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.

Seablues

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.

Angled light

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.

Wild Fuchsia

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.

SemiFlower

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.

Hawser

Iron and stone

Calum and the Snails

　
Calum always took the river route to the library. He would watch out for muggers and kingfishers with equal care on the fifteen minute walk from his flat by Kelvinbridge underground station, along the river and exit at the Botanic Gardens, then just a couple more minutes to the library on Byres Road.
He always had his camera slung from his shoulder, concealed by his jacket; there was no point in advertising it’s presence to the various ne’er-do-wells he passed on the path. A leaf or spider’s web might be worth a picture and once he got some really close up shots of a heron perched on the rail of the bridge that leads to the botanics; the one at the south end, not the north. The bird may have been a youngster; unsure of the correct flying away distance when approached by one of those ghastly humans. He got several photos- both full length and head shots, the bird almost as still as one of the plastic ones on sale at garden centres, the ones meant to scare real birds away from precious goldfish. In summer he’d look for bugs on the fence as he walked along. He got three kinds of ladybird, weevils, shield bugs and one day a spider with the cool name of Large-Jawed Orb Weaver. He would have to look that one up to find the name. Cool arachnid; he gave high-fives to leaves of Himalayan Balsam as he passed.
Today he took the heronless bridge and turned right along the path though the trees and up the slope. He passed some squirrels but didn’t have any peanuts in his bag, so they watched him carry on and went about their business. He emerged into the botanic gardens and decided that he would drop in to see the snails.
Through the doors and beyond the begonias was a section with small tanks displaying water plants from the tropics and a larger stone pond with fish and snails.
He hadn’t noticed them at first until one day when he almost reached in and took one from the water, thinking it a piece of plastic, a bottle-top perhaps, that someone had littered the tank with. It was big and round and yellow and not at all like the snails outside. Peering hard and bending close to the water like another heron, he could make out several more. On the next visit, he watched one surface to breathe. It didn’t actually break the water surface; he figured that in the tropics this might lead to it being spotted by a predator. Instead, it adhered to the pond side just below the surface and extended a sort of fleshy snorkel. This broke the surface and the snail began to sort of foot-pump itself, drawing in air and storing it within its shell. Once it had refilled its tank, it detached itself and slowly sank to the murky depths.
After that, he would return once a week or so to see how the snails were getting on. He would watch the fish too; catfish and cichlids. Signs on string dangled over the water identifying the various types and one named the snails too; they were Golden Apple snails from South America. The snails were not always visible, he thought that they might keep to the cooler, more shaded parts of the pond when the sun got high and made it too bright and warm out in the open. So then he would just watch the fish for a while as they languidly loafed around. He felt that he was self-medicating at those moments, thinking of the tropical aquaria that became more part of the therapists’ office than the couch, but it did not stop him relaxing as he watched. That was only when there wasn’t anyone else there. If someone came in he would leave, thinking that that person might prefer the solitude just as he did.
Sometimes Calum reversed the walk. If he wanted to get to the library early he might just go by road. Then, when done, go home by the botanics and river walk. One day he left the library and headed to the botanics in spite of the dark clouds that were clambering over one another in their haste to give the city a good soaking. The gardens had that strange light where the ground is brighter than the sky and more so than he had noticed elsewhere, the light changed by the white ironwork of glasshouses, the reflections from clear glass and panes that had been whitewashed to protect delicate plants inside. As rain began to cascade down he thought it a good moment to enter the begonia house and make his way through to the fishpond. He thought that the darkness and coolness of the stormy day might encourage the snails out from their lairs, but could see none. On the floor, though, something yellow stood out. He picked it up. It was a fragment of snail shell. He picked it up held it in the palm of his hand as he peered even harder into the pond, leaning over until his nose almost touched the water, but the snails were gone.
He saw a couple more pieces leading toward the door and headed outside, into the rain. No more shell showed up against black wet tarmac. He turned to head for home, giving up on the river path, which would be a quagmire now. But as he passed the palm house he noticed that there were some people inside, the only ones he had seen in the whole gardens. Probably just sheltering from the rain, he thought, but perhaps they have seen suspicious, pond-robbing characters around. He walked through the doors and paused to shake some of the rainwater from his coat, then made his way past another fishpond and into the main palm house. The indistinct figures that he had made out through the wet glass were now seen to be several attractive young women. They were dressed, he reflected, in a way incompatible with the weather, in fact seemed to be in some kind of costume. Perhaps there had been a rehearsal for a play or something in the gardens and they were forced to take cover. He remembered vaguely that there was a Shakespeare in the Park type of thing every summer. These must be actresses in what, Antony and Cleopatra? Something Mediterranean, he thought, judging by the diaphanous robes they were wearing. It didn’t really help. Titus Andronicus? A Midsummer Night’s Downpour? They seemed completely dispirited by the interruption to the rehearsal, sat looking dispirited and inanimate, sisters to the marble statues which were placed with fern fronds and palm leaves giving a dark green background to their pale hard figures. Four of them. Girls that is, not statues.
‘Are you Greek characters?’ They all looked at him. ‘Or Roman?’
‘Roman? Do we look Roman?’ Not sure if it was a trick question, he still detected that the answer expected was a no, as if he should be well aware of the differences between your classical Greek and Roman women’s wear.
‘I think it safe to say that we are Greek characters. I am Aigle, that is Crytheia, Hestia, and that saucepot is Arethusa.’ He got two nods and a wink. ‘Sometimes there are more of us, sometimes fewer.’
Odd names, maybe their characters in the play.
‘Are you rehearsing for a play? Shakespeare in the park? You’re not a band are you? Sort of themed? Original, I suppose, can’t think of anyone else doing a classical Greek thing.’
