Monday 23 November 2009
Friday 13 November 2009
Thursday 5 November 2009
Shelf-space
This is a tragedy, but I’ll try to keep it light. I got a job. Not a tragedy in itself, but we will get to that. The job was in the north. The far north. Beyond the far north. The isles beyond the northern most tip of the mainland. I really just wanted out of the city so had been applying for jobs in the western islands, the highlands and, yes, the northern isles, and this was the only success. I was sure it said in the advert that relocation expenses would be met, so it was a real pain when they told me that there was no cash for someone to move to a job as lowly as the one I was taking. They didn’t put it like that, obviously. So, if you were rolling in money and taking a job up there where you might be rolling in even more money; they would pay your expenses. If you didn’t have two pennies to rub together, well, tough, pay your own way. The theory was that they should hire locally for the kind of job I’d be doing, but, then, if they could’ve, they would’ve. I mean that since they had been unable to get someone local, then they should have been willing to help me out with the move. That’s fair isn’t it? Not that I had much. Living in a rented, furnished flat, I wasn’t moving beds, Welsh dressers or ottomans or dining tables with six matching chairs. No absurdly large sofas, no big bits of technology. Sounds a little Spartan. I even had the landlady remove a two-seater sofa because it was more than I needed, she replaced with an armchair. A pink armchair.
The only real possessions I had were books. The hall was full, the living room and bedroom pretty much full too. I did have some other stuff: small television, CD player, bits and bobs. But books were the main thing. So I called up a movers and asked them how much to shift my stuff and nearly dropped the phone. What, are they using Rolls-Royces to shift people’s possessions? Porsche pantechnicons?
No way could I afford that. I don’t drive and didn’t know anyone who could hire a van and would put that much effort into driving all that way as a favour, even a paid favour, to me. Maybe should have socialized more instead of having my head stuck in a book all the time. But then I wouldn’t need someone to help me move all these books.
There were a few second-hand bookshops not far from the flat. I’d occasionally had to sell the odd book now and then when flat broke, though other times I made myself flat broke spending my last few pounds on a book. But this was going to be wholesale slaughter. Retail slaughter.
I thought that I could save the poetry, those slim volumes , you can get a lot of them in a suitcase. But the fiction would suffer a fate worse than verse.
I decided that I would sell all the books at one shop. It was bad enough having to sell them without hawking them around several places. It is a cruel and harsh world where a simple working man can’t even keep his books. I could just imagine a passer-by deriding the guy with the bag of books…’what good did they ever do you? Your head is full of tales and your pockets full of nothing‘. Ah, the old ‘do not read poems; read timetables’ line. Well they trashed the public transport systems anyway, a timetable now might as well have been written by Lear for all its realism, Edmund I mean, not King…I’d get an arm about his neck in a half-kidding, half-serious half-nelson and tell him that these books had changed who I was, had played their part in making me who I am, what I am…’yeah’, he’d say, ‘ someone who can’t afford to keep his books.’ I’d gracefully pick up the bag of books and go on my way, maybe quoting something appropriate under my breath. Remember to look something up that I can memorise easily.
I chose the likeliest shop, the one that sold the kind of thing I was selling. I filled a bag and made the first trip. It didn’t help that this shop was run by the glummest bunch you could meet. It always seemed strange to me, twenty years or so I’d been coming here and it was the same three or so people running it. How could a small second-hand bookshop provide a living for these three? And miserable like a wet afternoon on early-closing day in Dunoon. Do they still have early-closing days? Is there still a Dunoon?
On the way to the shop, I thought it was like the film the ‘March of the Penguins‘…the British with the Scotts, as usual, making up a large contingent, English and Irish, no Welsh, sorry, the French, including one very large miserable figure and half a dozen Parisian types who seemed to be marching in tight patent-leather shoes, a Knight of Spain, confused, the Russians, a mix of prince, pauper, radical and criminal, the Americans, some in trench-coats, some in jeans, even one with a wooden leg , and a couple of others with hats pulled low very camera-shy, you couldn’t see their faces at all, I think they liked it that way. There was non-fiction too. What an unpoetic term, I suppose that’s the idea. Most were reprints, histories of the second world war. I didn’t feel too bad about moving those along, after all, they were just about mass slaughter rather than the depths of souls. The war books went unbought, they weren’t interested in reprints. So they ended up in Oxfam, which was a bit ironic what with them being about aid for those countries we fight our wars in now so as to avoid destroying all our lovely European real estate, art galleries and all that. But the fiction they gobbled down. The staff usually hung around in a little sitting room area at the back of the shop, leather armchairs, standard lamp, there for staff only, none of this friendly nonsense of chain stores. I’d dump the bag and affect interest in the nearest shelves. Then, obviously, start seeing things I’d have to resist buying. Turn round and the rejects are at one side. I’d have taken this, he said, but the pages are loose. Damn, should’ve noticed that, glued it up. So The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution’, ends up Oxfambound. After a few selling trips over a week or two, the shop began to resemble my own flat before the clear-out began. I thought that maybe I could wander downstairs one day and hide somewhere, come out after closing and sit in one of those armchairs, read a few pages each of those books that were once mine. But with my luck, I would stumble into a sub-basement that would be part of a salt-mine. I’d be forced to work there with only the thought of the great novel I would write about my experience if I ever got free. I think salt-mines came to mind because the staff always seemed a bunch of old Stalinist types, the last leaves on a withered tree, who had set up the shop with the last monies in the kitty, before throwing in the towel against steroid suffused capitalism. The fat cats won out; they’d bought the judges.
At this point a sister or two…actual sisters, not like dames out of Hammett or Chandler, started saying that they would have stored books in their attics, but them broads! they waited until the books were gone before making the offer. Now the flat seemed twice as large and far smaller at the same time.
So now I’m far away in a practically bookshop-free town. I have one bookcase. One! there is a suitcase of books at dad’s which is divesting its contents on each visit, and purchases are slowly beginning to repopulate the shelves. Next time I might just rob a bank to keep the books with me.
This happened a year or so ago. They’ll all be gone now, the books I sold, they will have flown off the shelves like racing pigeons from coops at the start of the race. I should be glad, I suppose, that people are discovering some of those writers now, those novels, individual pages, single lines that change your life forever.
The only real possessions I had were books. The hall was full, the living room and bedroom pretty much full too. I did have some other stuff: small television, CD player, bits and bobs. But books were the main thing. So I called up a movers and asked them how much to shift my stuff and nearly dropped the phone. What, are they using Rolls-Royces to shift people’s possessions? Porsche pantechnicons?
No way could I afford that. I don’t drive and didn’t know anyone who could hire a van and would put that much effort into driving all that way as a favour, even a paid favour, to me. Maybe should have socialized more instead of having my head stuck in a book all the time. But then I wouldn’t need someone to help me move all these books.
There were a few second-hand bookshops not far from the flat. I’d occasionally had to sell the odd book now and then when flat broke, though other times I made myself flat broke spending my last few pounds on a book. But this was going to be wholesale slaughter. Retail slaughter.
I thought that I could save the poetry, those slim volumes , you can get a lot of them in a suitcase. But the fiction would suffer a fate worse than verse.
I decided that I would sell all the books at one shop. It was bad enough having to sell them without hawking them around several places. It is a cruel and harsh world where a simple working man can’t even keep his books. I could just imagine a passer-by deriding the guy with the bag of books…’what good did they ever do you? Your head is full of tales and your pockets full of nothing‘. Ah, the old ‘do not read poems; read timetables’ line. Well they trashed the public transport systems anyway, a timetable now might as well have been written by Lear for all its realism, Edmund I mean, not King…I’d get an arm about his neck in a half-kidding, half-serious half-nelson and tell him that these books had changed who I was, had played their part in making me who I am, what I am…’yeah’, he’d say, ‘ someone who can’t afford to keep his books.’ I’d gracefully pick up the bag of books and go on my way, maybe quoting something appropriate under my breath. Remember to look something up that I can memorise easily.
I chose the likeliest shop, the one that sold the kind of thing I was selling. I filled a bag and made the first trip. It didn’t help that this shop was run by the glummest bunch you could meet. It always seemed strange to me, twenty years or so I’d been coming here and it was the same three or so people running it. How could a small second-hand bookshop provide a living for these three? And miserable like a wet afternoon on early-closing day in Dunoon. Do they still have early-closing days? Is there still a Dunoon?
On the way to the shop, I thought it was like the film the ‘March of the Penguins‘…the British with the Scotts, as usual, making up a large contingent, English and Irish, no Welsh, sorry, the French, including one very large miserable figure and half a dozen Parisian types who seemed to be marching in tight patent-leather shoes, a Knight of Spain, confused, the Russians, a mix of prince, pauper, radical and criminal, the Americans, some in trench-coats, some in jeans, even one with a wooden leg , and a couple of others with hats pulled low very camera-shy, you couldn’t see their faces at all, I think they liked it that way. There was non-fiction too. What an unpoetic term, I suppose that’s the idea. Most were reprints, histories of the second world war. I didn’t feel too bad about moving those along, after all, they were just about mass slaughter rather than the depths of souls. The war books went unbought, they weren’t interested in reprints. So they ended up in Oxfam, which was a bit ironic what with them being about aid for those countries we fight our wars in now so as to avoid destroying all our lovely European real estate, art galleries and all that. But the fiction they gobbled down. The staff usually hung around in a little sitting room area at the back of the shop, leather armchairs, standard lamp, there for staff only, none of this friendly nonsense of chain stores. I’d dump the bag and affect interest in the nearest shelves. Then, obviously, start seeing things I’d have to resist buying. Turn round and the rejects are at one side. I’d have taken this, he said, but the pages are loose. Damn, should’ve noticed that, glued it up. So The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution’, ends up Oxfambound. After a few selling trips over a week or two, the shop began to resemble my own flat before the clear-out began. I thought that maybe I could wander downstairs one day and hide somewhere, come out after closing and sit in one of those armchairs, read a few pages each of those books that were once mine. But with my luck, I would stumble into a sub-basement that would be part of a salt-mine. I’d be forced to work there with only the thought of the great novel I would write about my experience if I ever got free. I think salt-mines came to mind because the staff always seemed a bunch of old Stalinist types, the last leaves on a withered tree, who had set up the shop with the last monies in the kitty, before throwing in the towel against steroid suffused capitalism. The fat cats won out; they’d bought the judges.
At this point a sister or two…actual sisters, not like dames out of Hammett or Chandler, started saying that they would have stored books in their attics, but them broads! they waited until the books were gone before making the offer. Now the flat seemed twice as large and far smaller at the same time.
So now I’m far away in a practically bookshop-free town. I have one bookcase. One! there is a suitcase of books at dad’s which is divesting its contents on each visit, and purchases are slowly beginning to repopulate the shelves. Next time I might just rob a bank to keep the books with me.
This happened a year or so ago. They’ll all be gone now, the books I sold, they will have flown off the shelves like racing pigeons from coops at the start of the race. I should be glad, I suppose, that people are discovering some of those writers now, those novels, individual pages, single lines that change your life forever.
Thursday 22 October 2009
Cats and X-rays
Three days in and he was bored out of his skull. Appropriate enough, he thought, as I’m surrounded by them. He didn’t just mean those on the necks of his colleagues; but the images of thousands of x-rays and cat scans in the filing room that he was now working in, a windowless department of a big city hospital.
Skulls, tibia, fibula, ulna, radius. He could picture little girls reciting the words in some playground skipping game: Skulls, tibia, fibula ulna, radius, phalanges, vertebra, patella. Tibia, from the word for flute because they used to use them to play on. That’s some good recycling, he thought, picturing now a couple of honeys tootling out a tune on his leg bones after his death. Maybe before, he mused, if, say, he was in a terrible accident and lost his lower legs, which were immediately rendered down and sent off to the flute factory. Could happen. He didn’t mind the bone; but the thought of pictures of soft tissues made him feel a bit off. The term, too, ‘soft tissues’, like there was something clean and hard about the bone stuff and something ineradicably gelatinous and disgusting about the other.
He was soon filing in his sleep. He asked his manager if he could claim overtime pay for this and she said ‘In your dreams,’ which was a bit predictable, he thought, before planning how to fill out the necessary paperwork while asleep.
He overheard the porters…naw, she’s a Rain Man. So no conversation for the porters like loquacious taxi drivers. What kind of way is that to talk about someone? Bleedin’ troglodytes, porters…only football could interest them…..small of stature and mainly tattooed, but that wasn’t fair, some were kind in their foul-mouthed manner, maybe less scary than smooth-talking and icily polite doctors.
Trying to find a file he thought that maybe they should have a photograph of the patient on the cover like the back cover of a novel. Herein is some of the work of a particular genius, but the novels would nearly all be horror stories, grand guignol, ‘orrible murders..
Passing the time when sorting files by making up bands…lots of James Browns…they don’t feel good.
Ghost shadows on smoky film. The underlit filing room seemed to take on the smoky dimness of the films as if they were leaking. The management didn’t want to spend money on new lights because they knew the whole place was soon to be history..
As he searched for one film or another he thought that, given the city’s ageing population, it is no surprise that many of the names are seen now as old-fashioned. Men seem nearly all James or John; women, Margaret, Jessie, Jeannie. One day the Jades and Ashleys, Deans and Waynes will conjure up the image of aged faces. Others stand out; a Scaramangas One man is named for the battle of Cambrai; or a summer idyll spent there, but no, he was born in 1918.
Names of colours black brown grey white green…no-one called purple or tope or beige. Mr Camel meet Mr. Teal. People called glass wood steel…how come steel and no brass or bronze? No iron? That statue of bronze that came to life…Talos…in the stacks. People as colours and things. A couple of people with the surname Hailstones!)
As he moves among the stacks he thinks of the myriad radio, television, cell phone waves passing through him and the stored images. Perhaps future technology will be able to pick up his image on those films, if any are still to be found.
The youngest girls talk of their nightly boozing. One asks him, during an argument with her friend over who looks the youngest; what age she is. He knows she is twenty-one but thinks she looks twenty-five, the drink already beginning to take its toll, but says fifteen to keep her happy, meanwhile thinking that she has the mind, not the face, of a fifteen- year- old. She says, one day, that she is looking forward to going home to a long bath. He tells her that, given her shape, a wide bath might be better. She just laughs because she knows there isn’t anything wrong with her shape.
At tea breaks, some go out to smoke, some to collect chairs and place them in a corridor with a view of the outside world. To be more exact, it is a view of the Victorian cemetery; the Necropolis, the city of the dead. He thinks that passers-by must think them all fixated with death, but they just want to see some sky. The horizon is heavy with mausoleums.
