisan craft outlets. It was the only one of his artworks for which the construction capability of gypsum cement was not suitable. Unlike his usual work, this piece was to be created by subtraction, not addition. It was proving to be a bigger challenge than he anticipated.

  Since the day the large limestone rock had been delivered from the local quarry by forklift truck, he’d been chiselling at its pale surface in a continuing effort to recreate a specific segment of sea, approximately one square metre in size. The intention was that the stone would eventually contain the precise configuration of both the surface waves and the interior currents, at a specific moment in time, in a specific place in the Atlantic. One squared metre of the air directly above the limestone sea would also need to be considered, as it was impossible to conceive of an under-the-surface mapping of a memory without also charting the adjoining over-the-surface.

  He’d been working on this project for some time now. Articulating the concept in stone, articulating it in a satisfactory way, was proving elusive. When would he be able to come to the conclusion that the seawater sculpture was finished, that the past was successfully trapped at the precise moment, the moment just before the historical event unfolded? When he was sure he’d provided sufficient microscopic detail to enable it to take on a vitality of its own. And when or how could this ambiguous state be ever measured? By the ease with which he could slither from one life (his own) into the autonomous life of the sculpture.

  But the difficulties associated with achieving the result he sought were:

  the process of deconstruction was tragically irreversible, accordingly any mistake made required the entire sculptural form to be reconfigured, causing a gradual but inevitable diminishment in scale, and

  time passed without pause, therefore every fruitful point he came to with the seawater sculpture became obsolete almost as soon as he had chiselled it.

  In order to proceed, two indirect returns are required here: a return to the sunlit scene where the solitary figure is currently walking along a rural road followed at a distance by the stray greyhound, and a return to the line of events that led them here.

  It is three weeks ago to this day, today, the day Bunny has decided to walk with her to the mountain lake, that the white greyhound had appeared at his closed gates, resting on her porcelain haunches, looking in through the gates’ iron bars. Even after his last beagle’s death, after it was no longer necessary in a practical sense, he’d kept his gates closed. Whether he knew it or not, the intention was to maintain a line between himself and the outside, and here a line means a distance, and this manifested most easily, for the moment, with a physical threshold, e.g. closed gates.

  Yes, on that first day the greyhound looked hungry, but other than that there was no exterior sign of any inner turmoil. He took a quick photo of her and posted it on the neighbourhood WhatsApp group, anyone missing this sweet girl. Then he brought water and food. She eyed it, eyed him, looked away. When he returned in the early morning, he surprised himself at the joy he felt on seeing both water and food gone, and the greyhound still there, sitting on her lean hindquarters outside the gates, eager, it appeared, to engage. No one had replied to his WhatsApp query.

  ‘Hello there,’ he said to her, ‘and how are we today?’ He felt the occasion of her continuance at his gate required an acknowledgement of some sort, an acknowledgement that embodied the sense that they were in this together, connected somehow. It being early morning, and not a particularly bright one (excessively bright morns tended to be punctuated with strollers, often just couples who would appear around the bend in the road without warning, together but silent in their individual thoughts), he was certain no one was witness to the verbal salute, other than the greyhound herself. This was important. He understood his neighbours, and the wider community, thought him strange (or worse). There had been rumours. Regarding a prior event. Regarding the night swim he’d taken, when he was younger, a swim they’d both taken, him and his girlfriend, the two of them hand in hand. The two of them going in together; that much is established.

  He opened the gates to retrieve the bowls. As soon as he did so, she padded past him up his driveway. Surprised at this incursion, he left his gates open so she’d be able to about-turn and continue on her pilgrimage, after she completed what he assumed must be a species-related need to inspect his territory, combined with a need to show him he had no jurisdiction over her. He went back indoors and, when he peered out later, she was on his driveway lying just inside the gates, looking out onto the road. Her long, impossibly slender forelimbs lay in a silvery-white X in front of her.

  He stood transfixed, and resolved to continue feeding her (‘from an emotional distance’ is how he put it to himself) until she was ready to resume her journey, wherever it would be taking her. He closed the gates, her inside. He took the old dog bassinet from under his bed and positioned it inside the smallest outbuilding, a doorless shed housing his bicycle, a lawnmower, and a variety of shovels.