‘We are classical Greeks! We are The Hesperides.’ A definite capitalised definite article there, he thought. And like he would recognise the name. Not the islands off the west coast; she didn’t say ‘Hebrides’, that’s a start. She did say Hesperides didn’t she, hang on; they were like muses weren’t they, sort of nymphs or naiads or something. So this lot are like a tribute band. Or believe in Greek deities and their creations. The alternative is that they believe they are the Hesperides and that they believe that he would believe that they would turn up in his local botanic gardens as evening drew on and the gloom deepened and rain grew ever heavier and no park staff came to shut up the place and the public too were noticeable by their absence.
‘I’m Calum. Sorry, but I’ve never heard of you. If you’re a band; I don’t really listen to much music now. And if you’re a theatre group; well I still haven’t heard of you, sorry. Don’t keep up with drama much either.’
They looked resigned rather than indignant. Then he noticed that each held something in her hand. Snails. His snails. Each had one large yellow snail cupped in her pale fingers.
‘You shouldn’t have those, the snails, what are you doing with them? You have to put them back!’
Each held up a snail. ‘We didn’t take them all. And mine is just a shell anyway, said Hestia, and she broke off some pieces of the shell. He saw that it had already begun to disintegrate, must be the one which had given him the clue of the abduction. ’Do you look after them? Are you a snail-keeper’, teasingly. They all started to look a little happier, distracted from their problems. He had thought they were just down at the weather interrupting their rehearsal, and come to think of it, where were all the other personnel; the wardrobe and make-up and stage people, caterers, technicians and all that?
They all walked toward him with the snails outstretched. He saw that they seemed fine; antennae waving, enjoying the excursion, except for Hestia, who casually crushed the empty shell in her hand and dropped the pieces on the flagstones.
Calum took the snails from the other three and put them into a voluminous jacket pocket. He was a pocket person; coats, jackets, trousers all had to be well-pocketed and he still thought fondly of the time a new pair of shorts had turned out to have one more pocket than the manufacturers had even realised- their label said six, but he found seven! So snail-pocketing was not the problem for Calum that it might have been for another man. One not obsessed by things like pockets.
‘Why’d you take them? If the staff had caught you, you’d have been done. Snail rustling. Barred. No performance, no visits to the annual orchid show or ice-cream on the grass, watching the talent.’
Crytheia was looking at a statue of a woman sitting with one hand cupping her chin. She read the inscription.’ This is Ruth, holding sheaves of corn gathered in the fields of Boaz.’
‘Boaz. Is that a person or a place?’
‘Sounds like a corporation:” BOAZ, British and Overseas Annihilation of Zephyrs.”’
‘It’s a person, her husband. She was a symbol of virtue it says. Looks bored to me, living with Boaz, gathering sheaves of corn. Dull.’
‘Excuse me, I asked why did you take the snails. Remember?’
‘Well, you’ll think us rather dim,’ said Arethusa, looking over Crytheia’s shoulder, ‘but we heard something about golden apples being here. We’d lost some so thought that these might be them. So here we are. And here they are not.’
‘Explain it correctly, if you feel you must explain it at all,’ said Aigle. She turned to Calum.
‘The golden apples were a wedding gift from Ge, or Earth, you’d call her, to Hera on her marriage to Zeus. It was the job of the Hesperides to guard them. Unfortunately, when we were distracted one day the tree which bore them was destroyed and the apples lost.
‘Distracted, laughed Arethusa, ‘we were shopping!’
‘That is immaterial. The point is that the apples were lost and, if you knew Hera, you would know that you don’t go losing her golden apples without suffering the consequences.’
Calum recalled watching an American television programme about Hercules where Hera was certainly someone you wouldn’t cross. He could feel the snails sliding up inside his pocket toward fresh air and freedom.
‘But why take the snails?’
‘Well we heard where these golden apples were and went in and looked into the green depths of the pond and, well, you know, they could have been our apples. We fished them out and, of course, they weren’t. I suppose we just wandered off with them. But you can put them back and no harm done.’ Aigle arched an eyebrow.
That was true. ‘How was the tree destroyed?’ Calum was sympathetic, though he thought that it was their marbles they’d lost, and not the Elgin ones at that.
For the first time the women looked angry, vengeful. The rain battered against the hundreds of glass panes around them with increasing ferocity.
‘Some corporation. Maybe BOAZ. For a road. Or an airport extension, some such nonsense.’ Aigle, in illustration of destruction, stood on the fragments of snail shell, crisply crushing them to dust.
‘It’s like Joni Mitchell said, they paved paradise and put up a parking lot,’ said Arethusa, ‘Joni should never have left us for the human world,’ she mused, ‘she had real insight.’
‘Of course, Hera is really angry and taking out her vengeance on the world; hurricanes, droughts, floods,’ said Aigle,’ but I am not sure if there is any real point, since people don’t really believe in her or Zeus or any of us, so they aren’t going to do anything about finding some mythical apples. And the tree is still gone. We complained to the local council about it being destroyed and they just said that if it was that important, we should have taken out a tree preservation order on it.‘
‘The council? Back in Greece?’
‘The tree was nearer Greenock than Greece, sonny, we guarded it in the far west, to the Greeks, that’s why our other name is The Atlantides’. That capitalized definite article again. She saw Calum looking doubtful, confused even. ‘You’re not the sharpest arrow in the quiver are you, Calum? Atlantides from Atlantic, the ocean which beat upon the shore whereon grew our tree and which is as we speak is probably being viciously developed as a hotel and golf course.’
‘A curse on their honeymoon suites, let them know no fun therein,’ hammed up Arethusa,’ and let their bunkers be of quicksand.’
Hestia took up the explanation. ‘Hera had overlooked that what you humans are doing to the planet far outweighs any of her acts. When it dawned on her she said that we find the apples or she sends in the heavy mob.’
‘Then it’s pretty much goodnight Irene from the present six billion humans. Peace at last for the planet. Back to square one, clubs and caves for you lot, not clubbing and cappuccinos’ said Arethusa sadly, ‘ and no more shopping for us, nor make-overs, movies…it is going to be such a bore.’
‘This “heavy mob”, what is it? Spartan types?’ Calum pictured the scene; a few score helmeted and skirted swordsmen against machine-guns, bombers and tanks.
‘I think not. We were not the only guardians of the apples. There was Ladon too, though he had been asleep for the last few centuries, now he’s awake and just raring to obliterate civilization.’
‘Ladon?’
‘Ladon the dragon.’
‘A sort of figurative dragon? One that is revealed as a sort of symbol of our brutal handling of the planet, where heat and smoke produced by us becomes the dragon that will consume us all?
‘Not figurative, no. He’s in there.’
They all four turned and pointed into the main body of the palm-house. Within the tall palms and dense undergrowth of tree ferns something large and green shone dully in odd glances of light from the street. A thin spiral of smoke wound toward the glasshouse roof.
They just rebuilt this thing, Calum thought, what was it, seven million? Maybe he should get those snails back in their pond. Maybe it was too late.

