Ga terug naar waar je vandaan komt

I went back to where I came from.

It looked very familiar. Well, it would; it’s where I came from. The street was built in the 1950s to help house the population explosion after the war when people were living in prefabs and needed houses. But the hill here at this end of it is ancient, was here all along way before any town and has a Gaelic sounding name which, translated into English, means the hill of the yew trees. The townspeople where I come from started using this hill as a cemetery about two centuries ago and they did this until a crematorium got built out of town next to the psychiatric hospitals, and this was a prizewinning cemetery when I was a child, it won awards for being nice to visit, its marble war memorials and the coiffed leafy paths leading round them, its oldest graves from the 1800s deep in the trees up its sides and across its peak, then down below between neat paths spreading round the foot of the hill in widening circles like rings in water the newer graves, so many of our neighbours, people I’d known at school, the graves too of my own parents in there now.

So I stood for a while at the cemetery gate next to the sign telling visitors like me the opening and closing times.

Then I glanced away from it back down the street. I know the curve in this street like you know without knowing a curve deep in your own bones.

But it was now more than half a century since we’d all grown up here. I knew nobody in those houses now, not a single person, and was sure there’d be nobody living on this street any more who’d know me if they saw me or remember anything at all about us living here for all those years.

I was idly thinking this when I sensed something moving close to me, just behind me, like a dog or a cat, something wilder, maybe a fox.

Whatever it was, now it was almost alongside me at the edge of my vision, hanging slightly back.

I stopped. It stopped too.

It was a – what?

It was a very large very lightweight empty kind of a wheel, no, a circular tube of what looked like plastic, about as high as my waist. It was bright green, garish green, phosphorescent high-vis green.

It looked very like a hula hoop.

But how could a hula hoop, with no person near it, stop like that by itself next to me on the pavement at exactly the same time as I stopped? How could it, when it stopped moving, even still be standing balanced upright like that?

It defied logic.

Could someone remote control a hula hoop?

Probably. You could remote control anything and everything now. I mean, given social media you can even remote control people.

I looked all round me. The only place, for instance, that anyone could be hiding with a remote control was behind the bus shelter.

I started walking towards the bus stop. The green ring started up too, rolling along again next to me, just behind me, by itself.

But when I got to the bus shelter and looked over the fence there was no sign of anyone hiding behind it or anywhere near it.

There was no one else anywhere on the street.

So I scanned the windows in the houses all round me for someone, anyone, watching.

That long thin window there, high up on the end house next to the bus shelter – the house that was our own old home – that was once our window. We used to stand at it on the upstairs landing next to the pot plant, watching for the bus to town to appear at the top of the road so we wouldn’t have to wait standing out in the cold.

Monstra, was that what those plants were called?

Or had our mother just called it this because she really disliked that plant?

No, it wasn’t the plant she disliked, it was the brittle plastic pot that the plant had come in. One day she’d told me to get rid of that pot. What should I do with it? I’d said, and she’d shrugged and told me I could take it down to the end of the garden and throw stones at it for all I care. This was so unlike our mother, so vividly flippant a thing for her to say, that I’d laughed out loud at her, then she’d laughed too, and remembering this all the years later standing outside our old house with its new people inside it I laughed out loud again.

I could see out of the corner of my eye that the round green ring following me, was sort of shrugging on its curve very like it was laughing too.

You can laugh, I said. You’re going to outlast us, outlast me, by centuries.

I went to take the hoop in my hands. It backed off slightly, like it thought I might hurt it. Then it paused, changed its mind, leaned slightly forwards as if to let me. I picked it up.

Its astonishing lightness!

All it was was a bright green plastic tube, no clear beginning and no clear end. Original 1960s? Its only differentiating mark was a very lightly raised but near-invisible seam running along the inner rim, I could feel the line of it with my thumb, where the plastic that made it had been sealed in the mould in whichever factory it came from, wherever in the world.

It had that place’s old air inside it.

I held it up above my head. I looked through it at the sky. I moved it down in front of me, saw through it the roof of the house we’d once called ours.

I held it up above my head. I looked through it at the sky. I moved it down in front of me, saw through it the roof of the house we’d once called ours.

Then I didn’t know what else to do with it, really. I mean, I’d been useless at it hula-hooping half a century ago when I was a kid and supposed to be good at stuff like that. I was unlikely to be better at it now. Plus, I have some pride.

So I held it out in front of me quite formally. I held it like a window or picture frame, looked along the length of where I’d come from through it, one way, then the other. Then I put it down on the pavement again.

It stood, impossible, upright.

I walked past the house I’d grown up in, the house we’d all grown up in. I did this walking like any stranger on any street.

The plastic ring rolled itself along just behind me, complete, slight, bright green, light green.

When I got to the place where the street we’d lived in became the next street the green ring paused like a dog, a cat, some creature politely chaperoning someone unknown across a territory until they come to the invisible place that this territory naturally ends and another territory begins.

I crossed the road away from where I came from.

It stayed on the street behind me, open, empty.

O.