Memory and Straw Read online

  By the same author:

  The Greatest Gift, Fountain Publishing, 1992

  Cairteal gu Meadhan-Latha, Acair Publishing, 1992

  One Road, Fountain Publishing, 1994

  Gealach an Abachaidh, Acair Publishing, 1998

  Motair-baidhsagal agus Sgàthan, Acair Publishing, 2000

  Lagan A’ Bhàigh, Acair Publishing, 2002

  An Siopsaidh agus an t-Aingeal, Acair Publishing, 2002

  An Oidhche Mus Do Sheòl Sinn, Clàr Publishing, 2003

  Là a’ Dèanamh Sgèil Do Là, Clàr Publishing, 2004

  Invisible Islands, Otago Publishing, 2006

  An Taigh-Samhraidh, Clàr Publishing, 2007

  Meas air Chrannaibh/ Fruit on Branches, Acair Publishing, 2007

  Tilleadh Dhachaigh, Clàr Publishing, 2009

  Suas gu Deas, Islands Book Trust, 2009

  Archie and the North Wind, Luath Press, 2010

  Aibisidh, Polygon, 2011

  An t-Eilean: Taking a Line for a Walk, Islands Book Trust, 2012

  Fuaran Ceann an t-Saoghail, Clàr Publishing, 2012

  An Nighean Air An Aiseag, Luath Press, 2013

  The Girl on the Ferryboat, Luath Press, 2013

  ANGUS PETER CAMPBELL

  Memory and Straw

  First published 2017

  ISBN: 978-1-912147-08-3

  eISBN: 978-1-910324-96-7

  The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

  © Angus Peter Campbell 2017

  For Linzi

  1

  EMMA IS PLAYING the piano.

  The notes rise sporadically, as if they have no connection with each other. There is no obvious pattern. C. Ten seconds elapse and she touches D. Fifteen seconds this time. Twenty. Then E and F in quick succession, as if the order of time has been disturbed. She never practises her scales or arpeggios.

  As a child I learned that time was fixed. Wake up. Brush your teeth. Wash yourself. Put your clothes on. Have breakfast. Cereal at the weekends. Bells rang throughout the day telling you that Maths was over and that now you should go to Room Fourteen for French. Then at eleven fifteen a longer bell sounded and you could play. Boys’ games. Throwing or kicking a ball in the winter, hitting it with a bat in the summer.

  The periods lasted forty-five minutes and the longest bell of all rang at four pm. The bus arrived at four ten and by four thirty we were home. Half an hour was given for play and at five o’clock we went into the study for an hour’s revision. Dinner at six o’clock. Grampa sat in the old wooden chair at the head of the table. Granma moved between her chair and the kitchen. My sister Aoife sat to my left and I sat at the other end of the table, directly in line with Grampa. It was pleasant enough to be told what to do. I could then think of other things.

  Aoife and I were not allowed to touch our knives and forks until Granny and Grampa lifted theirs. We were careful not to eat too fast, so as not to overtake the grown-ups. We would allow them to have two mouthfuls, then we’d take one. It was agony at first, but after a while we became used to it: eating carefully, like an adult.

  After dinner, practice time. Aoife played the violin. I played the cello. I loved the deep sound it made, like a tiger growling in the dark, and spent my hours making animal noises with it. Depending on how you held the bow, you could be a lion or a mouse. A tiny frightened squeal at the top of the strings and a deep threatening roar down near the base. If you quickly rat-a-tat-tatted across the strings near the top you had a whole field full of rabbits running towards their burrows, and if you caressed the bottom ones it felt like Primrose the cat cuddling into your neck. Because I spent my practice time playing these games I never made any progress, while Aoife practised her scales and exercises diligently and played for the National Youth Orchestra.

  From that, I learned that progress is always specific, never haphazard. If you want to reach a goal, you set targets. I could have been a decent cellist if I’d practised more efficiently. However, when I gave it up, in sixth year, my teacher Mr Henderson said, ‘Your problem is that you don’t love the cello.’

  Emma loves the piano. Not for the sound it makes, but for the sounds it doesn’t make. ‘What fascinates me’, she says, ‘are the intervals. The spaces in between the notes.’