Fishbox Window

Fishbox Window
　
‘So let me see if I’ve got this straight.’ He pushed the coffee cup a little further away as if clearing the desks for action. He held his hands apart, pinkie edges on the table-top, as if holding an invisible skein of wool. She wondered at the origin of the word ‘skein’. Wasn’t that a flight of geese?
‘You’re telling me that after a few minutes, hours, years or , at best, decades, you cease to function? Your individual being just evaporates? Nothing left but a carcase that breaks down into chemical components? I mean, we saw it on the television broadcasts but never quite believed it. Lots of theories, schools of thought but I mean… complete annihilation?
She nodded. The alien shook his head.
‘I think I’m going to need more java.’ He caught the attention of the girl behind the counter and did the pointing at the two cups, wiggling of eyebrows and thumbs-up thing, but she just stared at him, and he had to go up and order properly.
‘Well, everyone dies at last, don’t they? I mean, even you’re race can’t be immortal, what’s in any being that is worth being immortal? And why do you have an American accent?’
‘No, your right. Or should that be “yes, you’re right?” Anyway, I agree, there is little or anything in anyone that deserves a place in the universe for ever. We migrate into other creatures, even objects if we want to. And the accent is because of all the American television we watch on my home-world, they broadcast so much, you know, everyone else can hardly get a word in edgeways. Edgewise. Not to mention the massive archives we have of their TV. Though the quality is getting poorer.’
‘The archives are decaying?’
‘No, the programmes are getting worse. Shows.’
‘It shows?’
‘No, I mean they say “shows“, not “programmes.”
‘You said objects a minute ago? You can migrate into an apple? A set of spanners?’
‘Now you’re being facetious. An apple! All that hanging around. Getting pulped for your juice, baked into a tart, just plain being eaten.’
‘Or a windfall. Lie on the cool grass of an orchard until you get all wizened up and return to Mother Earth. I suppose that’s a problem right there.’
‘Yes, and a set of spanners, well, it would be a wrench leaving that behind.
No, we would tend to choose something a little more interesting. And, when we leave, the being is in a far better state than before, lives a lot longer, improved dress sense, that kind of thing. But I’m not an authority. Its not really my subject, biology.‘
‘Xenobiology, you mean.‘
‘That’s right, but I’m stoical about it.‘ She didn’t get it, ‘Back on my planet…’ She frowned and he stopped speaking.
‘I wonder if we’ve heard enough about life,’ her voice dropped, ‘back on your planet.’ She looked around, though she didn’t want to, she just couldn’t help it. It was a bit late, half the coffee-shop had heard him talking of ‘his planet’. No-one seemed very bothered. Maybe he was just a very proprietarial environmentalist. Maybe it was just his technique, a cutesy way to amuse the young woman with him, maybe their first coffee together. The speaker was young, good-looking, well-dressed; you wouldn’t think he would need feeble comedic turns to impress, but maybe he was a late developer, had spent most of his youth gawky and awkward and hadn’t yet grown into his young adult skin. An unready imago, she thought. She was glad she had arranged that they meet here instead of at her flat. That one of the problems of running a website but with no premises other than your flat to meet clients. ‘Clients‘, indeed, he was her first, if you don’t count friends and family. He had got in touch to say he loved her photographs on her website and would like to buy a whole lot, framed. Take them back to his planet. Right. Planet. Amusing. But a new enterprise can’t turn down business. Enterprise. Wrong word. Maybe that’s what he’d use to ship home his purchases. It was fortunate that the owner of her favourite café saved on decorating by allowing local artists to exhibit there. Take the client to the café, be safe, don’t let on where you live, let him see the work on the wall, all nicely framed, sell a bundle. It was like he was reading her mind, because he gestured with one hand at the pictures and said, ‘ I’ll take them all. I’m not actually an art dealer, but a lot of my clients would really like these, I could maybe give one or two away, but sell on more. No commission, though, I’ll buy them straight out. As many as you can get to me. Framed, you choose the frames. Price them as you like.
as getting just a little too good to be true. ‘Perhaps you should have a closer look. I think maybe all the caffeine you’ve ingested has affected your judgement, maybe it’s an alien thing.’ She might be shooting herself in the foot, here, doing herself out of hard cash, but she couldn’t just take his money; she wanted some applause too. She stood up and invited him to follow her around the café to look at the pictures. They were all of the Orkney Islands, she had been living there for a while, walking the cliffs, taking lots of photographs, staring out to sea a lot.