The swishing noise of the trolleys’ rubber wheels on corridor floors like water rasping past a boat’s prow…the stretched out passenger, often hollow- cheeked, oblivious, seeming closer to death than life, the trolley a boat, the corridor the Styx, the porter Charon. He went home and continued his reading of The Iliad.
He heard someone advise on how to book a patient for an MRI, Magnetic Resonance Imaging. They should ask the patient if he or she had ever worked with metals, usually it was men; men who’d worked in heavy engineering before most of it went west or more accurately, east, the shipyards and foundries, the works producing engines and ships and big stuff for the oil industry. If they’d ever had a bit of metal in the eye they couldn’t get the MRI because the fragment would heat up and blind them. And women were told not to wear make-up because it sometimes had traces of metal in it and it could fry the face aff ye missus.
As the autumn drew on the whole thing became more depressing. He only had one pair of boots and they squeaked horribly. He couldn’t walk down a corridor without people looking up, back, round. Patients waiting to be x-rayed or CT’d watched him pass to the accompaniment of cacophonous squeaks. Maybe, he thought it will take their mind of the procedure and what it might reveal, just for a few seconds. Squeak squeak; one year, squeak, squeak; six months, squeak, squeak; don’t even bother going home. It got to be too much and he changed to a seasonally inappropriate pair of rubber soled trainers. Now he could catch them all unawares.
He managed to keep a check on his boredom. The angry young man had long become an irritated ageing one. One day, though, it was just like old times. He managed to lose it with a woman over the source of the River Tay.
‘Near Balloch? I don’t think so. More likely Loch Tay, don’t you think?’
She knew she was wrong, turned to another worker and started to ask her wasn’t it irritating the way that this one always had to be right?
He couldn’t stand being discussed as if he wasn’t there. And also couldn’t stand people being wrong about the source of rivers. So he told her to shut it and not address him again, nor even mention his name to anyone, to do some work for a change and stop peering round her computer at him like some stupid fat owl. His voice and face went very tight, vision blurred and blood drained from his face. Why do some faces go red with rage and some white?
He didn’t want to rag-doll anyone. In fact, he wasn’t sure what the term meant. ‘It’s when you take the piss out of someone, give them a really hard time, like kicking around an empty track-suit’, he was told.
He rag-dolled the river woman when she wasn’t there. Made jokes that would long survive his presence and be quoted against her. The river woman wasn’t popular. Like when she claimed that she’d been sitting on a beach in Turkey and some young local lads had thought she looked like Princess Di. Like she had actually expected anyone to believe that! Balloch!
As the digitalisation progressed the file-room got ever quieter. The workers themselves seemed to become obsolete, analogue, as anomalous as a ticking clock on a spaceship Some were wiped, left and weren’t replaced.
He felt some regret for the film. He realised one day that they reminded him of the films he had printed from when he worked, years before, in a photographic lab., pictures he printed from large-format glass negatives donated by shipbuilders to the museum of ships…warships on sea-trials swiftly moving down the river dark and dangerous outlined against the snow-covered hills. Images of creaking ribs and plates long rusted to nothing. Others were of the rich interiors of ocean-going liners showing wood-panelled walls, fine carpets, and enormous hothouse plants all to make the ship seem a gentleman’s London club and not a frail ship on a savage sea.
On his last day it rained heavily. As he walked up the corridor which connected the old hospital with the new buildings and which was lined on either side by windows streaming with rain, he held his black, wet, unfurled folding umbrella to one side. He noticed that ahead of him were several people similarly carrying black, wet, unfurled folding umbrellas, a line of them, the short dark umbrellas loosely pendent and dripping onto the corridor floor. It was like a procession of warriors returning from battle, the severed heads of their enemies swinging from one hand.
Skulls, tibia, fibula, ulna, radius. He could picture little girls reciting the words in some playground skipping game: Skulls, tibia, fibula ulna, radius, phalanges, vertebra, patella. Tibia, from the word for flute because they used to use them to play on. That’s some good recycling, he thought, picturing now a couple of honeys tootling out a tune on his leg bones after his death. Maybe before, he mused, if, say, he was in a terrible accident and lost his lower legs, which were immediately rendered down and sent off to the flute factory. Could happen. He didn’t mind the bone; but the thought of pictures of soft tissues made him feel a bit off. The term, too, ‘soft tissues’, like there was something clean and hard about the bone stuff and something ineradicably gelatinous and disgusting about the other.
He was soon filing in his sleep. He asked his manager if he could claim overtime pay for this and she said ‘In your dreams,’ which was a bit predictable, he thought, before planning how to fill out the necessary paperwork while asleep.
He overheard the porters…naw, she’s a Rain Man. So no conversation for the porters like loquacious taxi drivers. What kind of way is that to talk about someone? Bleedin’ troglodytes, porters…only football could interest them…..small of stature and mainly tattooed, but that wasn’t fair, some were kind in their foul-mouthed manner, maybe less scary than smooth-talking and icily polite doctors.
Trying to find a file he thought that maybe they should have a photograph of the patient on the cover like the back cover of a novel. Herein is some of the work of a particular genius, but the novels would nearly all be horror stories, grand guignol, ‘orrible murders..
Passing the time when sorting files by making up bands…lots of James Browns…they don’t feel good.
Ghost shadows on smoky film. The underlit filing room seemed to take on the smoky dimness of the films as if they were leaking. The management didn’t want to spend money on new lights because they knew the whole place was soon to be history..
As he searched for one film or another he thought that, given the city’s ageing population, it is no surprise that many of the names are seen now as old-fashioned. Men seem nearly all James or John; women, Margaret, Jessie, Jeannie. One day the Jades and Ashleys, Deans and Waynes will conjure up the image of aged faces. Others stand out; a Scaramangas One man is named for the battle of Cambrai; or a summer idyll spent there, but no, he was born in 1918.
Names of colours black brown grey white green…no-one called purple or tope or beige. Mr Camel meet Mr. Teal. People called glass wood steel…how come steel and no brass or bronze? No iron? That statue of bronze that came to life…Talos…in the stacks. People as colours and things. A couple of people with the surname Hailstones!)
As he moves among the stacks he thinks of the myriad radio, television, cell phone waves passing through him and the stored images. Perhaps future technology will be able to pick up his image on those films, if any are still to be found.
The youngest girls talk of their nightly boozing. One asks him, during an argument with her friend over who looks the youngest; what age she is. He knows she is twenty-one but thinks she looks twenty-five, the drink already beginning to take its toll, but says fifteen to keep her happy, meanwhile thinking that she has the mind, not the face, of a fifteen- year- old. She says, one day, that she is looking forward to going home to a long bath. He tells her that, given her shape, a wide bath might be better. She just laughs because she knows there isn’t anything wrong with her shape.
At tea breaks, some go out to smoke, some to collect chairs and place them in a corridor with a view of the outside world. To be more exact, it is a view of the Victorian cemetery; the Necropolis, the city of the dead. He thinks that passers-by must think them all fixated with death, but they just want to see some sky. The horizon is heavy with mausoleums.
The swishing noise of the trolleys’ rubber wheels on corridor floors like water rasping past a boat’s prow…the stretched out passenger, often hollow- cheeked, oblivious, seeming closer to death than life, the trolley a boat, the corridor the Styx, the porter Charon. He went home and continued his reading of The Iliad.
He heard someone advise on how to book a patient for an MRI, Magnetic Resonance Imaging. They should ask the patient if he or she had ever worked with metals, usually it was men; men who’d worked in heavy engineering before most of it went west or more accurately, east, the shipyards and foundries, the works producing engines and ships and big stuff for the oil industry. If they’d ever had a bit of metal in the eye they couldn’t get the MRI because the fragment would heat up and blind them. And women were told not to wear make-up because it sometimes had traces of metal in it and it could fry the face aff ye missus.
As the autumn drew on the whole thing became more depressing. He only had one pair of boots and they squeaked horribly. He couldn’t walk down a corridor without people looking up, back, round. Patients waiting to be x-rayed or CT’d watched him pass to the accompaniment of cacophonous squeaks. Maybe, he thought it will take their mind of the procedure and what it might reveal, just for a few seconds. Squeak squeak; one year, squeak, squeak; six months, squeak, squeak; don’t even bother going home. It got to be too much and he changed to a seasonally inappropriate pair of rubber soled trainers. Now he could catch them all unawares.
He managed to keep a check on his boredom. The angry young man had long become an irritated ageing one. One day, though, it was just like old times. He managed to lose it with a woman over the source of the River Tay.
‘Near Balloch? I don’t think so. More likely Loch Tay, don’t you think?’
She knew she was wrong, turned to another worker and started to ask her wasn’t it irritating the way that this one always had to be right?
He couldn’t stand being discussed as if he wasn’t there. And also couldn’t stand people being wrong about the source of rivers. So he told her to shut it and not address him again, nor even mention his name to anyone, to do some work for a change and stop peering round her computer at him like some stupid fat owl. His voice and face went very tight, vision blurred and blood drained from his face. Why do some faces go red with rage and some white?
He didn’t want to rag-doll anyone. In fact, he wasn’t sure what the term meant. ‘It’s when you take the piss out of someone, give them a really hard time, like kicking around an empty track-suit’, he was told.
He rag-dolled the river woman when she wasn’t there. Made jokes that would long survive his presence and be quoted against her. The river woman wasn’t popular. Like when she claimed that she’d been sitting on a beach in Turkey and some young local lads had thought she looked like Princess Di. Like she had actually expected anyone to believe that! Balloch!
As the digitalisation progressed the file-room got ever quieter. The workers themselves seemed to become obsolete, analogue, as anomalous as a ticking clock on a spaceship Some were wiped, left and weren’t replaced.
He felt some regret for the film. He realised one day that they reminded him of the films he had printed from when he worked, years before, in a photographic lab., pictures he printed from large-format glass negatives donated by shipbuilders to the museum of ships…warships on sea-trials swiftly moving down the river dark and dangerous outlined against the snow-covered hills. Images of creaking ribs and plates long rusted to nothing. Others were of the rich interiors of ocean-going liners showing wood-panelled walls, fine carpets, and enormous hothouse plants all to make the ship seem a gentleman’s London club and not a frail ship on a savage sea.
On his last day it rained heavily. As he walked up the corridor which connected the old hospital with the new buildings and which was lined on either side by windows streaming with rain, he held his black, wet, unfurled folding umbrella to one side. He noticed that ahead of him were several people similarly carrying black, wet, unfurled folding umbrellas, a line of them, the short dark umbrellas loosely pendent and dripping onto the corridor floor. It was like a procession of warriors returning from battle, the severed heads of their enemies swinging from one hand.
Friday 2 October 2009
Rock and Doris
I thought he was developing into a remote control addict, leaping compulsively from channel to channel. He denied it. Said it was art, a modern take on montage. He was a John Heartfield or Hannah Hoch of the disappeared, juxtaposing for mere seconds images that left only a fading flare on the mind’s eye. Nothing to be traded, dealt, gloated over by grasping heirs or predatory capitalists. I still thought he was turning into a remote control addict.
He once told me of a bus journey he had taken from Dublin to Belfast. The driver played the radio all the way. One DJ, well, he wasn’t a DJ because he didn’t play records and he wasn’t a shock-jock because he wasn’t a fool and anyway the term hadn’t been invented then; he was a chatterer, a bit of a comedian. Gerry something. Today he was asking listeners to call in with their stories of remote control addiction. One man told of the self-help group that he attended. They’d sit in a circle and pass around a remote control, learning how to pass it on, give it up without a struggle, and how they would substitute it at home for a pool-cue with which they would change channel, turned off channel-hopping through the sheer inconvenience of the thing. He got a bit tearful. The whole busload of people was killing themselves laughing. He wasn’t sure now if the whole thing wasn’t a joke by Gerry something. Probably. The next caller was a Blackrock woman terrified of spiders and one had turned up in her bath, could Gerry go round and remove it. Gerry was busy, but another woman phoned to say she lived in the same part of Dublin as woman number one and would go round and remove the spider, she not being afraid of them at all. Gerry said stay on the line and we’ll give you that address.
Anyway, back to remotes. The husband had told me that story and yet here he was, self-help groupless, stabbing at the zapper like a mad thing. Then I began to detect a pattern after all. Whenever anything about illness came on he couldn’t move fast enough to change the channel. Didn’t matter if it was to a home makeover programme, or, as they seem to want us to call them ‘show’, like in America, and a series is to be a ‘season’ like a string of hospital dramas are as momentous as spring.
Anyway, it could be that or hymns from unfeasibly full churches or even a party political broadcast, no matter, as long as it was a refuge from SARS or CJD (Human Variant), which sounds like an android. Even Parkinson rather than Parkinson’s, which amount to much the same thing in my book.
Then the newspaper. Usually he would read it right through, excepting the obviously too boring stuff: cars; travel, business; most sport; most lifestyle; gardens; ads; small ads; births and deaths. All right, so he missed out quite a lot, but he defended himself by saying that the car stuff was just advertising, even when criticising one car, it was only to promote another. Travel was all about white middle-class English people and their amusing mishaps, promoting the sacking of ‘undiscovered corners’ by rapacious readers, sandaled locusts. There’s an image. Grasshoppers in espadrilles. The business pages were just crime reports with the perpetrators getting away with it, usually, or actually rewarded, knighthoods for services to the fridge industry. Eat your heart out, Lancelot. The other ignored stuff was mainly padding, cul-de-sacs for has-beens and never-wases.
So it was front page, home news, international, letters, editorials, columns and the remaining sport. And the crossword. Then it changed. Now it was just the football results. Those and the crossword. No matter how long it took, he would study the clues; get angry they beat him.
Mercury’s hat, he told me, is called a ‘petasus’, worked it out with only a little help from his smaller classical dictionary. Then came ague. Obscure illness that has dropped five. Four letters. Ague. Easy enough, went unfilled. As did any other clues with poor health. Crossword abandoned. Keep Out notice.
I like crime novels but have never felt that interested in complication for its own sake. I can’t be bothered with following the plot where Poison X only works if the 13.20 from King’s Cross arrives at Little Deducing before Virgo is in conjunction with the MCC breaking for tea. I’m more into Chandler’s belief that when the story gets too complicated, have a man walk into the room with a gun.
My man walking into a room with a gun moment was when…hold on, let me backtrack a little (the gunman begins to open the door, hesitates, and retreats, closing the door gently). One day we were walking into town. It was very busy and people constantly had to dance/manoeuvre past one another; the hands extending to the side, shoulder and head movement denoting which way they intended to waltz onward. Often with that little polite, pursed-lip smile. But on one occasion, my husband did that other look; the one small men do when manoeuvring past much taller men, the sideways look-away, sudden interest in the far-off, ok you’re tall but I could nip in and give you a few in the bread-basket before you knew what hit you, ok Lofty? look.