  To have her stay long-term was impossible. Every time he saw the greyhound, he thought of his amber-eyed beagle, and the electric collar he had placed on it, and how it had trusted him, accepting the pain, and how he’d led it into the clinic to be euthanized, and how he’d not considered, not even for a fraction of a second, that it could maybe have gotten accustomed to the condition, how maybe, given the chance, it could have worked out a system of orientation based on scent, how, considering the tracking capabilities of its breed, this would have been entirely probable. And the guilt Bunny carried stretched in ever-widening circles, starting in the centre at Third Beagle and unfolding outward and backward, a spiral-reach towards the past, towards an intangible measure of saltwater that had followed him here.

  But as the first, then the second and finally the third week passed with the greyhound showing no signs of moving on, preferring to traipse mute after him up and down between the farmhouse and the gate, always keeping a distance from him (he’d walk down, open the gate, stand aside, she’d stay rooted, staring at him), he realized the only way she’d proceed on her trek was if he took the initiative and stepped out onto the road. He was certain she’d follow him.

  So, as he rose from bed this morning, he decided that, later today, maybe around noon, after a stint trying to advance his limestone-sea sculpture, he’d go for a walk, and that because this uncharacteristic walk was, as he saw it, necessary (to rekindle the greyhound’s internal crusade, to reform, as it were, her coordinates), it wouldn’t be just an arbitrary walk, a stroll up or down the road to loosen limbs, et cetera, no, it would have to have intent, and that intent would have to be, he concluded, a destination.

  He decided he’d walk to the cauldron lake on the mountain. He’d been thinking about this lake ever since he saw the exhibition in town with multiple representations of it, an exhibition he was particularly interested in because he hadn’t been invited to submit a piece. It was a ‘multidisciplinary collaboration’, local artists all rendering the same lake via a curated assemblage of mixed-media paintings, photographs, sculptural installations, an audio of stones skimming off its surface and receding slowly into silence before the next stone followed, handwritten prose scrawled in rust-coloured silt on the floor, a short animated film in a continuous loop that mimicked live drone footage of the surface of the lake, architectural drawings on calfskin vellum of the point where the dark lake touches its white rock edges.

  The lake is reputed to be bottomless. Or, at least, connected by some invisible (umbilical?) cord to the sea, an underground channel of sorts, a proposed physical attribute more plausible than the idea that it is bottomless, though this aspect of the lake, its apparent vast boundlessness, the immeasurability, the unfathomability of it, is, of course, a draw.

  The journey there wasn’t far. It’d take maybe five hours, at a steady pace. He’d walk in as straight a line as possible, directed (in part) by his phone. The greyhound would, presumably, shadow him and, hopefully, at some point, veer off, back on her own path, the one she’d wandered from three weeks ago like a wayward camera dolly off its tracks.

  * *

  picture a bottomless lake (bottomless as in boundless)

  a sharp-edged sunlit noon tracking towards an evening

  *

  After an unsatisfactory morning in his studio, he leaves the farmhouse at noon. He’s holding the phone as divining rod. The greyhound follows. It’s a sunlit day. The road meanders past sequences of fields hidden behind thick hedgerows of hawthorn and hazel. Fringes of briars, nettles and tall grasses mirror each other on either side.

  He has given his phone details of both the mountain lake and his intentions. After considered deliberation, which appeared to take longer than usual, the phone has responded. Keep straight, he’s told, keep straight for eight hundred metres, then take a right onto R****, and continue please for three kilometres.

  He’s decided that the best approach regarding the greyhound is to appear to ignore her, just allowing himself the odd look over his shoulder to check whether she’s still there or has finally diverged back onto whatever track she left three weeks ago. He reminds himself that this trip has two objectives, the first being core, the second being opportune. They are:

  to reconfigure the greyhound’s true trajectory and to feel selfless/wholesome about enabling her in this quest, (plus, to not, under any circumstance, feel a modicum of pitiful loneliness when/if she goes)

  to make it to the lake (54.270, -8.469), with the intention of unearthing insights that may alleviate the difficulties he’s experiencing in completing his limestone-sea sculpture (and with the thought that these insights may be found when immersed in the act of considering the purported endlessness of this lake, in particular the idea that diving in and heading downward in a straight line would bring him to the other side of the world, his antipode (–54.270, 171.531), which by his phone’s helpful and, candidly, overly enthusiastic calculations would have him surface in the waters of the South Pacific Ocean, just above the submerged continent of Zealandia, surface head first to the endless sky and within sight of the tiny island of Motu Ihupuku, a small uninhabited land mass not far south off the coast of New Zealand, the phone signing off this particular volley of information with a live aerial shot of ocean somewhere, hovering maybe one metre above the charted surface, the scene plotted out within a tight grid format, three squared).