They slowly walked around the café ignoring, and being ignored by, the drinkers in ones and twos, murmuring or deeply involved in books, crosswords or portable computers. He walked ahead, though she wished that the direction of their tour had allowed her to take the lead, so that she could spend more time at her favourite pictures, impress them upon him just by a longer exposure . As it was, she had to slow him by trying to exert a little magnetic pull, dragging a foot, fiddling with the leaf of a plant, get him to slow at this one, that one. She remembered this seascape. Walking into the teeth, freshly sharpened, of a force 8 gale she had despaired of being able to stand steadily enough, to be able to weigh down the awkward tripod enough, to get any photographs at all. But this shoreline could not be ignored. The breakneck waves, their tops ripped away by the gale, grayed, vaporised, it was like watching clouds being born.
‘You seem attracted to dereliction. To things rusting or falling apart. Why is that?’
‘I suppose because when things are new they are alike, but when they start to decay; they decay uniquely. It doesn’t have to be sad, though. As you see, there are a few pictures of old, abandoned cottages, a bit of a cliché, I suppose, but I like them, and I think they needn’t make us feel disheartened.
I like to think of all the moments within that must have been joyful; the birth of a child, the recovery from an illness, the music from a fiddle or a of a song. This one, look, though it seems abandoned, it wasn’t really because I found a blackbird sitting on her nest inside.’
’So, though humans were no longer in possession, it was still a home?’
He moved further along . ‘Lots of these, windows, in one state or another. Tell me about them.’
It was true, there were quite a few pictures of windows. Some were whole, most were broken, many were blocked up. ‘I suppose it’s because they are a sort of picture themselves. A picture pictured. Framed, glazed, like pictures. A whole range of subjects, some dark, hardly anything visible, when I’ve shot from outside in, some framing a landscape or seascape, but with frames that tell you something about the time and people who first framed that picture. Even when the window frame is totally blocked up, the material becomes the picture, the old metal, the stones cut into rough blocks or just natural, just lifted from the shore. Or wood like in this. Fishboxes.’
‘Boxes for fish. That’s the creatures that used to live in your seas.’
‘Well, I think that there are a few left.’ ‘Yes, a few. I suppose too many of them ended up in boxes like the ones someone’s used to block up that window. From bumblebees to blue whales; everything’s on its way out’.
Nothing of that sort had occurred to her, she had just liked the texture of the old wood framed within the stonework of the window. ’They didn’t think, then, that the fish could ever disappear . Not for ever. Though they’d disappear for a season or two. I suppose it must have crossed their mind then, would they maybe never come back?’
He continued looking at the series of windows. He thought that perhaps she was always on the outside looking in at the long-gone lives of the people who had lived there, or on the inside watching the world go by outside. The blocked-off windows, wood or stone where glass had been, were like the closed eyes of the dead. She was photographing them without realising, it seemed, the forensic nature of her work. He turned and looked at her for a moment before moving on, as if she were a specimen in a museum, a specimen of an extinct species. She tried to distract herself by looking at her own photographs, concentrating on the seascapes. Waves in colour or black and white, water frozen yet not ice. All unique, never to be repeated exactly, exactly ,as these ones captured here. Captured? Nonsense, she thought, captured no more than a mountain is ‘conquered’ by some arrogant mountaineer. She was thinking of how, as far as she could remember, someone drowns or nearly drowns in every one of Iris Murdoch’s novels, engulfed by existence itself, experience realised as a liquid, when he asked her if she could use another coffee. She sat back down at their table and they discussed the number of pictures he wanted, the frames, the time it would take to deliver. She was stunned at the numbers he could take, and, without asking about prices, he handed her a cheque. The generosity of the figure nearly made her drop her specs in her soup, as the old saying goes, though she wasn’t, as she explained when telling the story later, actually wearing her specs, and wasn’t having soup, and there is no such old saying.
Out in the street, as they were saying goodbye for now, she realized that she hadn’t really found out what he did, only that he wasn’t an art dealer.
’Do? I’m in real estate.’ He turned and walked off. She turned in the opposite direction and walked away.’ ’Real estate!’ Another of those Americanisms he’d picked up. She smiled until she realized the import of his words.