Only it wasn’t that look. It was a get me out of here look. A something has appeared that I do not wish to be around look. The tall man had a jaw destroyed by cancer. The husband would have jumped aboard a passing bus full of ravenous tigers to get away. That was a big clue I suppose, but the moment when the hesitant gunman made it into the room was one morning when I had started at the sight of him.
‘What’s up?’
I pointed at his left eye. ‘Your eye looks all bloody. Like you’ve been scrapping in the street except there’s no bruising.’
He checked it in the mirror and said that if he got off to the doctor’s before nine, he’d be seen without an appointment. That night he returned with eye drops and an appointment at the eye department of the Royal; the Princess Alexandra Eye Pavilion.
‘Have you ever heard a dafter name? Pavilion! Princess Alexandra! It makes eye-doctoring sound like a sport. One for toffs. Russian toffs. Romanovs on horseback! No doubt ol’ Alex’ll be there, in the outpatients, swinging her eye-mallet… “out of the way, serfs. My eye!” ‘Course, it’s all down to some snivelling little bureaucrats, sook up to the establishment with a name like that and they confer some piddling little so-called honour that you can impress everybody at the golf club with.’
He didn’t seem bothered about the eye, apart from being self-conscious at having to wear sunglasses when it wasn’t that sunny, felt like a poser. It came to me that he wasn’t overly bothered about his own health. He was suffering from hypochondria all right, but it was a kind of hypochondria by proxy, a variation of the Munchausen thing. He began to worry if I had the slightest thing, a sniffle, sore throat, anything at all. How thoughtful, you think, but it didn’t feel that way. It felt more like I was a car newly bought and anxiously examined every five minutes by the owner for the tiniest mark, given the half-closed knife tour, slow and deliberate, is that a scratch? And he still turned the page or changed the channel if illness was the theme.
Can you beard a lion? That sounds like the phrase, but it sounds a bit silly and I’m sure that it’s not meant to. I cornered him one day in the kitchen. By the toaster.
‘Is there something you’re not telling me? Healthwise? Mine or yours, I’m not sure which. Whom. Who. Anyway, what’s going on? Are you sick? Am I?’
They don’t still do that, do they? Tell the spouse and not the, eh, other spouse? How can you leave a few exquisite watercolours behind, if you haven’t been warned in time to learn how to paint? In watercolour?
He just stuffed his mouth full of toast, mumbled something about me still being in dreamland and took his tea through to the front room, turned on the television news.
I shouted after him. ‘Is it your eye? If you need to get an eye-patch, you’ll look just like…’ I couldn’t think of anyone with an eye-patch at that moment. Except Nelson. And I was trying to think of someone less heroic. Or exciting, like a pirate. And maybe that would have hexed him. Ended up with him losing an arm or getting a wooden leg. From sustainable forest timber, hopefully.
One day I came home and he had managed to get it down on paper. Or at least tried to. I won’t quote him straight, that wouldn’t be right. It’s like books of people’s letters, you feel a bit strange reading them, like you’re hanging over the author’s shoulder as he writes, a ghostly presence, where he should be the ghost as he is the one who is dead, probably. Though I suppose there are plenty of writers who have every intention that their letters should be published as another proof of their genius. Even when they demand that their executor burns all their work, they have innocently chosen an executor who is pyrophobic. Not sure there is such a word, but you know what I mean.
Anyway he told me how his own ageing, likelihood of illness, possibility of catastrophe and certainty of death didn’t bother him unduly, he could handle it. How sometimes when he was about to fall asleep, he thought that he wouldn’t really mind if he never woke up. Each night he would dream the same dreams, as familiar as well-thumbed novels. What do you call a novel that no longer is?
What was far worse for him, to him, was the idea of me becoming ill, diseased, changing from one being to another in front of him even just through ageing, transformed from a graceful aspen in the breeze to a gnarled, lightning-struck old chestnut. That image is mine, not his. The cheek. How he would never be able to think of me other than as I ended up through calamity or just being alive for longer in the world. How he didn’t want his memory to rewrite how we were at first together, on holiday, walking down the street, in our first home. He couldn’t escape from the idea that what I was to be would backwardly transform what I had been, his memory would have him as a young man in love with whatever blighted specimen it was my fate to become. He didn’t say ‘blighted specimen’, that’s another of mine. It was a dread that was invading his mind like a malignant, no, the other word for a weed you can’t get rid of, pernicious, a pernicious weed with its roots threading throughout his idea of us, me, him and the space that was to be filled by our personal cataclysm, and there was no pill, book or doctor that would change the situation.
He’d left me.
Maybe it’s a bit like when Rock Hudson was dying. He didn’t want people to know about his disease because he said that that would then dominate how people would remember him, not through his films. And he was right. Like now. He wanted his movies to stay with people, not the reality. And this from someone, God bless him, with a very self-deprecatory opinion of himself as an actor, of his films. He wanted Rock and Doris to live on, Pillow Talk where the pillow stays white as the driven snow and as cold. All those films that they keep tying to remake but can’t because we’re all so much more cynical.
So my Rock wanted his Doris in a movie, ninety minutes of not getting old, or damaged, or dead. He didn’t get sick, he was a Rock that crumbled for fear that I would. Doris in decay, had her day, gone away. Except I’m not.
And, of course, I have the certain knowledge that I will live to one hundred and three, nary an ill day, never an unfortunate collision between me and the planet or the objects on it, not a hair shall be stirred from its place other than romantically on wild Atlantic shores. My mind will put razor blades to shame. Men seem to have that need, the escape route, the hidden track into the hills, the ship taking on hands for a great adventure. Most make do with voyaging the library shelves, but some think they can do better. It’s childish, but I didn’t make them, I don’t accept any blame. He has gone and the space left behind is wavering, becoming part of the everyday. It has been like throwing away an old copy of Peter Pan. Now I can do the crossword without having to undo all his solutions that aren’t, and quicker than he ever managed. Mercury’s hat and all.
Sunday 27 September 2009
Walker
I walked a good few miles in Marwick and Sandwick today. I took a lot of photographs along the cliffs but have uploaded this. The last couple of miles on the road, this walker was ahead of me. I like the image as he reached the top of the hill. He had a ponytail, a leather satchel and a magic staff; he may have been a wizard.
The last I saw, he was heading for Stromness as I reached the Bridge of Quholmslie.
That was as far as I went; I can't cross running water.
The Death of Alan Daw
Iain was the first to realise that Alan was missing. The whole crowd is here but him, he thought, or should that be ‘he’? Anyway, gossip and laughter, the usual hubbub lacking only Alan’s ebullient contributions. Iain glanced over his shoulder. Not there either. He started to feel a little concerned. It was an unwritten law that everyone got together at day’s end; a short period every evening when problems could be shared, adventures related and gags groaned over. Iain couldn’t remember Alan ever missing the evening blether. Should he go and look for him? It would be dark soon; if he was going to search, it had better be right now. He spread his black wings and launched himself from his perch on the highest branch of the ancient tree.
He banked to the left and spiralled downward around the tree, checking each branch, hoping Alan was perhaps huddled silently by the trunk, maybe in a huff about something or feeling a bit off-colour. The air hummed over each black feather, Ian’s mind subconsciously checking to ensure that all was well, like a driver listening to a thousand engines. No Alan. He veered off toward the Abbey. Flying vertically, he swept past a lighted window, startling a woman who had been looking out into the gathering darkness.
It was unlikely, but perhaps his friend was on the roof; had given the gathering a body-swerve and gone straight to roost. Methodically, he checked each eave, each chimney-pot, especially the one in which Alan had been born, right next to Iain’s own birthnest.
A gloom thicker than the evening was setting on Iain. He flew back to the sycamore and consulted with the colony elders. Consternation spread from branch to branch, laughter being replaced by a worried muttering.
By now darkness had settled in and made itself comfortable. Pipistrelle bats winged silently while looping out their sound nets, young tawnies made a laughable hash of the solemnity of hooting. But the Colony was cheerless. No search was possible until first light, many hours away. Iain tried to sleep and managed a little, but only disturbed by dreaming of the single full-grown dead jackdaw he had seen. The previous winter he had come across Eilidh Jackdaw, frozen beneath a red oak. She had seemed to merely be sleeping, but her nightblack plumage was cobwebbed by frost, a cage from which she seemed uninterested in escaping. But Eilidh was old and died in the depths of winter: this was summer and Alan was young. Hopefully. Still.
It was decided by the Elders in the morning, that enquiries should be made of other colonies and kinships, and everyone was given their instructions. It seemed to Iain that, young as he was, he was chosen to be sent to non-‘daws as a way to avoid embarrassment to the more venerable Colony members; that the envoys would fail and bring the Colony into some disrepute as badly-run and a bit wayward. But as a junior member, he could not turn down his assignment, and his discomfiture hardly mattered if there was a chance of tracking down his friend.
It was barely worth asking the Singers for information. Their heads were full of song and sex, thoughts of how to improve their performance in both fields and how poor their neighbours were at either. They were too busy to notice anything of anything else, but would be questioned on the off-chance. The magpies, known as ‘the Motley Crew’, disliked being questioned, denying knowledge of anything as a matter of principle. More likely to be of help were the more sensible and responsible woodpigeons and the rooks. The pigeons were nearer so Iain turned to them first.
They were usually to be found on the wide Abbey lawns. Their solemn demeanour led to their being known as ‘the Bishop’s Conference’. Portly and garbed in muted but impressive vestments, they seemed to walk the lawns in search of spiritual enlightenment rather than base food. They never expressed irritation at the raucous jackdaws, but would sigh as the Colony tumbled overhead, and continue their cogitations, wings clasped behind their backs.
Iain did not know the correct procedure in approaching such dignified figures, so he merely bounced down onto the lawn in front of the nearest Bishop. He was regarded with quiet surprise.
‘My word, young ‘daw, such energy at such an early hour! You will not be so spry at my age, you can be sure of that.’
‘Us ‘daws are just naturally spry your worsh…sir. Even the elders. I did not mean to make you jump, but we are missing a young friend of mine, Alan Jackdaw, and I was wondering if you or any of your colleagues may have noticed him?’
‘We do not notice too much, young ‘daw, as we stroll these hallowed lawns. Our minds are on a higher plane. Or food. But I will most certainly ask my associates if they have noticed anything untoward in regard to your friend. What does he look like?’
‘Eh…black, sir,’ said Iain, realising at the question that his enquiry was pointless, the Bishops only noticed the jackdaws, he realised, as they might dead leaves blown across the sky above the abbey, woods and lawns. But, being a courteous young ‘daw, he thanked the Bishop and flew back to the sycamore to make a brief report before visiting his next assigned group, the rooks.
The rooks were a much different kettle of fish to the woodpigeons, thought Iain, and an image of a woodpigeon and a rook gazing into a steaming potful of fish almost made him grin. They were cousins of the jackdaws, its true, but were regarded by them with a mixture of amusement and respect. The rooks were known as the Society of Advocates. The name had spread from the clan of ‘daws that lived in the spire of St Giles’ Cathedral, from their sharp observance of centuries of black-gowned lawyers issuing from the neighbouring courts and gathering in knots on the cobbles far below. Just like rooks in looks and just like rooks in behaviour too. The human rooks seemed to have vanished but the real rooks, the real McCaw, had too many pressing cases in hand to disappear. They could be found in small clusters in fields, deep in legalistic discussions, brows furrowed and only missing the red-tape bound papers of their human counterparts tucked under their wings. Less amusing, though, was the fact that these disputations were not always without consequence. Occasionally, an advocate might be struck off and sent in exile from the colony. Such a thought sent a shiver down Iain’s spine.
The Society of Advocates met in a muddy field beyond the river and Iain had only to fly for a few minutes before he could see them below, fustian blending with the soil. He glided down nervously, aware that many beady eyes would be observing his approach. Iain knew that the rooks’ court held no jurisdiction over him, yet the knowledge did not seem to help.
He landed a respectful distance from the court and waited to be called. Some minutes passed and a rook approached at a dignified pace. Iain realised that although these birds were cousins, they were somewhat cousins at several removes. This rook seemed awfully tall. His legs were heavily trousered in feathers, making Iain feel exposed and childish, just a kid in shorts. The rook had a face that appeared to be composed of very ancient parchment, as if pages of decaying old law-books had stuck to it as the old rook peered short-sightedly into their depths.
‘Have you an appointment? No?’ The rook was a little displeased but cheered up on noticing an injudicious leatherjacket that had popped out of the ground by his foot. A swift bob and it was gone. He is now wearing that leatherjacket, thought Iain, or is it wearing him? Confusing, concentrate. Iain explained the reason for his visit. The advocate nodded a few times, listening intently while gazing into the distance over Iain’s head. He flapped his wings as if plunging about for a handkerchief. But he aint, thought Iain, rooks don’t use ‘em.
‘We will certainly look into this for you. I should think that an investigation could be up and running within four to six weeks. Depending on the availability of personnel, of course, everyone has a very heavy caseload at the moment.’
Iain would have thought that he was being teased if it were not for the well-known fact that rooks are humourless.
‘Your wayward friend will prob’ly have turned up long before then, I wager, having put us to lots of bother.’
‘What bother if you haven’t begun your investigation?’
The advocate raised his eyebrows at the impertinence of the young 'daw, or at least Iain thought that he did, it can be difficult to detect when a rook raises his eyebrows.
‘Meetings will have been rearranged, schedules disrupted, confabs confused! Our diaries are set months ahead.’
Papershufflers! Desk jockeys! Red tape wranglers! Quill quiverers! Iain tried to content himself with thinking up a series of derisory names for the august body of advocate rooks
He tried to forage a little on his way home. He had eaten nothing all day, but had little appetite. He checked in at the evening meet, no news of Alan, made his report to the elders and then turned in early. Already he was aware of rumours in the colony…Alan had left to join a more prestigious clan or he had fallen for a young ‘daw from elsewhere and mated out. But that was just crazy talk. Abandoning the colony was almost unheard of and Alan loved it here, you’d have to break his wings, his legs to keep him from home. He tried to settle down to sleep. For such a young ‘daw, Iain had quite a decent roost. In the lee of a large chimney and sheltered by corners of slate and lead, it was a comfortable spot. But tonight the wind got up something fierce. It tore around the roof, the chimneypots keened dully, the woods boomed like a maddened sea. Iain, sleepless, gazed at a large moon occasionally hidden by hastening, ragged cloud. His pale blue eyes seemed to hold onto a little moonlight whenever the shadows fell.