  He types into the phone: ‘Of careful sadness?’

  The phone stalls (is it heading out of coverage or, worse, is it low in battery), then text scrolls bright:

  Careful sadness, but it was not the intended recipient.

  The screen blinks black as he places the phone back in his jacket. He stretches his arms up and out to the sides as he walks, his head being full of the idea of opportune actions. He twists his torso to the right, to the left, without breaking step. His swivelling provides him a convenient circumstance in which to discreetly check on the greyhound. She’s still there, ten or twelve paces behind.

  He starts to whistle (a made-up salvo which sounds more like a burst of manic birdsong than a carefree ditty), shoving his hands in his trouser pockets as accompanying evidence of his jaunty, carefree state. His fingers touch plastic: the talisman he’s brought with him for luck wrapped in a small weed bag. Fuck sakes, he thinks, when did I get so superstitious. Or is it sentimental, is that the correct word. He pulls it carefully from his pocket and shakes out the contents into his palm. A shrunken ox-eye flower, an umbilical wizen of darkened stem still attached. Its dessicated petals, dotted with shreds of old weed, remain as tightly closed as the night by the sea when the flower head was snipped from its stalk by a pair of pearlescent fingernails, their varnish like clotted milk. Poetic, that’s probably the word.

  Holding it carefully by its dried stem, he swings it back and forth and, in doing so, unexpectedly conjures the memory of a fragment from one of the archaic poems he’d once deconstructed to be used as a constituent part in the making of his many hybrid ‘found-poems’ for the many many weed-fuelled, spoken-word events he’d rather not be remembering right now thank you. It’s one of his favourite poems, from the English Romantic Age, he should never have subjected it to deconstruction fragmentation hybridization. Bit late for all that grandiose insight now, I’m afraid. He recites the original, in time to the swinging ox-eye flower head: ‘And when, at dusk, by dews oppressed / Thou sink’st, the image of thy rest / Hath often eased my pensive breast / Of careful sadness.’ On the final swing, the little flower head flies off its stem and down into the nettles. Fuck. He flings the stem cord after it, fuck it, and then the weed bag after that, fuck it all.

  Here comes the turn. He takes it. Behind the fabric of his shirt, the phone wakes, considers. Keep straight, it concludes, keep straight for three kilometres on R****, then discreetly veer left at the Y junction, staying please on R**** thank you. He can see the mountain in the distance, over to his left. Why walk straight, why three kilometres down this road, he thinks, why not veer left now, why not cut across the fields, save some distance, get back onto the road when I’m a little closer to the mountain.

  He climbs the ditch to his left, goes into the field. The phone utters a disappointed, a concerned burble, and begins to recalibrate the route. Make a U-turn, it implores as it configures, make a U-turn please now here back onto R****.

  He strides through the long-grassed meadow, the mountain and its lake straight ahead in his sights. Other than an occasional digital sigh, his phone makes no further comment, its screen displaying him as a blue triangle-arrow wandering lost off-track in a wasteland, the road (delineated in bold as the only recommended route) persisting to the right of the screen.

  It’s late summer, nearly autumn. The field’s grass has been left to grow; it will soon be cut for hay. The fuchsia bushes are out, their little teardrop flowers hang in solemn profusion from the field’s tall boundary hedgerows. He’s moved by their bright red colour, shining beautiful out here for no one, pursuing their own short, fateful path every summer. He pauses, takes a photo, and is about to head over for a closer inspection when he remembers the greyhound; shit, what will she have made of this diversion off-road. Can she still see him (these dogs are sighthounds, not trackers, this his phone revealed to him when he googled grey hound then greyhound after she’d turned up at his gate), will she have left the road to follow him over the ditch. What if the landowner spots her roaming loose in the field, are there sheep in here. No, they wouldn’t put sheep in a meadow. Still. Fuck’s sake. Where is she.