Blue Daisys

21 Ravens

　
As the train rumbled northward, rain came in from the west in waves dense enough to surf on. Rob peered through the windows for wildlife but saw little, most of the wild things under shelter or simply absent. There were some deer, though, red deer, mainly in small groups far from the railway line. The only exception was a hind standing in a vivid green pool of water, algae, he supposed. It stood with its neck down and arched to one side, grazing. He thought it looked like a mosaic in some recently uncovered Roman villa down south. The Romans came this far north but built no villas, only military marching camps, the decoration of floors less important than fighting and surviving.
When the train reached the port of Mallaig he found a room for the night and had a meal. Afterward, as darkness descended, he wandered around the harbour taking photographs with his new digital camera. He remembered books that said you should not mix colour sources; that you need different films for different kinds of light. He had usually shot in black and white so had no need of that advice but now liked the effect of different kinds of light on the image: remnants of sunset, halogen arc lights at the harbour, car lights, streetlights, and the warmer tones spilling from seafront homes. The colours all mixed in the camera, made the kind of light that illuminated many of his dreams. He thought of the images made of pixels, another mosaic.
Next day he sailed for the Isle of Rum.
It was sunny and warm and calm and islands surrounded the boat like curious whales. The engines rumbled as if the boat was in conversation with the sea. As it steamed up the loch to the pier on Rum he looked around and saw that the sea was of several shades of blue and so was the sky and the land offered a variety of greens and greys of bracken and grass and stone and pine trees but the castle at the head of the loch was only one shade of red.
When they docked things got a little strange, it’s always that way when you are met by government land rovers. And people in uniform. If matching sweatshirts count as a uniform and he thought that they did.
But explanation is needed. Rum is owned by a government agency and run as nature reserve. Visitors were discouraged but the new parliament in Edinburgh brought in rights of access legislation and so Rum has had to open up. No-one lives there but the scientists and a few people running the hostel, the natives were largely thrown off the island in the nineteenth century by the English industrialist who wanted the isle as his little fiefdom, his hunting preserve, his kingdom.
Those who disembarked made their way to the castle along a chalk-white path through the pine wood. The people who had booked had their luggage delivered by the land rovers; the others had to shift for themselves. And since the hostel people were unsure of how many unbooked they could accommodate until they got back to the hostel, this resulted in an unacknowledged race; a line of rucksacked figures trying to walk as fast as possible while appearing to stroll. He found himself walking alongside a man he had noticed on the boat; that accidental walking alongside that immediately calls for speeding-up, slowing-down or conversation. The man had been talking to another passenger on the boat, had told how he was a gillie, a marksman, on his way to cull some red deer. Walking the path now he did not look the traditional figure of a highland stalker; more a Mafia hit-man, dressed in a short black leather coat and with his rifle in a matching black samsonite case. Rob tried the conversation, ‘Maybe we’ll be sure of rooms if you use that now,’ nodding at the guncase and the figures striding ahead. The man just scowled. Don’t make fun of my calling, his red face said. Rob knew he should have chosen the speeding-up choice so he did, left the Assynt assassin behind, the Buchaille button-man, the Torridon torpedo, he ran out of names as he reached the castle and was soon settled in a small room with two amiable climbers from Tyneside, one of whom, it would transpire, was in serious training to represent the UK in the next snoring Olympics. Accommodation was in the former servants’ quarters in the attics. You could rent a proper bedroom, four-poster bed and all, but Rob was here, he told himself, for stern exercise, not mollycoddling and feather beds. He also would cook for himself and eat in the kitchen. Dining in the hall was for the pampered, he thought sardonically, or those not on a budget, he added rather more honestly. He bought some supplies in a small shop that was run by the rangers, one of a group of prefabricated buildings painted in huge flowers, rainbows, suns and moons. The sixties live, he thought, and checked round the back for any half-built wicker men.
Rob awoke early and felt pretty refreshed, thanks, he thought, to the large wads of toilet paper that had eventually muffled the midnight racket. He exchanged good morning nods with the silent climber returning from the common room sofa he had slept on as a last resort, and was soon washed, breakfasted and on the move.