Soon after daybreak Iain set off again. The rest of the colony watched him go. They would search too, but the general opinion was that Alan was dead, they would find, if anything, only his corpse.
Iain headed out over the woods. They stretched for hundreds of wingbeats around. As he flew, he kept an eye out for big sparrowhawk. The missus hawk. Her husband wasn’t anything to worry about but she, she would rip your wings off as soon as spit. He did not notice the large black shape that dogged his path.
He was resting on an oak branch when he heard the voice. It was low and appeared to come from several directions at once, even from within his own skull.
The voice said, ‘Young jackdaw, you will never find your friend in this land. He has long reached Farflight.’
Iain could now make out the speaker. A large lustrous carrion crow sat on a branch a couple of wingbeats above and behind him, the sun beyond making it difficult to see his features. But he sounded old.
‘I have been informed of your search. You should have come to me first.’
The last words carried a note of amusement, the creature knew that a young ‘daw would fly a mile rather than approach a carrion crow.
Farflight. Iain’s beak made an absurd clopping sound as he tried to say something, anything to hide his fear. The crow shrugged his shoulders a little, his plumage shifting like an oversized, borrowed greatcoat.
‘My name is Aleister Crow. It is a name with which you may be familiar?’
Iain tried to nod his head, tried to say that he had, but could not.
‘Cat got your tongue? No mind. If you can stir your little wings, I can show you the remains of your kinsman.’
Iain thought for a moment that he was in the middle of a very nasty dream. That he was at his roost and not transfixed on a branch being told of the death of his best friend by the most infamous member of the Coven, the collective name for all carrion crows. But the moment passed, and Aleister Crow remained real, corporeal, a dense fragment of feathered ill-luck.
‘Follow me and stay close, Mrs Sparrowhawk has just given up on her latest diet.’
Iain took his advice. Two wingbeats of his own for every one of Crow’s soon took its toll and he was relieved when they arced down to an alder by the river. Below them on the river path was a young human. Iain was puzzled at the creature’s plumage, broken browns and greens, until he realised that the human was trying to look like the woods, like a woodcock blending with bracken.
‘Watch what he does.’
The human slowly pointed a long object toward a robin singing powerfully on a hawthorn.
‘Watch yourself, young Robbie!’ Aleister Crow rapped out in his allaround voice.
The robin jumped and disappeared into the bushes as the object held by the human made a tremendous crack. The branch that the robin had sat on splintered.
Iain found his voice, ‘What do you call that object?’
‘Some call it a thunderstick, and some, the branch that kills, but I find it simpler to call it a twenty-two. This human used it to kill your friend.’
Iain felt a shiver go through him, a shiver totally different from the one that helped him wake up on a frosty morning. The human’s face twisted on missing the robin, and he scanned the trees for his target or the noisy crow that had scared it off. But he was unable to penetrate the shadows with his paltry human vision.
Aleister said, ‘He’ll keep. Follow me.’
Within a hundred wingbeats they had stopped again. Crow said nothing, merely nodded groundward, his eyes remaining on Iain.
Alan lay on a deer-path below. Still as a rock. There were no signs of injury, no wing broken on wire or wall, no decapitation by hawk.
Crow seemed to read Iain’s mind. ‘The twenty-two throws a tiny fragment like a hard little pebble into the target. I’ve put some rowan leaves around him. Nothing like rowan leaves for a warning to keep off.
Iain barely understood what Crow was talking about. He sat and considered the carcase of his friend.
‘This day is going to get worse before it gets better’, said the crow, ‘you have never, I assume, carried out the necessary ritual on a departed kinsman?’
No, he hadn’t. But to Crow’s surprise, the young ‘daw dropped from the branch and landed gently by Alan. And plucked out his dead blue eyes.
This would allow a bond to remain between Alan and the clan, allow him to see a little, through Iain’s eyes, of the lives of his friends and family when he wished, from Farflight, where all birds’ understanding goes when the body fails.
Above him, Aleister Crow looked impressed in spite of himself.
As Iain had dropped through the air he wondered how he would feel on ingesting his dead friend’s eyes. On doing so, he felt invigorated; happy that Alan had, in a way, been brought back to the colony, would be able to laugh at the jokes and tricks of the clan at play.
It began to rain. Waterdrops like tiny bones began to clatter off every leaf in the wood. Millions of snaps, clicks that filled Iain’s head and drove out thoughts of Alan, clan and even Crow. It grew heavier and shook Iain from his trance. Crow indicated with a sweep of his wing that Iain should follow and plunged into the open, ignoring the elements. Iain wished that he was a raven, because they can fly in the rain without being touched by a single drop. Within moments they were in sight again of the human, now more bush-like than ever with his collar up and a hat pulled low down his face peering out like that of a pig trapped in a holly.
‘We can catch up with him again’, said Crow, ‘see ya’. He disappeared into the murk.
Iain flew home and told the elders what had happened. They were grim at the news and talked of how such things were once common, the humans with the loud sticks, the lines of the fallen strung barbarously on fences.
‘Nor is it a good thing, young ‘daw, that you have been in the company of Aleister Crow. He is not fit company for any self-respecting jackdaw. The Society of Advocates have a file on him as fat as a Bishop’s arse. We know that most humans mean us no harm and so we deign to treat their roofs as our own, but the carrion crows hold them only in great contempt. Wickedness from humans is no excuse for wickedness from jackdaw nor crow neither. As long as you live on our roof, you must abide by our rules, and a prime one is: No fraternisation with Aleister Crow!’
The chief jackdaw’s term of office would be over by the new moon, but Iain guessed that the next elder to serve would be just as strict on the subject of Crow. The young jackdaw had a feeling that Crow would not be easily ignored, and had a nagging temptation to seek out the crow and seek his aid in avenging the slaying of Alan.
As he flew from the Abbey the next day, it did not seem to him entirely accidental that he saw Crow winging across the parkland and into the cover of an enormous lime tree. It was as if Crow knew that Iain would want to see him and was casually making himself available. But this did not occur to the naïve young jackdaw as he glided on Crow’s path into the cavern of lime leaves.
The lime tree stood isolated on the grass. It had an air of secrecy about it; the air of an uncharted island on a green ocean where the great beeches, ships in full sail, could see the island but not approach it. Inside the island tree the light was almost submarine, filtered into greenness. It took Iain a few moments for his eyes to adjust. He felt more like a frog in a pond than a bird in a tree. The trunk and branches were covered with a powdery stuff like green soot, which helped to muffle to almost nothing all outside sounds, few as they were. Iain decided that he preferred the black soot on the chimney- pots of his home.
Crow’s words were made flat, uninflected and stripped of the undercurrent of amusement that Iain had detected in his previous meeting.
‘It is doubtless that you have been warned against associating with such a blackguard as myself. Yet it was obvious to me from watching you fly that you desired a meeting, something in the dip of a shoulder, a hesitant turn. Different to the clumsiness of a merely youthful and inexperienced aviator. I think that the death of your friend has revealed to you that the world is no mere playground.’
Crow, sitting on a branch near to its meeting with the trunk, reached out a foot and crushed a shield bug, then flicked the remains into the gloom below.
‘A human, long ago, described life, human life, as encapsulated in that period when a bird flies out of the night through a window, across a firelit hall, and into the night again through a window opposite. A few moments of light, vision, in surrounding depths of darkness, blindness.
For us birds, the humans, probably, if they were to think on it at all, think the hall a very narrow one, the firelight flickering and dim. But, of course, we fly in night as well as day, our existences not constrained by mere human understanding of it.
So it is most vexing when one of them crushes one of us as I did that bug. The little creature’s myriad family might wish to avenge him, though I doubt they think much of that kind of thing, and if they did I think that they would be incapable. We, on the other hand, wing, are very capable. Do you wish vengeance? Shall the human suffer?’
Iain began to speak and immediately halted, shocked at the sound of his voice in the dead still air. It was as if his voice had been changed just as he had been changed by Alan’s death. He realized that the choice given him by Crow was just the latest in millions of choices made by every creature every day and night, largely without even recognizing the fact. An image came into his head. He was standing on the lawn in front of one of the huge beeches in an autumnal gale. As the wind stripped the tree of its thousands of leaves, he had to identify which would be the next to be torn away. If he chose wrongly he would die. Then memory intruded, the memory of the moment before plunging from the abbey roof on his first flight. He had practised for that, short flight-hops from chimney to chimney, and watched friends and family make the leap, had been coaxed and encouraged by his parents. But this trial was to be endured alone. Alone but for the shade of his dead friend and the presence of the dread Aleister Crow. There can be only one maiden flight.
‘Well, Iain Jackdaw? Shall we go a-hunting?’
‘As he aims I can stoop upon him- a brush of the wing on his right cheek and he turns, I pluck with a peck his eye from its orbit. Swallowing it will give me insight into the human ways. Humour. Aqueous. Do you get the joke? No, I think my humour goes over your head. The insight is real enough but it fades with time.’ He glowered down at the jackdaw below him.
‘It is something I have done before. Without the eye he will be unable to kill. You might object that he will simply use the other eye, but humans are peculiar, they seem weaker on one side than the other, their hands for example, if they were birds, they would fly only in circles. Strange creatures.’
Iain knew that the elders did not lightly try to restrict the activities of the colony. Adventurousness, curiosity, were elements to be encouraged, the means by which new sources of food were found, new dangers to be given a wide berth. A colony of jackdaws that turned inward, that looked away from the world, was likely to have its collective head torn from its shoulders by a passing goshawk.
Crow was no jackdaw-killing hawk, but at the same time he appeared just as dangerous. The elders and the Advocates must have heard this kind of thing from Crow and his ilk before. Had heard it and rejected it. Yet that had not stopped the human in his destructive ways. What would Alan have done? Satisfaction in putting an end to the human’s evil actions through another evil action would not have been Alan’s way. If he was watching from Farflight now, Iain knew that his friend would be hoping that he would make the right decision, choose the right oak leaf.
‘I will not follow you in this, Aleister Crow. I am not an owl to fly in the darkness that you describe. Vengeance may be something indulged in by your fraternity, but it is not by mine. I will inform the Colony fully of the human’s behaviour. They will tell the Bishops, the Advocates, the Motley Crew, the Singers. Everyone. Perhaps even the unrained on ravens. The human will find the woods a silent and empty world when he walks them, they will reawaken on his departure. Perhaps the silence of his path will allow him to hear a small voice of conscience within. I thank you for bringing me to Alan and thus allowing the ritual of passing to be performed, and now I must return to the clan.’
Pompous little twit, thought Crow, as he watched Iain fly off abbeyward, that little jackdaw needs some devil in him. This reminded him of a poem. He struggled to remember the title, narrowing his eyes in thought, “The Jackdaw of Reims”, that was it. Impressed by his own feat of memory he flew off in search of the human.
He banked to the left and spiralled downward around the tree, checking each branch, hoping Alan was perhaps huddled silently by the trunk, maybe in a huff about something or feeling a bit off-colour. The air hummed over each black feather, Ian’s mind subconsciously checking to ensure that all was well, like a driver listening to a thousand engines. No Alan. He veered off toward the Abbey. Flying vertically, he swept past a lighted window, startling a woman who had been looking out into the gathering darkness.
It was unlikely, but perhaps his friend was on the roof; had given the gathering a body-swerve and gone straight to roost. Methodically, he checked each eave, each chimney-pot, especially the one in which Alan had been born, right next to Iain’s own birthnest.
A gloom thicker than the evening was setting on Iain. He flew back to the sycamore and consulted with the colony elders. Consternation spread from branch to branch, laughter being replaced by a worried muttering.
By now darkness had settled in and made itself comfortable. Pipistrelle bats winged silently while looping out their sound nets, young tawnies made a laughable hash of the solemnity of hooting. But the Colony was cheerless. No search was possible until first light, many hours away. Iain tried to sleep and managed a little, but only disturbed by dreaming of the single full-grown dead jackdaw he had seen. The previous winter he had come across Eilidh Jackdaw, frozen beneath a red oak. She had seemed to merely be sleeping, but her nightblack plumage was cobwebbed by frost, a cage from which she seemed uninterested in escaping. But Eilidh was old and died in the depths of winter: this was summer and Alan was young. Hopefully. Still.
It was decided by the Elders in the morning, that enquiries should be made of other colonies and kinships, and everyone was given their instructions. It seemed to Iain that, young as he was, he was chosen to be sent to non-‘daws as a way to avoid embarrassment to the more venerable Colony members; that the envoys would fail and bring the Colony into some disrepute as badly-run and a bit wayward. But as a junior member, he could not turn down his assignment, and his discomfiture hardly mattered if there was a chance of tracking down his friend.
It was barely worth asking the Singers for information. Their heads were full of song and sex, thoughts of how to improve their performance in both fields and how poor their neighbours were at either. They were too busy to notice anything of anything else, but would be questioned on the off-chance. The magpies, known as ‘the Motley Crew’, disliked being questioned, denying knowledge of anything as a matter of principle. More likely to be of help were the more sensible and responsible woodpigeons and the rooks. The pigeons were nearer so Iain turned to them first.
They were usually to be found on the wide Abbey lawns. Their solemn demeanour led to their being known as ‘the Bishop’s Conference’. Portly and garbed in muted but impressive vestments, they seemed to walk the lawns in search of spiritual enlightenment rather than base food. They never expressed irritation at the raucous jackdaws, but would sigh as the Colony tumbled overhead, and continue their cogitations, wings clasped behind their backs.
Iain did not know the correct procedure in approaching such dignified figures, so he merely bounced down onto the lawn in front of the nearest Bishop. He was regarded with quiet surprise.
‘My word, young ‘daw, such energy at such an early hour! You will not be so spry at my age, you can be sure of that.’
‘Us ‘daws are just naturally spry your worsh…sir. Even the elders. I did not mean to make you jump, but we are missing a young friend of mine, Alan Jackdaw, and I was wondering if you or any of your colleagues may have noticed him?’
‘We do not notice too much, young ‘daw, as we stroll these hallowed lawns. Our minds are on a higher plane. Or food. But I will most certainly ask my associates if they have noticed anything untoward in regard to your friend. What does he look like?’
‘Eh…black, sir,’ said Iain, realising at the question that his enquiry was pointless, the Bishops only noticed the jackdaws, he realised, as they might dead leaves blown across the sky above the abbey, woods and lawns. But, being a courteous young ‘daw, he thanked the Bishop and flew back to the sycamore to make a brief report before visiting his next assigned group, the rooks.