  We’d just met. It was Maundy Thursday morning, and we went for a spin in the car down to Epping Forest. The sun was shining as we walked through the oak trees. I was telling her that May the 29th used to be celebrated in England as Oak Apple Day when she suddenly stopped and looked up.

  ‘See.’

  I looked. The sun’s rays were shining through the leaves.

  ‘See.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The way the light catches the space between the leaves. Isn’t it gorgeous?’

  A light wind was blowing the leaves, enlarging and diminishing the spaces.

  She is now playing Gymnopédies, which I like. Things can be irregular, yet have a beautiful pattern.

  Clouds for example. What I can’t stand is disorder. The way she leaves her clothes strewn all over the place. It’s not as if we don’t have shelves and dressers and hangers and cupboards for them. I built them myself, from rescued wood from an old school they were demolishing: beautiful old pine which I scraped and smoothed and oiled. The little labelled cupboards I made from stained glass.

  They are clearly marked, so really there’s no excuse. Socks. Underwear. Jerseys. Blouses. Scarves. Handkerchiefs. When the sun shines through the roof windows the clothes glitter behind the patterned glass. And then there are the pictures, which she hangs haphazardly on the walls. As if a Picasso could hang beside a Rembrandt. They are of a different order.

  ‘You’re a bit OCD,’ she says when I raise the issue, so I try not to. Instead, she gave me permission to put things in whichever order I liked, as if it didn’t really bother her.

  I spend time going through the house, tidying up her life – moving blouses to where they ought to be, putting the books back on the shelves in alphabetical order, so that next time we can find Graham Greene where he should be, sitting between Robert Graves and the Grimms.

  ‘It’s displacement,’ she said. ‘External order for internal chaos. The truth, Gav, is that your life is without emotional architecture. Like a room hanging in mid-air. It needs a structure. How do you get to it? Or from it? By stairs? By flying? And anyway, what do you do in that room?’ She spoke like a lecturer.

  I used to have a box. A simple cardboard shoe-box which my grandfather Magnus gave me. It was filled with old photographs and scraps of paper. I’d look at them now and again: black and white pictures from another time and place, and all kinds of hand-written notes about gardening and fishing. I had it stored beneath the shoe-rack at the bottom of the cupboard, but one day I returned home and it was gone.

  ‘I needed a box just that size to send some manuscripts in the post,’ Emma said. ‘I put the stuff that was in it in the drawer.’

  As if the box itself didn’t matter.

  I’m currently reading Hobbes, who also argued for order. I try to stop myself from quoting him when I speak to Emma, but I can’t help myself. He puts things so well in the midst of chaos. At breakfast, for example, she put the honey spoon into the marmalade jar. I just looked at her and she immediately said, ‘You’re angry, Gav.’

  There’s nothing I dislike more than when she is reasonable.

  ‘It’s courage,’ I said. ‘Hobbes said that sudden courage is anger.’

  ‘Fuck Hobbes,’ she said.

  It’s Saturday, so after lunch we go to the beach, where order is always restored. The waves lap on to the sand and you can watch the rising tide-line u
ntil it can go no further. Then it recedes. It takes four hours to come in, and four hours to go out. It’s just science: because the Earth spins on its own axis, ocean water is kept at equal levels around the planet by the Earth’s gravity pulling inward and centrifugal force pushing outward. There’s nothing mystical about it. One thing leads to another. It’s like birdsong: the chaffinch sings the same song eternally.

  The beach is quiet. One of the many little coves in the area. An hour’s drive from the town, so hardly anyone ever there.

  We have it to ourselves again. Emma is getting ready to swim. She has a wonderful way of undressing. I need to stand up to take my clothes off, but she does it all in one elegant movement standing, sitting, or lying down. It’s childlike in its liberty. As usual, she flings her clothes on the sand. I resist the temptation to tidy them up. Her skin glistens.

  ‘Swim? Go on, Gav.’

  She knows I prefer to lie in the sand sunbathing. She takes my hand and I undress in my usual awkward standing-on-one-leg way at the edge of the sea. We swim out as far as the inner light. She leads the way with strong steady strokes and I follow with equal measures. The initial chill has gone and the further out we swim the warmer it seems to get.