He passed a girl leading a horse, a bay, tall and strong. He remembered that Rum has its own race of ponies but this seemed pretty big. He acknowledged to himself that he was no horse-fancier though, as he noticed the strange-looking saddle on the animal’s back. Someone called out to the girl,’ Portia!’ Watch out for that sports-car he thought, immediately ashamed at himself for the ropy joke. Portia! Where are the Shonas of yesteryear? Now he felt doubly guilty. He could see more ponies loose in a field across the glen and it came to him that the saddle had seemed odd because it was not for riding but for deer carcases, the deer culled by the man with the rifle.
He concentrated on walking. The track was unmetalled and rough with stones large enough to stumble on. He carried on up Glen Kinloch as the sun grew in power until he saw something standing above the track on the left. It was of iron, red-skinned as a Royal Artilleryman in the desert, North Africa, 1943. Rob shucked of his pack and climbed the bank to have a look. A plate on the side identified it as a stone-crusher. It had stood here probably since the landowner built the track, big solid teeth crunching on rock for the track and bridges over the mountain streams. Now mute and still, it still gave off strength, Rob half-expected it to growl into action, snag a sleeve and drag him in, spitting out his bones as white gravel . Some might decry it as a blot on the landscape, overlooking that without it they would have no track or bridges to use. Rob, while careful of his cuffs, liked it, thought it an artefact of the second Iron Age. He photographed it with respect and carried on walking. He rested at a stone bridge and checked the map. The route called for turning onto a footpath through the peat and he almost missed it, a faint way through heather on dark soil. As he walked on it, it gave slightly with each step as if it was the flesh of something alive, as if the island itself knew of his presence in a way that it had not when he walked the hard scar scab of the rocky track. He walked on, following the vague path on a curve up and across the moor and to the east, then over a col and turning west. Now he was in sight of the sea far below, beyond a wide glacier-scooped strath. A few reddish cattle were the sole occupants. He stopped for a rest, took some water and food and checked the map. He had been right. That hill at the edge of the sea and further than he had really expected, was Bloodstone Hill.
He never liked to stop for long, so was soon on his way and, after an hour, and was on the slope of the hill. Perhaps others did not tend to come so far; the only tracks he had seen were of a pony that seemed to him deep, as if the pony had been heavy-laden with a deer carcase. Now the path faded until he realised that he had lost it completely. It was not that important, he had intended to keep to it as a conscientious act, a way of minimising erosion. But that now seemed unnecessary; few seemed to make their way here. Then he found the tail.
It was sitting on the grass, long blades bent below it showing that it had not sat there long. About twenty inches, he corrected himself mentally, about fifty centimetres long with sparse, coarse hairs, of black or white it came to a sharp point and the base was still bloody. It looked bitten-off. He glanced around. He thought himself fairly knowledgeable about mammals, British ones at least, but had no idea what animal this came from. Perhaps it had been dropped by a bird of prey, something that had flown from over the see with the tail in its mouth. Maybe a roc bird.
Whatever it was, wherever it came from, it gave him an uneasy feeling. He took a couple of photographs of it. Later, he could email them to experts for their opinion. Perhaps there were creatures on the island unknown to science; perhaps scientists had been producing unknown creatures.
The moment he reached the top of Bloodstone Hill, cloud rolled in from the sea and swallowed it up.
A hundred metres away shapes moved, grew out of the earth. It took him a moment to realise that it was a herd of red deer that had been resting on the grass. As they saw him, they rose to their feet and watched. He could make out no antlers; a group of hinds. They each slowly and in turn moved off into the grey.
With nothing else to see and tired from his hike, Rob decided to lie down and close his eyes for a few minutes. Silence and stillness made it hard to judge the passing of time and when he opened his eyes and stood up, he was not sure if the nap had been of five minutes or an hour and he deliberately avoided looking at his watch, enjoying the dislocation from any sense of schedule. But he was also not sure of direction, which way had he come? He left his backpack where it was and walked a few metres, suddenly coming to a cliff edge, a sheer drop into the Atlantic. Height and the cloud had somehow stifled the sound of the breakers, he could easily have strolled straight off this edge. Maybe that was why the deer got to their feet; they were keen to see the spectacular fall.
Then the cloud tore open in a sudden breeze and he could see the isle of Canna below like a ceramic brooch on the cloak of a sea-witch or the time-blurred tattoo on a blue giant’s arm.
That night he slept well, the climbers had moved on but he was so tired even the volcanic snoring of the night before would not have kept him awake.