The rooks were a much different kettle of fish to the woodpigeons, thought Iain, and an image of a woodpigeon and a rook gazing into a steaming potful of fish almost made him grin. They were cousins of the jackdaws, its true, but were regarded by them with a mixture of amusement and respect. The rooks were known as the Society of Advocates. The name had spread from the clan of ‘daws that lived in the spire of St Giles’ Cathedral, from their sharp observance of centuries of black-gowned lawyers issuing from the neighbouring courts and gathering in knots on the cobbles far below. Just like rooks in looks and just like rooks in behaviour too. The human rooks seemed to have vanished but the real rooks, the real McCaw, had too many pressing cases in hand to disappear. They could be found in small clusters in fields, deep in legalistic discussions, brows furrowed and only missing the red-tape bound papers of their human counterparts tucked under their wings. Less amusing, though, was the fact that these disputations were not always without consequence. Occasionally, an advocate might be struck off and sent in exile from the colony. Such a thought sent a shiver down Iain’s spine.
The Society of Advocates met in a muddy field beyond the river and Iain had only to fly for a few minutes before he could see them below, fustian blending with the soil. He glided down nervously, aware that many beady eyes would be observing his approach. Iain knew that the rooks’ court held no jurisdiction over him, yet the knowledge did not seem to help.
He landed a respectful distance from the court and waited to be called. Some minutes passed and a rook approached at a dignified pace. Iain realised that although these birds were cousins, they were somewhat cousins at several removes. This rook seemed awfully tall. His legs were heavily trousered in feathers, making Iain feel exposed and childish, just a kid in shorts. The rook had a face that appeared to be composed of very ancient parchment, as if pages of decaying old law-books had stuck to it as the old rook peered short-sightedly into their depths.
‘Have you an appointment? No?’ The rook was a little displeased but cheered up on noticing an injudicious leatherjacket that had popped out of the ground by his foot. A swift bob and it was gone. He is now wearing that leatherjacket, thought Iain, or is it wearing him? Confusing, concentrate. Iain explained the reason for his visit. The advocate nodded a few times, listening intently while gazing into the distance over Iain’s head. He flapped his wings as if plunging about for a handkerchief. But he aint, thought Iain, rooks don’t use ‘em.
‘We will certainly look into this for you. I should think that an investigation could be up and running within four to six weeks. Depending on the availability of personnel, of course, everyone has a very heavy caseload at the moment.’
Iain would have thought that he was being teased if it were not for the well-known fact that rooks are humourless.
‘Your wayward friend will prob’ly have turned up long before then, I wager, having put us to lots of bother.’
‘What bother if you haven’t begun your investigation?’
The advocate raised his eyebrows at the impertinence of the young 'daw, or at least Iain thought that he did, it can be difficult to detect when a rook raises his eyebrows.
‘Meetings will have been rearranged, schedules disrupted, confabs confused! Our diaries are set months ahead.’
Papershufflers! Desk jockeys! Red tape wranglers! Quill quiverers! Iain tried to content himself with thinking up a series of derisory names for the august body of advocate rooks
He tried to forage a little on his way home. He had eaten nothing all day, but had little appetite. He checked in at the evening meet, no news of Alan, made his report to the elders and then turned in early. Already he was aware of rumours in the colony…Alan had left to join a more prestigious clan or he had fallen for a young ‘daw from elsewhere and mated out. But that was just crazy talk. Abandoning the colony was almost unheard of and Alan loved it here, you’d have to break his wings, his legs to keep him from home. He tried to settle down to sleep. For such a young ‘daw, Iain had quite a decent roost. In the lee of a large chimney and sheltered by corners of slate and lead, it was a comfortable spot. But tonight the wind got up something fierce. It tore around the roof, the chimneypots keened dully, the woods boomed like a maddened sea. Iain, sleepless, gazed at a large moon occasionally hidden by hastening, ragged cloud. His pale blue eyes seemed to hold onto a little moonlight whenever the shadows fell.
Soon after daybreak Iain set off again. The rest of the colony watched him go. They would search too, but the general opinion was that Alan was dead, they would find, if anything, only his corpse.
Iain headed out over the woods. They stretched for hundreds of wingbeats around. As he flew, he kept an eye out for big sparrowhawk. The missus hawk. Her husband wasn’t anything to worry about but she, she would rip your wings off as soon as spit. He did not notice the large black shape that dogged his path.
He was resting on an oak branch when he heard the voice. It was low and appeared to come from several directions at once, even from within his own skull.
The voice said, ‘Young jackdaw, you will never find your friend in this land. He has long reached Farflight.’
Iain could now make out the speaker. A large lustrous carrion crow sat on a branch a couple of wingbeats above and behind him, the sun beyond making it difficult to see his features. But he sounded old.
‘I have been informed of your search. You should have come to me first.’
The last words carried a note of amusement, the creature knew that a young ‘daw would fly a mile rather than approach a carrion crow.
Farflight. Iain’s beak made an absurd clopping sound as he tried to say something, anything to hide his fear. The crow shrugged his shoulders a little, his plumage shifting like an oversized, borrowed greatcoat.
‘My name is Aleister Crow. It is a name with which you may be familiar?’
Iain tried to nod his head, tried to say that he had, but could not.
‘Cat got your tongue? No mind. If you can stir your little wings, I can show you the remains of your kinsman.’
Iain thought for a moment that he was in the middle of a very nasty dream. That he was at his roost and not transfixed on a branch being told of the death of his best friend by the most infamous member of the Coven, the collective name for all carrion crows. But the moment passed, and Aleister Crow remained real, corporeal, a dense fragment of feathered ill-luck.
‘Follow me and stay close, Mrs Sparrowhawk has just given up on her latest diet.’
Iain took his advice. Two wingbeats of his own for every one of Crow’s soon took its toll and he was relieved when they arced down to an alder by the river. Below them on the river path was a young human. Iain was puzzled at the creature’s plumage, broken browns and greens, until he realised that the human was trying to look like the woods, like a woodcock blending with bracken.
‘Watch what he does.’
The human slowly pointed a long object toward a robin singing powerfully on a hawthorn.
‘Watch yourself, young Robbie!’ Aleister Crow rapped out in his allaround voice.
The robin jumped and disappeared into the bushes as the object held by the human made a tremendous crack. The branch that the robin had sat on splintered.
Iain found his voice, ‘What do you call that object?’
‘Some call it a thunderstick, and some, the branch that kills, but I find it simpler to call it a twenty-two. This human used it to kill your friend.’
Iain felt a shiver go through him, a shiver totally different from the one that helped him wake up on a frosty morning. The human’s face twisted on missing the robin, and he scanned the trees for his target or the noisy crow that had scared it off. But he was unable to penetrate the shadows with his paltry human vision.
Aleister said, ‘He’ll keep. Follow me.’
Within a hundred wingbeats they had stopped again. Crow said nothing, merely nodded groundward, his eyes remaining on Iain.
Alan lay on a deer-path below. Still as a rock. There were no signs of injury, no wing broken on wire or wall, no decapitation by hawk.
Crow seemed to read Iain’s mind. ‘The twenty-two throws a tiny fragment like a hard little pebble into the target. I’ve put some rowan leaves around him. Nothing like rowan leaves for a warning to keep off.
Iain barely understood what Crow was talking about. He sat and considered the carcase of his friend.
‘This day is going to get worse before it gets better’, said the crow, ‘you have never, I assume, carried out the necessary ritual on a departed kinsman?’
No, he hadn’t. But to Crow’s surprise, the young ‘daw dropped from the branch and landed gently by Alan. And plucked out his dead blue eyes.
This would allow a bond to remain between Alan and the clan, allow him to see a little, through Iain’s eyes, of the lives of his friends and family when he wished, from Farflight, where all birds’ understanding goes when the body fails.
Above him, Aleister Crow looked impressed in spite of himself.
As Iain had dropped through the air he wondered how he would feel on ingesting his dead friend’s eyes. On doing so, he felt invigorated; happy that Alan had, in a way, been brought back to the colony, would be able to laugh at the jokes and tricks of the clan at play.
It began to rain. Waterdrops like tiny bones began to clatter off every leaf in the wood. Millions of snaps, clicks that filled Iain’s head and drove out thoughts of Alan, clan and even Crow. It grew heavier and shook Iain from his trance. Crow indicated with a sweep of his wing that Iain should follow and plunged into the open, ignoring the elements. Iain wished that he was a raven, because they can fly in the rain without being touched by a single drop. Within moments they were in sight again of the human, now more bush-like than ever with his collar up and a hat pulled low down his face peering out like that of a pig trapped in a holly.
‘We can catch up with him again’, said Crow, ‘see ya’. He disappeared into the murk.
Iain flew home and told the elders what had happened. They were grim at the news and talked of how such things were once common, the humans with the loud sticks, the lines of the fallen strung barbarously on fences.
‘Nor is it a good thing, young ‘daw, that you have been in the company of Aleister Crow. He is not fit company for any self-respecting jackdaw. The Society of Advocates have a file on him as fat as a Bishop’s arse. We know that most humans mean us no harm and so we deign to treat their roofs as our own, but the carrion crows hold them only in great contempt. Wickedness from humans is no excuse for wickedness from jackdaw nor crow neither. As long as you live on our roof, you must abide by our rules, and a prime one is: No fraternisation with Aleister Crow!’
The chief jackdaw’s term of office would be over by the new moon, but Iain guessed that the next elder to serve would be just as strict on the subject of Crow. The young jackdaw had a feeling that Crow would not be easily ignored, and had a nagging temptation to seek out the crow and seek his aid in avenging the slaying of Alan.
As he flew from the Abbey the next day, it did not seem to him entirely accidental that he saw Crow winging across the parkland and into the cover of an enormous lime tree. It was as if Crow knew that Iain would want to see him and was casually making himself available. But this did not occur to the naïve young jackdaw as he glided on Crow’s path into the cavern of lime leaves.
The lime tree stood isolated on the grass. It had an air of secrecy about it; the air of an uncharted island on a green ocean where the great beeches, ships in full sail, could see the island but not approach it. Inside the island tree the light was almost submarine, filtered into greenness. It took Iain a few moments for his eyes to adjust. He felt more like a frog in a pond than a bird in a tree. The trunk and branches were covered with a powdery stuff like green soot, which helped to muffle to almost nothing all outside sounds, few as they were. Iain decided that he preferred the black soot on the chimney- pots of his home.
Crow’s words were made flat, uninflected and stripped of the undercurrent of amusement that Iain had detected in his previous meeting.
‘It is doubtless that you have been warned against associating with such a blackguard as myself. Yet it was obvious to me from watching you fly that you desired a meeting, something in the dip of a shoulder, a hesitant turn. Different to the clumsiness of a merely youthful and inexperienced aviator. I think that the death of your friend has revealed to you that the world is no mere playground.’
Crow, sitting on a branch near to its meeting with the trunk, reached out a foot and crushed a shield bug, then flicked the remains into the gloom below.
‘A human, long ago, described life, human life, as encapsulated in that period when a bird flies out of the night through a window, across a firelit hall, and into the night again through a window opposite. A few moments of light, vision, in surrounding depths of darkness, blindness.
For us birds, the humans, probably, if they were to think on it at all, think the hall a very narrow one, the firelight flickering and dim. But, of course, we fly in night as well as day, our existences not constrained by mere human understanding of it.
So it is most vexing when one of them crushes one of us as I did that bug. The little creature’s myriad family might wish to avenge him, though I doubt they think much of that kind of thing, and if they did I think that they would be incapable. We, on the other hand, wing, are very capable. Do you wish vengeance? Shall the human suffer?’
Iain began to speak and immediately halted, shocked at the sound of his voice in the dead still air. It was as if his voice had been changed just as he had been changed by Alan’s death. He realized that the choice given him by Crow was just the latest in millions of choices made by every creature every day and night, largely without even recognizing the fact. An image came into his head. He was standing on the lawn in front of one of the huge beeches in an autumnal gale. As the wind stripped the tree of its thousands of leaves, he had to identify which would be the next to be torn away. If he chose wrongly he would die. Then memory intruded, the memory of the moment before plunging from the abbey roof on his first flight. He had practised for that, short flight-hops from chimney to chimney, and watched friends and family make the leap, had been coaxed and encouraged by his parents. But this trial was to be endured alone. Alone but for the shade of his dead friend and the presence of the dread Aleister Crow. There can be only one maiden flight.
‘Well, Iain Jackdaw? Shall we go a-hunting?’
‘As he aims I can stoop upon him- a brush of the wing on his right cheek and he turns, I pluck with a peck his eye from its orbit. Swallowing it will give me insight into the human ways. Humour. Aqueous. Do you get the joke? No, I think my humour goes over your head. The insight is real enough but it fades with time.’ He glowered down at the jackdaw below him.
‘It is something I have done before. Without the eye he will be unable to kill. You might object that he will simply use the other eye, but humans are peculiar, they seem weaker on one side than the other, their hands for example, if they were birds, they would fly only in circles. Strange creatures.’
Iain knew that the elders did not lightly try to restrict the activities of the colony. Adventurousness, curiosity, were elements to be encouraged, the means by which new sources of food were found, new dangers to be given a wide berth. A colony of jackdaws that turned inward, that looked away from the world, was likely to have its collective head torn from its shoulders by a passing goshawk.
Crow was no jackdaw-killing hawk, but at the same time he appeared just as dangerous. The elders and the Advocates must have heard this kind of thing from Crow and his ilk before. Had heard it and rejected it. Yet that had not stopped the human in his destructive ways. What would Alan have done? Satisfaction in putting an end to the human’s evil actions through another evil action would not have been Alan’s way. If he was watching from Farflight now, Iain knew that his friend would be hoping that he would make the right decision, choose the right oak leaf.
‘I will not follow you in this, Aleister Crow. I am not an owl to fly in the darkness that you describe. Vengeance may be something indulged in by your fraternity, but it is not by mine. I will inform the Colony fully of the human’s behaviour. They will tell the Bishops, the Advocates, the Motley Crew, the Singers. Everyone. Perhaps even the unrained on ravens. The human will find the woods a silent and empty world when he walks them, they will reawaken on his departure. Perhaps the silence of his path will allow him to hear a small voice of conscience within. I thank you for bringing me to Alan and thus allowing the ritual of passing to be performed, and now I must return to the clan.’
Pompous little twit, thought Crow, as he watched Iain fly off abbeyward, that little jackdaw needs some devil in him. This reminded him of a poem. He struggled to remember the title, narrowing his eyes in thought, “The Jackdaw of Reims”, that was it. Impressed by his own feat of memory he flew off in search of the human.
