The Letter Writer

         The first time I ever saw her was back in the Spring. She was sitting on the middle bench overlooking the pond and writing something on a pad that she held in her lap.
         A few yards away from her, a mother was feeding the ducks with her child. A crowd of birds jostled around them both in a puddle of movement and sound. There was the dusty rustling of their wings and the strange bubbling noise that the pigeons make as well as the chatty croaks and harsher honks of the ducks and geese. The child was still too young to be able to throw the bread far enough away and shrieked when the birds inevitably surged towards her.
         I could watch children feeding the ducks all day, much as those children could feed them all day, I expect. The trouble is, in order to do so, I tend to have to hang back and watch from afar. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some kind of a paedophile, though I’ve seen a few of them by now. I’m just the unwanted woman who wanders around the park all day, the one with the ancient shopping trolley tied up with string, the one whose clothes never seem completely clean. There’s one of me in every park, I bet, all equally noted and ignored.
         Anyway, on this day, I did what I usually do and pretended to rummage for something in my trolley for a bit before stopping to watch from a comfortable distance. People don’t mind, I find, so long as I don’t come too close. Or rather, I think they simply don’t notice me, until, that is, I come too close. On the whole, I think that they pity me, though I wouldn’t really know, they’re also probably a bit repulsed. No one likes a bag lady, after all. But I’ve never had any complaints and the wardens are all nice, so long as I leave the park at night. I’m not actually homeless, though I reckon that is what people think, but I have learnt, for the sake of politeness, to keep my distance from the pristine folk. That’s what I like to call them, all these middle class parents teaching their pretty children the niceties of life. No, they don’t seem to mind, so long as I keep at least a good few feet between them and me.
         Sometimes, though, our pathways cross, and then I can feel them pull in their breath, smiling tightly even as they do so, to show that they do not mind. But they do of course. They mind a lot that my clothes could usually do with a bit of a wash, as could my hair, that my face has the broken veins of an alcoholic. It’s understandable, really, though there are days when it hits home and I feel sad and bitter but on the whole I give them the wide berth that they desire. To be honest, it’s easier that way.
         Oh, but I’m getting maudlin now and losing the sight of what I’m trying to say which is simply that if I hadn’t been hovering just out of reach and pretending to be absorbed in the contents of my bag, then I would never have looked around and noticed the woman sitting on the bench, the one that shelters under the wall of the secret garden and looks out over the pond. She was, after all, hardly noticeable, hidden in a pair of baggy jeans and a dark-coloured fleece, sitting as quiet as a shadow. She seemed hunched up against the world and was looking at something on her lap. I went back to looking at the child, surrounded by her squabble of ducks, and was quite ready to forget all about the silent woman on the bench.
The mother started to nudge her child away from the pond and the scene, for me, was over. I took the handle of my trolley and started walking along the path towards the pond, the path that would also, had I thought about it, lead me towards the other woman. I walked slowly, looking at the patterns in the asphalt beneath my feet, listening to the rumbling of my trolley’s wheels and the fading singsong notes of the mother’s voice. At some point, I looked up to check on the sate of the sky and whether there was rain on its way and it was then that I noticed that the bench was empty and the woman moved away. More out of habit than interest, I scanned the park to see where she’d gone and eventually spotted her, small and dark on the other side of the pond. She was crouching by the side of the water, which meant that she must have climbed over the railing, and seemed to be staring at something out on the water. I couldn’t tell quite what was holding her gaze but I remember thinking that everything around her was so completely still that it could have been a picture. Only the branches of the trees, reflected in the silken water, rippled gently under an invisible breeze. And then she just got up and walked away up the hill and out of sight.
         I don’t suppose I’d have thought about her ever again if I hadn’t seen her in exactly the same position and attitude just one week later. But there she was, on precisely the same bench, hunched over her lap and writing something onto a piece of paper that she was holding down against the wind. This time I decided to keep my eye on her so I took a path that would lead me towards a bench that I knew would allow me to see her without appearing to watch. And I waited.
         For a while she just sat there, curled over her paper and cut off from the world, just as she had been before, but eventually she sat up, briskly and without warning, lifting up her head and looking around. The paper was flapping in her hand, silently from where I was sitting, while she sat, exquisitely still, looking up at the sky.
         A pigeon flew across her line of vision and she returned her gaze to the piece of paper she was holding. She did nothing for a moment or two and then slowly started to fold it, carefully, or so it seemed to me, until it was small enough and solid enough to hold in the palms of her hands. She fiddled with it for a bit then got up and walked over to the far side of the pond, carrying it in her right hand. She swung her legs, one after the other, over the low iron fence, a strangely balletic movement in the yellow light of evening and took a single step towards the edge of the water. She crouched, leaning her arms on the inside of her thighs, holding the folded paper in both hands between her knees and stayed there in perfect stillness before slowly raising the folded piece of paper up to her lips and kissing it.
         Now, I know I wasn’t very close, and the light was starting to fail, but I swear, just before she floated the paper off onto the pond, that’s precisely what she did. And she did it beautifully too, as though she were speaking in whispers in a church, reverent and hopeful within some kind of a dream. And once the kiss was over, she placed the paper on the blackened water and gave it a little flick. And it was then that I saw that she had made her sheet of paper into a boat and launched it in a tiny ceremony and now, from our different vantage points, we both watched it twist and shiver on invisible currents, before it finally settled in and drifted away from the shore. After a minute or so she got up, climbed back over the railings to walk away from the pond and out of sight.