He was up early and alone in the echoing kitchens, breakfasted, and was soon on his way. He stopped off at a walker’s information point by the ranger’s office with maps and leaflets about the island, filling in a card with his planned route. If he fell, searchers would have an idea where to find him.
The mountains of Rum are multicultural; with names of Gaelic, Norse and even English origin. A leaflet told him that the Vikings named mountains for their use as seamarks. Two on Rum are named for spear shafts, often made from ash. Askival and Ainshval, and today he would climb Askival via Hallival, maybe all three if the weather improved. He stuffed the leaflet in by his map and strode through the Kinloch woods and up the track onto the hill.
He tempered his pace as the slope steepened and followed the stream called on his map Allt Sluggan A’ Choillich, that’d be, he thought, the stream of the wooded gorge or gully. The route took him to the black corrie, Coire Dubh and over it through the Beallach Bairc-Mheal, the pass of something, his Gaelic had given out. Soon after the pass he crossed an invisible battle-line between long vanished Gaelic and Viking hosts, and was on Hallival.
Not breathless at all, he told himself, merely stopping to look at the fantastic views. But the views were rapidly diminishing as rain clouds swept in from the ocean. He started across a boulder field; stones as large as cars, vans, houses and the rain slickened the surfaces below his boots. I should have stuck to the long route, to the way on the grass, he thought, because this is no fun. He decided to cut his losses with the rocks and lose some height, maybe fifty metres, make for the grassy path. He headed down through and saw a route though a natural stone arch. Unwelcoming, he thought, even sinister. Nothing could be seen through the arch but swirling cloud. He made his way through and one second’s inattention led to a slip and a crack on the head. This is turning out well, he thought through the pain. He got to the grass and sat on the slope. No blood, just wait till the ringing diminishes. The clouds broke and he saw a raven. And another, three, four, he kept counting until he reached twenty-one once, twice, three times. Twenty-one then, an extended family, a clan.
One peeled off from the group and made a low pass over his head. They’ll do that, ravens, he thought, they’ll check you out if you come onto their territory. Another pass from a slightly different direction, like he’s building up a 3D image, fixing me in the landscape, my space-time co-ordinates.
It did not seem quite as normal, however, when the whole clan came in, circled once, twice, then began to settle around him like cinders beyond the thermals of a bonfire.
One looked at its neighbour and gestured with his head at Rob.
‘Is this the one?’
‘Yes, this is the lad alright.’
‘You’re sure? We can’t be making any mistakes here.’
It’s him, I’m certain. On the hill yesterday, found a wolf hair, picked up a bloodstone and put it in his pocket. I’ll bet it’s there now.’
Rob had had the occasional strange experience elsewhere on the hills; on the Quiraing on Skye, where the calls of the ring ouzels echo between rock formations as the dusk thickens and on Schiehallion, the Fairy Hill of the Caledonians, where he’d got lost on a perfectly conical hill in the fog. Both places he’d slept and dreamt strangely, but he was awake here, near as he could tell.
The first raven spoke again. ‘You’re in a lot of trouble here, son, if that’s true, about the hair and the stone. Is it? The stone in your pocket now?
Stone? And what hair? Did they mean the tail? Rob remembered the tail all right, but had barely noticed that a pebble he’d picked up was of bloodstone and that he had absently pocketed it. He put his hand into the pocket and felt it there now. He could tell that the birds had watched and understood the action.
The leader spoke again. ‘Do you know what a geis is? No? A geis. A sort of forbidden thing or behaviour. You have broken an ancient geis, two really, in touching that hair and in bringing a bloodstone to Hallival.’
Rob looked away, concentrate on something else and this will fade. That hill, it’s Trollval. He knew that the Vikings thought that trolls shrieked from these mountaintops at night, and that they were actually Manx shearwaters at their nest-burrows, but why had the Vikings only named one mountain for the trolls? Maybe they were perfectly aware of the difference between the cries of seabirds; they were Vikings for goodness sake, and the roars of the demonic. Maybe it was lucky he wasn’t on Trollval. These birds were not conversing with him.
No, they were conversing with each other about him. In raven.
The leader turned back to him. ‘Well, son, it’s a shame, but breaking two geis! We cannot let that go without the ultimate punishment. You’re a goner. We are going to have to lift you up and drop you on your head from a great height. You won’t know what hit you. Which is just as well because being hit by a planet can’t be much fun.’ That got a big laugh from the crowd.
‘I can’t believe for a moment that you’re serious,’ said Rob. ‘A geis?’ Memory was kicking in. ‘I have heard of that. But isn’t it a Gaelic thing, Celtic rather than Norse? And aren’t ravens more of a Norse than a Celtic symbol’