Sunday 20 September 2009
The Snowbridge
It always seemed a longer route on the way home. That made sense; he was tired after a long day at the office. It was worth the imaginary extra half-mile, though, better than sitting on the underground train or a bus, gave him the chance to stretch his legs. And, in spite of tiredness, he seemed all the more alert to the scenes around him, a result perhaps, of being a worker in a windowless office of a hospital. He saw dozens of patients a day in wheelchairs or lying on trolleys, come five o’clock he was striding out like he was wearing seven-league boots.
Tonight he noticed how the blue cigarette smoke of the man ahead of him matched the evening colours of the air. He still slowed down though, hating smoke in his lungs. And those two beer cans in an over-crammed bin hanging lopsidedly on a lamp-post; their tops were like a pair of owlets’ faces peering from a tree hole nest.
When he got in the flat the first thing she asked was had he sent that letter?
‘I did, course I did. And before you ask, no, I did not post it in the pillar box at the corner because that is an honourable Japanese warrior and you do not go pushing letters into the mouth of an honourable Japanese warrior.’
‘Honourable! Did you know that the Japanese have a verb that means to test your new sword edge on a peasant met at a crossroads?’
Where had she come up with such a crushing question? He was stunned.
‘Is that so? That’s some verb.’ Playing for time he walked over to the window. She had already pulled shut the curtains. The sofa blocked the way. To save reaching, he picked up a roe deer antler from a shelf and used it to part the curtains.
‘You should have left that in the wood you found it,’ she said, ‘you know, deer eat them for the calcium. Some wee deer is wandering around that wood feeling under the weather because of you, not quite up to the mark, sick in the sitkas, coughing in the conifers.’
‘I should have kept that red deer antler I found, I wouldn’t have to reach so far.’
But he knew that reaching was exactly what he was doing. That was two in a row she‘d zinged back at him. Where was she coming up with this stuff? He peered into the gloomy evening at the back court of the tenement, the bins, the graffiti scrawled back wall of the pub. ‘ We need to leave the big city behind,’ he sighed.
She looked at his broad figure. ‘Talking of the ‘big city behind’ have you quit the gym?’
This was intolerable. He concentrated on the graffiti. ‘You know, I wouldn’t mind that graffiti so much if it was saying something. ‘Peace’, ‘End the War’, ‘Love Is the Answer’. She wasn’t listening, was already in the kitchen. ‘When I were but a radical lad I was out on the beer with a pal one night. I’d a can of spray-paint in my pocket that I’d pinched from an art supply shop, a beautiful shad of blue it was, and even the spray was different, the way it came out, gave the words another way of looking different to other graffiti. So, we’re in the High street and there’s this lovely space of wall between two shops and I said to Stevie to keep a look-out and over I go. He probably thought I was going to do a big anarchy sign, but I put ’ In the society that has destroyed all real adventure, the only adventure is the destruction of society‘. Took a while, especially given it was the High Street. And all cursive, much more attractive than capitals. Stevie was having kittens across the road, me taking so long. It didn’t survive long, though. That kind of challenging stuff never did. Not like that crap up there, been there years, probably will be for more. It’s just egoism, you see, a ’tag’ they call it, like a label on some stupid pair of jeans., no challenge to the power, the Man. So they let it sit up there for years, the Powers That Be. Hey I thought of a new one…’The best place to study twisted logic? Colig!‘. She didn’t hear , had zoned him out. She came out of the kitchen, pots bubbling on the cooker in the tiny space behind her. He turned from the window and she looked at his face. It was a face, she thought, that looked less lived in than slept in.
There was a river quite near the flat. When there was little traffic you could hear the water flowing. He could hear it one evening as he came home a little later than usual, the rush-hour past. He saw her leaving the tenement and turn into the park heading in the same direction as the river flows. It was immediately apparent to him that it was carrying her away. It carried her away a dozen or more times that month.
The gym classes she attended were in that direction, but he saw little evidence that she was shedding any weight, though he did not tell her so. One evening he followed her. She soon came close to the big Victorian building that housed the gym, but she did not go in. The man who walked up to her and clasped her in his arms prevented that.
Hold on, wait a minute, that can’t be right, that’s my wife! What’s going on? No,no, this is a mistake on my part. He felt a little faint. I must have missed her, that’s not her, they must have passed each other in the park and I followed the wrong one. Their paths crossed, that’s it, while I was round a corner or something and I picked up the wrong trail there, fella, the wrong scent, can happen to any tracker, soddin’ darkness, corners, bushes, lamps with no bulbs.
It was her, all right.
He moved across to his left, up onto the lawn of the museum, across the sights of the Lewis gunners of the war memorial. The blank-faced gunner seemed to aim directly at embracing couple on the steps of the Kelvin Hall which housed the gym.. He felt like climbing up there- tapping the soldier on the shoulder- feeding the belt of cartridges through as his mate opened up on the embracing couple, bullets spraying the Old Red sandstone of the Kelvin Hall which housed the gym which she was obviously, now, not attending at all. No wonder she wasn’t looking any slimmer. The lovers were walking away now toward the lights of cafés and bars he walked in parallel, onto the lawn in front of the museum and through the bare cherry trees. Walking with his head turned to one side, ignoring the hazard of tree, of flowerbed or wall, he thought the lovers looked like two strange dark fish in a greenish aquarium until he realized that he was looking through tear-filled eyes.
Over the next few weeks she grew happier and grew more morose. He asked her about it with an innocent air and she said it was all thanks to her great work-outs at the gym.
With the ‘gym’, you mean, ‘gym’ with an ‘I’ at the end, ‘gym’, as in ‘Jimmy’, he could see the words in his head, nonsense crowding out the need to think seriously. And anyway, he wouldn’t be called Jimmy anyway, no-one was anymore.
He began to delay his return from work on her ‘gym days’, would go for a pint, or two, or more than several. I’m going to the State Bar. I’m going to get in a state in the State Bar. I’m stating that I’m going to get in a state in the State Bar. I should’ve stayed in the State Bar. I should have state in bed. That’s the kind of nonsense that’s tired her of me. He had a couple more, drummed farewell on the bar-top and walked home. She’d only liked him in the first place, he had recognised, because she saw him as a broken person. He saw that when he met her ex-boyfriend and recognised another as someone he had known years before. Broken people. Maybe being with her had helped him become less broken and so less interesting. Maybe she had just grown up and got tired of the broken people she had around her, had gone out and found a normal functioning person. Someone he didn’t know, the kind of person he didn’t know, like the people who live in the houses you pass in trains, the houses that have turned their backs on the passing trains and their inquisitive passengers. How do they live, the people who are not me, how can they live? How do they live, the people in far away cars you can only see as moving points of reflected sunlight? He asked the opinion of the samurai post-box, but it just grimaced, he imagined that it was unimpressed by solipsistic passers-by.
It came to a head one night, the first night, the only night of heavy snow that winter. He was in the pub looking out t the street. Well, he couldn’t see the street because of the frosted glass that served as a barrier to vision; that old British custom that saves the impressionable passer-by from seeing into pubs and having their innocent, abstemious heads turned by the visions of bonhomie and jollity within. Or maybe it was the publicans’ idea to stop people seeing all the lonely losers. So he was looking out the top half of the window, the half frost-free at snow, which struck him as faintly amusing as he watched the snowflakes fall slowly by the hanging baskets of plastic flowers. An hour later he was walking home when he realised that she would be going to the gym in an hour or so. He reached their street and bought a newspaper then took up position across the street and down a few doorways from the doorway to their tenement. He inserted earphones and readied a tune on his digital music player, but did not start the little machine. He almost missed her by becoming absorbed in a story about people increasingly becoming allergic to fruit and vegetables. He imagined the street in a few decades. People might be stopping at lamp-post-like feeding-stations to suck on tubes of meat-like pap like some creepy race of two-legged ants as people became ever more alienated from their own planet. The thought was making him feel pretty sick when he noticed her leave. That would make him feel better, thinking of her and her lover. He folded his paper, turned on the music, and followed her through the snow. The tune was from a compilation of film themes, the one he played was from a spy movie from the ‘sixties;’ The Ipcress File.’ He could feel the cold and wet through the thin, cheap leather of his shoes, but that was alright, it made him feel even more like Harry Palmer.
They moved along the road past shops and restaurants spilling different neon colours onto the snow covering the pavements. She turned, as expected, and continued on to Kelvin Way and then right into the part of the park that lies between the university and the art galleries. The snow was getting deeper now and the colour of the light from the streetlamps had changed too, from the blue-white that seemed to complement the snow, to the orange light that seems especially designed to make you think there’s no world beyond the concrete and brick. He thought of how the snow, in his memory, would be whiter than it was here because snow is not orange, even though it is not white either, falling orange, lying orange, it was no less snow and no more or less the ‘right’ than the ‘wrong’ colour, but memory would edit the scene, shift the colour balance to a ‘truer’ rendition, white snow, maybe becoming blue as the darkness deepened.
As they neared the edge of the park he began to hurry, narrowing the gap in a shuffling run. Passers-by noticed, but it was still busy enough for everyone to assume there was no evil intent as he began to catch up with the woman in front of him; there were too many witnesses and anyway, he seemed more interested in the pieces of snow his boots kicked up in front of him, than the woman ahead. What determines the size of those chunks of snow? he wondered. His feet were the same size at each step and the snow of the same consistency, so why did the pieces come in different sizes? Or were they the same as they left his boot caps and only broke up differently? But why would they break apart differently? And what determines the size of raindrops? He realized she would soon be on the main road, but managed to catch up just as she was crossing Old Partick bridge.
‘Hey, wait for me, it’s me, wait a bit.’
’What are you doing out here? Has something happened?’ Have you been home or just in the pub again?’ her voice was muffled, he thought it the snow, but it was the earphones he still had in, though he music had finished.
’The music is over. I have no home. And alcohol is not the comfort it was.’
’So you’re teetotal? And homeless? And the music is over, is it? You’re covered in snow, you look like a snowman mugger. A snowman who mugs, I mean, not a mugger of snowmen.’ This irritating flippancy was, he realized, probably something she had picked up from him. At least she would carry his virus of quippery always.
’I’m just out for a walk in the snow, a little night music and a following of you to meet your boyfriend ‘Jym‘, as I call him, that’s Jim with a ’y’ not an ’i’ , since you say your…well, you get it.’
She leant back on the ornate, spiked iron fence that most people thought gave the bridge charm, but which he was always afraid was going to gouge out his eyes if he stumbled while walking over to look into the river. He always looked over bridge parapets, thought it a necessary thing, though afraid of spikes and stone walls that might crumble and pitch him downward. He reached out and held onto a spike, at least now he was sure exactly where the spikes were.
‘Yes, I’ve known for quite a while now. You and Jym. When I say ‘homeless’, it’s because we’re breaking up, aren’t we?’
She looked away, toward the bell-tower of the University, flood-lit but made ghostly by the curtain of snow.
‘ Did you know that John Betjeman called that a Victorian cake-stand?’ Of course he knew, he was the one who had told her! That and lots of other interesting junk. Of Joseph Conrad drunkenly pitching pebbles into the top hat held by a statue in George Square in a contest with Neil Munro, novelist and newspaper editor, stuff of that sort. Bet Jym didn’t have arcane knowledge like that at his fingertips. If he even had fingertips, probably made do with the knuckles he doubtlessly dragged along the ground.
‘I suppose you probably told me that. It’s something I think I’ll miss, but you can’t really base a relationship on curious facts, you know. Us being together is the most curious fact of all. I’ll ove out, I won’t stay with that view either, though it was better than us moving to some blasted heath with no-one else for miles, Christ I’d’ve done you in in a week.’
Well, if she was going to be like that.
’I’ll manage, thanks, I’ll find someone else, someone with better taste than you have.’
‘It took you long enough to find someone with as little taste as I have, but the best of luck.’
He did not want this to be it, thought of how each word we say to someone brings us one word closer to the last word we will ever say to them. She glanced toward where her new man must be getting impatient.
‘It’s an appropriate place to meet this, on a night like tonight.’
She turned back to him.’Why is that, then?.’
‘Well, this used to be called ‘the ‘Snowbridge’ at one time. See, the fences have gates in them that don’t lead anywhere. They would be opened during a big snowfall and the snow shovelled through into the river, when this was the main road, before they built that,’ he pointed to the big bridge a few metres downstream across which cars and buses still passed, ‘before this one was demoted to just a footbridge. That was when there were still lots of snow every year, not like now, just one or two days and nights of snow lying. There’s a line about that in French..‘where are the snows of yesteryear?’
She smiled. ‘When they opened the gates, it must have made angel’s wings in the snow.’ She used her arms to illustrate the gates’ sweep through the long-gone deep snow.
‘Maybe. Maybe they just opened the gates before it got that deep.’
‘No angels’ wings?’
‘Not then. Not now.’
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘ I better get going. I’ll stay at my sister’s tonight. We can sort everything out tomorrow, next week, whenever suits you. You’ll be alright? No brooding?’
‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll be right as rain. Cold, wet, rain.’ She walked off into the shadows. He looked down into the river. The Kelvin, he thought, from the Gaelic meaning ’stream of the narrows.’
The river was running swiftly, surface unbroken but for one spot by the bank, where an overhanging tree dipped a branch into the water. The current pushed the branch in a curve and when it could go no further, it swept back leaving a dark wake like the sweep of ink from a Japanese artist’s brush. Again and again the ink swept across the paper surface of the river only to be instantly erased.
Saturday 19 September 2009
Friday 18 September 2009
Dispatched
Dispatched
I am not a bad person, I just like beer lots. And you know the price of it these days. Well, alright, it’s never been cheaper, but that’s even worse. Now you can afford to get drunk quicker and your wits depart that much quicker too. You spend what you have and more. I spent the money dad had given me for the vet.
The old man had finally given up on the dog. The old bugger was on his last legs, the dog that is, for ages, but he would never hear of it getting put down while mum was alive. And now she wasn’t. I will remember her last days as if there had been a bumble bee flying around the room, because she had had a little gadget implanted under her skin. Every couple of minutes it would release painkillers into her system with a friendly little, bee-like buzz.
Dad had wanted to keep the dog until she was gone; even though it was no kindness because the dog was racked with cancers as much as mum had been.
So after the funeral, dad said to take the dog top the vet and have her put down, the vet had wanted to do it ages ago so would be only too happy to do it. A mercy. Here’s the money.
I took the dog and the money to the pub and had a few pints and next thing the dog’s still there but the money isn’t. So I took the old dog back to my flat until the next day so I could at least take her to dad’s sober. Me, I mean. Next day I was walking up the road very slowly, partly because I didn’t feel too good, partly because I didn’t want to face dad and partly because the dog couldn’t go very fast; legs knackered, lungs too probably. Poor old thing is always starving, even her digestive system must be gone, food goes straight through her, so I suppose that slows her down too, no energy.
The old man would be mad, take out his grief in anger on me, quite right too, I could hardly blame him. I was walking past a derelict mill site and had to stop. The dog had slumped onto her belly, five minutes recuperation needed at least. For maybe the first time ever, I noticed a carving on the wall; a whatyemaycallit, a mortar and pestle. Which bits which, I can never remember, don’t exactly use them much. I suppose it was there as a symbol of industry, not as one of the mill-workers being ground into dust. The company shut up shop years ago and moved to parts of the world where they don’t have to worry about troublesome newfangled ideas like safety, pollution laws or paying a fair days wage for a fair weeks work. The main mill is gone. It had four cupolas on the corners, green with age. I got on the roof once to take some photographs; the verdigrised domes made it seem like some papal palace.
Standing in a daydream I didn’t hear the voice. A finger poked me on the shoulder.
‘Don’t touch’, I said, ‘I suffer from tactile hallucinations.’
‘You’ll suffer from my boot up your arse if you don’t wake up, yah dozy get.’ Davey MacMillan. Scrawny bugger, biking jacket, rides a clapped-out Kawasaki at great speed with no concern for other road-users. He nodded at the dog.
‘Who’s this, Patch?’
‘It’s a Golden Labrador. Why would it be called Patch?’
‘Golden? More like a sort of washed-out yella. Is he called Yella?’
‘Don’t let my old man hear you call his dog Yella. And he’s a she. Name’s Iona.’
‘You own a?’
‘It’s an island.’
‘There’s an island called ‘you own a’?’
‘It’s off Mull.’
‘There’s an island called Mull?’
He grinned and poked me with a bony finger again.
‘Well, Iona isn’t looking too clever, is she? Maybe you should stick her on a skateboard and wheel her home.’
As if in disgust at having to listen to this, Iona slowly rose and we continued up the road. I told Davey about messing up her big date with the vet.
‘She looks like she’s had a good kick of the ball. How old is she? Fourteen! That’s like eighty in dog years, ninety. That’s like saying she was born when the doggy Queen Victoria was still on the throne.’ This all happened a while back, so he wasn’t far off. I had the image of a doggy Victoria in my head. What breed would she be? King Charles spaniel, I suppose, since he was an ancestor. Big floppy ears sticking out of that old-fashioned bonnet.
Ever the helpful lad, Davey came up with a plan and went off home, he promised to be back soon. I sat on a broken wall and waited, Iona slumped in the shade of the broken masonry. Davey only lived five minutes away so he was soon beck, a holdall slung over one shoulder.
‘Follow me.’ He headed into the waste ground where the mill had stood.
Although the main building was long demolished, some of the smaller buildings still stood. Davey led the way through the wreckage of a stone gateway and up what had been a garden path. It led to a fairly complete and grand looking honey-coloured sandstone house; maybe the home of the mill manager, keep an eye on those feckless workers. Davey stopped and unslung the bag. He unzipped it and took out a shotgun.
‘That’s bloody well sawn-off! What the bloody hell are you doing with a sawn-off shotgun?’
‘Shooting short rabbits? Low-flying clay pigeons? I saw an American film where a guy called it a ‘sawed-off’! Ha! Get it? Sounds like ‘sod off ya bastard’, bang! We’ll finish off old but gold here and be on our way, yer old man’ll never know.’
I was going right off the idea. Fine, it wasn’t costing me anything, but poor old Iona. Could I stand by and watch this?
I told Davey that maybe it was all a bad idea and I couldn’t watch him shoot the poor old bitch.
‘I’ve an idea,’ he said,’ give me the lead.’ He walked up the path and led the dog through the door of the villa. As I made to follow, he put a hand up to stop me and forced close the front door. He shouldered it to shut it as tight as possible. I stood there and the handle of the lead popped out of the letter box.
‘Grab hold.’
I took it and stood there. I heard Davey walk further up the hall. Silence. Click. Boom. Pigeons erupted through the upper windows.
The severed end of the lead slithered through the letter box, dangled from my hand, it was bloody . I chucked it into the weeds and walked off.
Davey got the jail soon after for robbing his local shop, the one he bought milk and cigarettes in. He wore a ski-mask but they knew him right off, the girl went to school with his little sister, daft bastard.
The honey-coloured house was turned into expensive flats when the site was developed. I don’t suppose any bloodstains show on the walls of the hallway as the residents walk out of a morning to their flash cars.
I am not a bad person, I just like beer lots. And you know the price of it these days. Well, alright, it’s never been cheaper, but that’s even worse. Now you can afford to get drunk quicker and your wits depart that much quicker too. You spend what you have and more. I spent the money dad had given me for the vet.
The old man had finally given up on the dog. The old bugger was on his last legs, the dog that is, for ages, but he would never hear of it getting put down while mum was alive. And now she wasn’t. I will remember her last days as if there had been a bumble bee flying around the room, because she had had a little gadget implanted under her skin. Every couple of minutes it would release painkillers into her system with a friendly little, bee-like buzz.
Dad had wanted to keep the dog until she was gone; even though it was no kindness because the dog was racked with cancers as much as mum had been.
So after the funeral, dad said to take the dog top the vet and have her put down, the vet had wanted to do it ages ago so would be only too happy to do it. A mercy. Here’s the money.
I took the dog and the money to the pub and had a few pints and next thing the dog’s still there but the money isn’t. So I took the old dog back to my flat until the next day so I could at least take her to dad’s sober. Me, I mean. Next day I was walking up the road very slowly, partly because I didn’t feel too good, partly because I didn’t want to face dad and partly because the dog couldn’t go very fast; legs knackered, lungs too probably. Poor old thing is always starving, even her digestive system must be gone, food goes straight through her, so I suppose that slows her down too, no energy.
The old man would be mad, take out his grief in anger on me, quite right too, I could hardly blame him. I was walking past a derelict mill site and had to stop. The dog had slumped onto her belly, five minutes recuperation needed at least. For maybe the first time ever, I noticed a carving on the wall; a whatyemaycallit, a mortar and pestle. Which bits which, I can never remember, don’t exactly use them much. I suppose it was there as a symbol of industry, not as one of the mill-workers being ground into dust. The company shut up shop years ago and moved to parts of the world where they don’t have to worry about troublesome newfangled ideas like safety, pollution laws or paying a fair days wage for a fair weeks work. The main mill is gone. It had four cupolas on the corners, green with age. I got on the roof once to take some photographs; the verdigrised domes made it seem like some papal palace.
Standing in a daydream I didn’t hear the voice. A finger poked me on the shoulder.
‘Don’t touch’, I said, ‘I suffer from tactile hallucinations.’
‘You’ll suffer from my boot up your arse if you don’t wake up, yah dozy get.’ Davey MacMillan. Scrawny bugger, biking jacket, rides a clapped-out Kawasaki at great speed with no concern for other road-users. He nodded at the dog.
‘Who’s this, Patch?’
‘It’s a Golden Labrador. Why would it be called Patch?’
‘Golden? More like a sort of washed-out yella. Is he called Yella?’
‘Don’t let my old man hear you call his dog Yella. And he’s a she. Name’s Iona.’
‘You own a?’
‘It’s an island.’
‘There’s an island called ‘you own a’?’
‘It’s off Mull.’
‘There’s an island called Mull?’
He grinned and poked me with a bony finger again.
‘Well, Iona isn’t looking too clever, is she? Maybe you should stick her on a skateboard and wheel her home.’
As if in disgust at having to listen to this, Iona slowly rose and we continued up the road. I told Davey about messing up her big date with the vet.
‘She looks like she’s had a good kick of the ball. How old is she? Fourteen! That’s like eighty in dog years, ninety. That’s like saying she was born when the doggy Queen Victoria was still on the throne.’ This all happened a while back, so he wasn’t far off. I had the image of a doggy Victoria in my head. What breed would she be? King Charles spaniel, I suppose, since he was an ancestor. Big floppy ears sticking out of that old-fashioned bonnet.
Ever the helpful lad, Davey came up with a plan and went off home, he promised to be back soon. I sat on a broken wall and waited, Iona slumped in the shade of the broken masonry. Davey only lived five minutes away so he was soon beck, a holdall slung over one shoulder.
‘Follow me.’ He headed into the waste ground where the mill had stood.
Although the main building was long demolished, some of the smaller buildings still stood. Davey led the way through the wreckage of a stone gateway and up what had been a garden path. It led to a fairly complete and grand looking honey-coloured sandstone house; maybe the home of the mill manager, keep an eye on those feckless workers. Davey stopped and unslung the bag. He unzipped it and took out a shotgun.
‘That’s bloody well sawn-off! What the bloody hell are you doing with a sawn-off shotgun?’
‘Shooting short rabbits? Low-flying clay pigeons? I saw an American film where a guy called it a ‘sawed-off’! Ha! Get it? Sounds like ‘sod off ya bastard’, bang! We’ll finish off old but gold here and be on our way, yer old man’ll never know.’
I was going right off the idea. Fine, it wasn’t costing me anything, but poor old Iona. Could I stand by and watch this?
I told Davey that maybe it was all a bad idea and I couldn’t watch him shoot the poor old bitch.
‘I’ve an idea,’ he said,’ give me the lead.’ He walked up the path and led the dog through the door of the villa. As I made to follow, he put a hand up to stop me and forced close the front door. He shouldered it to shut it as tight as possible. I stood there and the handle of the lead popped out of the letter box.
‘Grab hold.’
I took it and stood there. I heard Davey walk further up the hall. Silence. Click. Boom. Pigeons erupted through the upper windows.
The severed end of the lead slithered through the letter box, dangled from my hand, it was bloody . I chucked it into the weeds and walked off.
Davey got the jail soon after for robbing his local shop, the one he bought milk and cigarettes in. He wore a ski-mask but they knew him right off, the girl went to school with his little sister, daft bastard.
The honey-coloured house was turned into expensive flats when the site was developed. I don’t suppose any bloodstains show on the walls of the hallway as the residents walk out of a morning to their flash cars.
Thursday 17 September 2009
Happy Place
We are all supposed to have happy place where we go to when we feel under stress. In our heads, that is, I don’t mean that we get to just leave the car at the traffic-lights and walk off, people indifferently watching us go, maybe saying to other passers-by ‘look that guy’s probably off to his happy place’.
And I mean ‘go’ inside your head at an appropriate time, too. Not when you’re driving a train or piloting several hundred people over the ocean, just getting to that really fiddly part of the brain surgery. No, in those cases it’s probably just as well if you stay in your nasty place and leave the happy place to later, when going there won’t result in any sudden deaths.
I have several happy places, maybe more. I thought that that was a good thing but, then, maybe there’s something wrong if I need so many happy places to go to. To which to go. Now I’m stressed.
Anyway, I thought that maybe there are lots of people who don’t have a happy place to go to, and so I thought, well, why not let them have one of mine? I mean, If I go there and someone’s already there, it doesn’t really matter, I can go to one of my other places. Nice of me, isn’t it? I am thinking of someone sitting in an office, maybe, one of those big, open-plan places where everyone can see everything that everyone else is doing all the time. The kind of place where everyone has to come in early and leave late or they’ll be the next for the chop in these harsh economic times. Where the air tastes like it’s been pre-breathed by a hundred halitosis-sufferers after a lunch of garlic sausage and slightly off milk. Someone, maybe, who lives in a drab, faceless suburb and commutes there along dreary, characterless streets. Maybe they live in Beechwood Avenue. The beechwood was cut down to build the street. Not many orchids on Orchid Drive either. Maybe you.
So that person, maybe you, can accompany me now to one of my HPs. I think it is best if we travel together because getting there is an intrinsic part of the being there. I mean, I don’t just want to describe it as if we’ve been dropped there by parachute. How you want to go there in future is your own business. Let’s go.
It just occurred to me that my kind of HP maybe isn’t yours. But this is such a place as I think you’d have to be a bit odd not to be able to be happy there. At least compared to that crummy office you work in. All I can do if offer my kind of happy place, (I’ve had to stop using HP as an abbreviation, makes me think of beans all the time). You can bail out quickly if you don’t like the prospect as it opens up.
So: we are on a Scottish island. A wooded one, not one that’s too bleak. This one has mountains and glens and woods and streams. Here we call streams ‘burns’. Unless they are big like rivers, in which case we call them ‘rivers’.
We have just disembarked from a bus. We have not driven because, 1. I do not drive and, 2. Do you really think I will let myself be driven by someone who may be cracking-up? We set off across the moors. The going is quite hard, the heather is straggly and tough, entwined with bramble and bracken. The ground is alternately hard and soft. Boggy patches are disguised with beard-like rushes. Watch that root on your right. Your other right. The sky is clear and the sun high. Our efforts soon make us sweat profusely, attracting myriads of black flies of several species. Happy yet? A family of linnets watches us from a willow. They fly off. I take a map from my pocket, yes they are big pockets, to check our route, but do not show it to you. It isn’t easy to go in a straight line because of detours around pools and particularly thick patches of bramble. The moor begins to dip down. We are heading for a river which we will have to cross, but it is not very deep. You are beginning to look rather dishevelled and you bitterly regret wearing shorts. I am calm and would be bronzing nicely if it were not for my face being shaded by a broad-brimmed bush hat. My shirt is long-sleeved to spoil the flies’ lunch and my trousers army-style, with those big, map-sized pockets. The effect is rather spoiled, perhaps, by the large ‘San Francisco’ sew-on badge on the front of the hat. End of season sale on Fisherman’s Wharf, couldn’t resist. The jungle wear comes in useful as we disappear from the Argus view of satellites into a small but dense wood that pulls and tears at my clothes and your peeling skin. I extricate us by a judicious change of direction and we emerge into a small meadow.
Over there is the river. We move toward it.
The only sound is of bumblebees and grasshoppers. The meadow is thick with tall golden grasses and tangle of low, purple of vetch. From the waves of vetch arise beautiful little moths called ‘chimney-sweepers’. They are velvety black with wings tipped with white. For all their darkness, they look more like butterflies than moths. But so do many moths. There are more here than I have seen anywhere and they move to the accompaniment of the slow music of other insects like black-clad jazz dancers.
We make our way leisurely to the riverbank. The river flows beneath us, heading toward the sea a mile or so to the west. It bends slightly, we are on the bank on the apex of the inside of the bow. To the left are thick shrubs that must be descended from plants imported for some land-owner’s parkland. They are shedding scarlet flowers onto the water. The flowers drift past slowly. The petals test the surface tension of the water, bends the water which then catches sunlight, surrounding each flower in a halo of intense light. Beneath them, like live shadows, move trout fast as arrows.