‘Not bad son? Though I don’t suppose we would care to be thought of as a symbol. Geis is a Gael thing right enough, strangely enough, you lot have imported a Polynesian word ‘taboo’ for the same thing. Polynesian, isn’t it?’ He turned to the others who seemed to agree on the origin of the word taboo.
‘But we’re on the cusp here aren’t we, where the two cultures intermingled. We could try and claim to be pure one or t’other, not like ravens only lived in Scandinavia, but we’ d be ignoring the facts. And some suggest we’re the direct descendants of Odin’s raven advisors; Hugin and Mugin, but how do you prove something like that? And it’s so long ago, would it matter anything at all if we were?’
‘Hugin and Mugin, youngster’, said another,’ were personifications, if I may use the word, of memory and thought, so if we are their descendants, we may be only memory and thought also, and unlikely to carry out any retribution for the breaking of the geis. Your own mind might be what takes you over the cliff.’
‘Or you’re original perceptions may be the correct ones,’ took up the chief raven again, ‘and there is nothing symbolic about us. We are here to police a law of which you have fallen foul, ignorance no excuse. Plus, if we were the advisors of Odin, who must still live as he is a god and therefore immortal, you would think he would keep his sage advisors by his side until Ragnarok.’
‘That’s the end of the world.’
‘When the wolf Fenris consumes it.’
‘Which he hasn’t, too busy moulting.’
‘Possibly.’
‘It’s debatable.’
The chief was looking annoyed at the crowd butting in. Rob spoke up.
‘So you don’t really know of you origins or why you are fulfilling the demands of ancient laws. You can’t define exactly the point or reason why your tribe came up with or acceded to these laws?’
‘Don’t get all superior, human. Most of your tribes can’t do that either.’
‘So you’ll follow destructive edicts without understanding the need for them?’
‘Again, as do you.
‘Question anything and you question all. Maybe that’s just the thing that would bring on Ragnarok; a world entombed in ice, the last raven’s wings frozen to a windswept rock.
So we’ll do as we’ve done.
Don’t take it personally. You’re probably regretting now all the time you’ve wasted sitting in front of the television, reading rubbishy stories, hanging around in pubs. Must add up to years. But you can’t get them back; you can’t get time to run backwards. That would be just silly.’
‘Silly and against the laws of physics,’ someone pointed out. Everyone nodded.
The same bird continued. ‘And if you start with the ‘what ifs’, you have to accept an infinity of what ifs, any one of which might have led you to a worse fate. You feel robbed of years that were never guaranteed you.’
Rob felt that he was a tumbler in an old iron lock. There was no real choice but to fall as the key turned. He could only feign rustiness, slow the inevitable, no matter whether the lock was to open or shut. Or maybe not part of a lock, maybe one component of an eye that could not be aligned with the others necessary to provide a single vision.
Someone said, ‘We’re not alone.’ There was a rustle like that of black silk at a Victorian funeral.
He noticed that the ravens were looking downhill to a string of brightly garbed walkers like a child’s broken, cheap, dayglo bracelet. The Buchans from Macduff, he thought, in their garish waterproofs. Or is it the MacDuffs from Buchan? A family of hikers, cyclists, marathon runners, though he had got the impression that the teenage son was getting to the age of wanting to hang around on beaches and look at girls. Now they doggedly ascended, faces down, eyes on the heels of the person in front. Father Buchan, or MacDuff, leading as ever from the front, glanced uphill without seeing the raven conclave. The hill in rainwater and edges of sun was like the tarnished cuirass of a long dead soldier.
The family, other tumblers in the lock, disappeared from view below a ridge.
‘Well,’ said the chief, ‘we’d best get on.’
With a susurration of wings in the wind and rain, the clan was in the air and circling tightly around Rob. An unspoken signal and they were on him with beaks and claws and lifting him into the air, over the cliff and then letting go.
He fell into the lochan of the deep corrie. They knew what they were doing; had lived here long enough, could navigate their way around the island in darkness, cloud or fog with unerring accuracy. Ravens are intelligent, they need their distractions, and where they might have once dropped the transgressor into the ocean or chasm; they knew now that myths can be treated simply as stories, as amusements with a thrill of fear, enough to raise the feathers on the back of your neck.
Rob, butt of the joke, mouth full of black, peaty water, soaked just a little more than he had been in the driving rain, slid muddily over the lochan’s edge and made his way back to the castle. That evening, he sat with a hot drink in the reading room on a huge leather sofa among glass cases of stuffed hawks and seabirds, listening as a woman told him of the Pictish fort she could see from the kitchen window of her farmhouse.