I think you are a little happier now. Across the river and beyond some beech trees, I can see the stone circle which was my intended destination the first time I came this way and discovered this place. You can go there if you wish and think about your life, but you may be interrupted by tourists disguised as druids or druids disguised as tourists. No-one knows this place, no-one much. You can come here on a hot summer’s day like this one, or on a snowy day when the chimney-sweepers will be huddled deep below you. Or you can come here tonight when the river will just be a sound and the stars will be your only moths. The Plough will leave no furrow, Lyra the harp be still as the night itself.
And I mean ‘go’ inside your head at an appropriate time, too. Not when you’re driving a train or piloting several hundred people over the ocean, just getting to that really fiddly part of the brain surgery. No, in those cases it’s probably just as well if you stay in your nasty place and leave the happy place to later, when going there won’t result in any sudden deaths.
I have several happy places, maybe more. I thought that that was a good thing but, then, maybe there’s something wrong if I need so many happy places to go to. To which to go. Now I’m stressed.
Anyway, I thought that maybe there are lots of people who don’t have a happy place to go to, and so I thought, well, why not let them have one of mine? I mean, If I go there and someone’s already there, it doesn’t really matter, I can go to one of my other places. Nice of me, isn’t it? I am thinking of someone sitting in an office, maybe, one of those big, open-plan places where everyone can see everything that everyone else is doing all the time. The kind of place where everyone has to come in early and leave late or they’ll be the next for the chop in these harsh economic times. Where the air tastes like it’s been pre-breathed by a hundred halitosis-sufferers after a lunch of garlic sausage and slightly off milk. Someone, maybe, who lives in a drab, faceless suburb and commutes there along dreary, characterless streets. Maybe they live in Beechwood Avenue. The beechwood was cut down to build the street. Not many orchids on Orchid Drive either. Maybe you.
So that person, maybe you, can accompany me now to one of my HPs. I think it is best if we travel together because getting there is an intrinsic part of the being there. I mean, I don’t just want to describe it as if we’ve been dropped there by parachute. How you want to go there in future is your own business. Let’s go.
It just occurred to me that my kind of HP maybe isn’t yours. But this is such a place as I think you’d have to be a bit odd not to be able to be happy there. At least compared to that crummy office you work in. All I can do if offer my kind of happy place, (I’ve had to stop using HP as an abbreviation, makes me think of beans all the time). You can bail out quickly if you don’t like the prospect as it opens up.
So: we are on a Scottish island. A wooded one, not one that’s too bleak. This one has mountains and glens and woods and streams. Here we call streams ‘burns’. Unless they are big like rivers, in which case we call them ‘rivers’.
We have just disembarked from a bus. We have not driven because, 1. I do not drive and, 2. Do you really think I will let myself be driven by someone who may be cracking-up? We set off across the moors. The going is quite hard, the heather is straggly and tough, entwined with bramble and bracken. The ground is alternately hard and soft. Boggy patches are disguised with beard-like rushes. Watch that root on your right. Your other right. The sky is clear and the sun high. Our efforts soon make us sweat profusely, attracting myriads of black flies of several species. Happy yet? A family of linnets watches us from a willow. They fly off. I take a map from my pocket, yes they are big pockets, to check our route, but do not show it to you. It isn’t easy to go in a straight line because of detours around pools and particularly thick patches of bramble. The moor begins to dip down. We are heading for a river which we will have to cross, but it is not very deep. You are beginning to look rather dishevelled and you bitterly regret wearing shorts. I am calm and would be bronzing nicely if it were not for my face being shaded by a broad-brimmed bush hat. My shirt is long-sleeved to spoil the flies’ lunch and my trousers army-style, with those big, map-sized pockets. The effect is rather spoiled, perhaps, by the large ‘San Francisco’ sew-on badge on the front of the hat. End of season sale on Fisherman’s Wharf, couldn’t resist. The jungle wear comes in useful as we disappear from the Argus view of satellites into a small but dense wood that pulls and tears at my clothes and your peeling skin. I extricate us by a judicious change of direction and we emerge into a small meadow.
Over there is the river. We move toward it.
The only sound is of bumblebees and grasshoppers. The meadow is thick with tall golden grasses and tangle of low, purple of vetch. From the waves of vetch arise beautiful little moths called ‘chimney-sweepers’. They are velvety black with wings tipped with white. For all their darkness, they look more like butterflies than moths. But so do many moths. There are more here than I have seen anywhere and they move to the accompaniment of the slow music of other insects like black-clad jazz dancers.
We make our way leisurely to the riverbank. The river flows beneath us, heading toward the sea a mile or so to the west. It bends slightly, we are on the bank on the apex of the inside of the bow. To the left are thick shrubs that must be descended from plants imported for some land-owner’s parkland. They are shedding scarlet flowers onto the water. The flowers drift past slowly. The petals test the surface tension of the water, bends the water which then catches sunlight, surrounding each flower in a halo of intense light. Beneath them, like live shadows, move trout fast as arrows.
I think you are a little happier now. Across the river and beyond some beech trees, I can see the stone circle which was my intended destination the first time I came this way and discovered this place. You can go there if you wish and think about your life, but you may be interrupted by tourists disguised as druids or druids disguised as tourists. No-one knows this place, no-one much. You can come here on a hot summer’s day like this one, or on a snowy day when the chimney-sweepers will be huddled deep below you. Or you can come here tonight when the river will just be a sound and the stars will be your only moths. The Plough will leave no furrow, Lyra the harp be still as the night itself.
Wednesday 16 September 2009
Goats and Ponies
He could hear splashing on the flagstones outside; Martha must be watering the hanging baskets again. Gazing through the window toward the tree line, he thought idly of someone at that very moment in, where, the Sahel maybe, dragging along, going for a plastic canister of muddy, bug-ridden water. The house was encircled by the baskets, heavy with polychromatic blooms. Hold on, polychromatic, isn’t that just paint? Well, they were like painted things; you didn’t get real wild flowers in those colours and in that tight proximity, nothing natural about it. He thought too that there were half a dozen too many, and the cottage was old, early eighteenth-century; the rich colours clashed with the weathered old slate and stone.
The small house was dark and cool, darker and cooler than even the depths of the wood he was looking into. He could go for a walk in the wood but tended to avoid it in the middle of the day; at this time of year at least, the deep shadows and listlessness of the creatures living there had something oppressive about them. He would go for a walk, but into the open spaces of the moor behind the cottage. Take the dog, stretch his legs and get some air, put some sun block on first though and take a hat.
A stop in the bathroom to apply some protection against or own star, he thought, we’re making ourselves aliens to our own planet. He stuck a bush hat on his head, whistled to the wiemaraner and, with the clicking of her toes on the stone floors telling him that she was following, headed out the back door, away from the sound of the splashing water.
He walked past the bird-feeders and the pens for the ornamental chickens and ducks; through the wooden gate and onto the moor. He always wore long trousers now on these walks; partly so his bone-white legs wouldn’t burn, partly because of the rise in the number of ticks. He did not want to contract Weil’s disease, he thought; start composing Threepenny Opera’s all over the place. That’s a terrible joke, he scolded himself. On a previous walk he had cut across a hillside of burnt heather. The woody remnants had acted like charcoal on the material of his trousers, they carry, he had thought, a mysterious message in unknown hieroglyphs.
‘Ulf!’ The big dog had disappeared over the brow of the hill. There were not too many sheep around here now, but the farmers still retained their distrust of free-running dogs, so he always took the leash, only using it when the land maggots appeared. Ulf! Martha named all their animals and birds, but while it hardly mattered what you name a rabbit; he always felt an idiot shouting a name that made it sound like he’d just taken a thump in the belly. She’d got it out some book, he couldn’t remember which.
His mind went back to the sound of the water. Would we ever look back at such waste and feel guilt? He wondered if women were more inclined to such waste; water pouring unnoticed from tap down the drain without having been used at all, as if its presence was as totally natural as a waterfall, just one that had cleverly been redirected through pipes into the house. His granddad had worked on dams in Scotland in the thirties, left the farm in Donegal for the big wages to be made in back-breaking labouring in big projects in Britain. Few mechanical diggers around, instead hundreds of men on piece-work, shovelling hour in hour out for days and weeks and months. He wouldn’t have taken clean drinking water for granted. And his grandmother back on the farm; for drinkable water she had to take two enamel buckets and walk down the glen to a spring. It tasted beautiful and maybe all the more so after the labour it took to get it. He could probably bottle it now with his cousin who had the farm, sell it in a million shops and make a fortune; but it wouldn’t taste as good. He thought his gran wouldn’t have wasted water like Martha and other women these days. But hold on there, he told himself, what about all those men washing great big stupid cars and what about all the water that gets used on golf-courses, mainly a man’s game. People in countries all over the place were struggling to get water through their taps because of big golf developments springing up in near desert conditions; take the water from the kids’ mouth to keep the greens green. Talking of water, he thought, there’s where the old reservoir was. Ahead was deep green, where the water had been was thick now with iris, sedge, meadowsweet and other plants he could not name. Ulf disappeared into it, sending ten, twelve wild duck rocketing skyward.
He skirted the marshy area and started to breathe heavily as he climbed a hill, heading for the site of an Iron Age fort. The period named, he told himself, for when people really started to look after their clothes. Eyes fixed to the ground he noted the flowers; tormentil and devil’s-bit scabious. Tormenting devil by the biting of scabs, nice thought. There’s some mountain pansy, elevated pensees, the heights of pensiveness or are they dog violence, dog violets. No sign now of the fort; he only knew it was here from the maps, maybe he would buy a metal detector and unearth a spearhead. He looked out over the countryside. Life a stopgap between birth and death, he thought, then noticed a large flying insect. Is it a dragonfly or damselfly? It landed. Dragonfly. Holds its wings crosswise, a forty-five degree angle when at rest, not along the body like the damselfly. Too big for a damselfly anyway. He crouched for a better look. The insect swivelled its head. He loved the way that that head swivelled; loved that sixty thousand images of him in those compound eyes were being translated into one image in the creature’s tiny brain. Calmly the dragonfly took flight, its front legs held in a skeletal net to scoop prey, smaller insects, from the air.
When he got home, Martha was cleaning out a rabbit hutch. That’s our life now, he thought, housekeeping for rodents. Not rodents, lagomorphs. And Ulf walking. When they’d sold up the business in the city and moved here, he had felt a bit like some Roman patrician retiring from military and political life to his farm. He pictured himself and his retinue leaving Glasgow in a series of chariots and wagons, the mob cheering and waving as slaves distributed generous parting gifts from the people’s favourite senator. Bet they don’t even remember me now.
‘I thought you had fallen down some bottomless pit.’
Thought…or hoped, dear Calpurnia.
‘Make some coffee, darling, and I’ll love you forever.’
Or at least until the ides do fall.
‘Do we have any biscuits?’ Those chocolate ones out of Marks with the hole in the middle that he liked, though he’d just as soon like them better if they dispensed with the hole and filled it with biscuit and chocolate.
‘We have if you haven’t eaten them all.’
He hung Ulf’s leash behind the door and washed his hands before taking down the biscuit tin. It was the Schrodinger’s Cat moment he hated. Did the biscuits exist or were they extinct?
Martha came in to coffee and shortbread.
’You should ration yourself; make the chocolate ones last longer. I’ll get more tomorrow when I’m picking up feed.’
That’s it feed. Pour it from the grain sack and stir a few biscuits into it and me and the livestock’ll just tuck in. This is no life. We can’t get away because of all these dependants. It’s because the kids are gone isn’t it? We’ve replaced them with other, goat kids, daft little ponies. We should take our money from the bank and re-open some coalmine just so we can put ponies to work down there, then rescue them. They’d be eternally grateful as long as we kept out the way initially so they couldn’t recognise us as having been in on the plot from the start.
Little animals. Fun-sized animals. Bonsai creatures; eventually get them down to table-top size, little enclosures on a plateau above the Turkish carpet a new, miniaturized Lost World. Combine two interests by having a train set on the table, the locos chuffing along past real, tiny, cows and horses, fingernail-sized pigs and sheep. Maybe nature would kick in with foxes to scale; hard to keep out of the house, wily enough to reach the high table, picking off flea-sized chickens and ducks.
In the morning, as if they had been conjured up by his daydreams, foxes, full-sized ones presumably, had got into the bird pen and killed the lot. Little feathery feet were scattered on the ground. It made him think of a student job he had one summer, cleaning out old buildings for a college to refurbish and let out. In one building he found that, over the years, hundreds of butterflies must have hibernated in the building and perished in the winters. Their bodies had rotted away or fed spiders but their wings were scattered all over the floor, thousands of fragments which seemed all to have broken into triangles, small tortoiseshell tesserae.
Martha wanted to wreak her vengeance on the local fox population; he suggested she get a saddle for one of the Shetland ponies and hunt them, in short bursts. She saw sense quick enough, though she didn’t like his description of the hen runs as being a vending machine for delinquent carnivores, penniless but determined to have the goodies on display. They made do with the dogs, ponies and goats after that; they were all big and mean enough to kick the living daylights out of any fox. Or tod, he thought, the old name for fox. Badger; brock or grey and hare, mawkin. Listen to the grizzled countryman.
Long after dinner that night he sat gazing distractedly through the living-room window. He noticed the row of little ceramic cottages on the sill. When did they turn into the kind of people who buy such rubbish? Was it another example of shrinking the world? They were belittling existence, acting like Brobdingnagians. Who were the ones who argued over which end of the egg to break? Tomorrow for breakfast he would have two boiled eggs and open one at the big end and one at the little; confuse any observers, reports would be inconclusive, the warring parties would dismiss his potential as ally or enemy. Gulliver’s Travels. Tulliver’s Gravels: Driveways of Distinction. Who were the Tullivers again? That’s it, ‘The Mill on the Floss’. Daft name for a river; every time it was mentioned he imagined it all big and fluffy. And pink. Candy floss. You wouldn’t drown in that; just lose your teeth to decay. It’s a nice night, he said, I’ll just go for a last check around the place. The night sky was clear and vast, the stars pin sharp. This was one of the countryside’s attractions that had drawn them from the gaudily illuminated city. He looked up at the Milky Way. A great white gravel drive for God’s 4x4. He went up to the field and unlocked the padlocked gate that led to the moor, but the ponies and goats just stayed where they were, grazing calmly and looking at him occasionally as if he was some kind of crackpot.; maybe some kind of partisan of the fox people; a foxite, a foxian, a cryto-foxist. The minute I find a casserole dish big enough, he thought, as he locked up the gate and walked back to the house. A tawny owl in a nearby tree watched the grass about his feet as he walked: perhaps the shambling giant would flush out a mouse.
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