  ‘The sand bank,’ she calls out. ‘Makes it warmer out here.’

  Warm enough to float easily on our backs gazing at the sky. We are weightless, like birds. Perhaps if we remain here, afloat, we will live forever. As the water moves, our bodies occasionally touch. A hand, a foot, the sharp contours of our hips. For a moment she seems like the best evidence for God in the universe. When we touch one another it confirms the fact. We kiss the salt off each other’s lips. Her hands are smooth and the soft down on her arms reminds me of the first time we lay down in the woods, afraid. The moss beneath us was like velvet, and as we looked up we saw a tree as we ought to have seen a tree, for the first time. It got thinner the higher it climbed, until the branches became part of the blue sky.

  She suddenly dives into the water and I count. It’s our game: how long she can stay submerged for, and the longer she stays the more difficult it is for me to guess where she’ll surface. I reach ninety and see a stirring in the waters about a hundred metres to my left. She emerges ten seconds later a hundred metres to my right, her hand raised in a victory sign. She has a dazzling smile.

  We go home. We usually have a shower then and go for a walk. Down by the boulevard and on to the coastal path that takes you right along the side of the golf course. There are several resting-places along the route, each with its own view. By the edge of the fifth tee you can see all the way out beyond the lighthouse and watch the oil-tankers glide north and south, to and from the terminal. The next bench is at the corner of the twelfth fairway, where we look west towards the low-lying undulating hills which never harness any clouds. And the final resting place is down from the eighteenth green where you have the best view of the town itself, with its splendid spires. We then walk back the same way, sometimes stopping for a beer at one of the beach café-bars, before getting dressed for dinner.

  Enrique knows we always arrive there at six, so everything is ready. We have our own corner table. The simple red and white checked table cloth, the single white rose and the solitary iris, a plate of unseeded Greek olives and bread fresh from the oven. And we like the music he plays, which makes you feel as if it will always be like this. My Granma used to say that if you wished for something hard enough then it would happen.

  We smile and play the game of choices. When the menu arrives we extend the game by taking ages to go through every option, discussing the possibilities. Too warm for soup of course, so we have the usual discussion as to whether to have a starter and main course or opt out and go for a sweet afterwards. We vowed years ago never to have the three courses except when there are friends there and we extend the meal for hours.

  This time we choose a mussel and calamari salad for starters, followed by sea bass for me and quail for her. Each and every morsel of each dish is delicious. The mussels and calamari are just the right textures – firm, but moist and delicate – and the bass and quail perfect. We have our usual light-hearted discussion about the wine, finally choosing the Leflaive, which tastes like nectar. We linger over coffee, watching the evening lovers stroll down the sea side of the street where all the vendors are trading.

  We join them for our own stroll. I buy Emma a gardenia which she carefully places in her hair, and she buys me a decorative pop-up striped mini umbrella which I play with as we walk along, singing in the rain, though the sun is setting orange in the west and not a drop of rain has been felt here in months. We end up on the main beach itself amongst the others, sitting on sailcloth chairs which Jamie hires out at ten dollars a time. The sea laps round the edges of the leisure boats which adorn the harbour.

  ‘What is it?’ she asks.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘It’s a big word.’

  So big I have no words for it.

  ‘It’s just…’

  ‘Yes?’

  Tiny beads of perspiration glisten on her upper lip.

  ‘Shall we walk?’ I suggest. ‘Along to the pier? We’ll get something of a breeze along there.’

  She slips her arm into mine and we walk along the wooden decking towards the quay. We stand near the edge gazing at the green light blinking to our left and the red light answering to the right.

  ‘For those in peril on the sea,’ I sing quietly.

  ‘Oh, hear us when we cry to thee,’ she whispers in response.

  This is it. It will never get better than this.

  The breeze is warm on our faces. The best bench, the green one with the comfortable arm rests, is empty so we sit there, side by side. Her finger traces some kind of outline on the back of my right hand which rests on my knee.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ she asks.

  I hedge again.

  ‘Was that a map?’ I ask. ‘On the back of my hand.’

  She laughs.

  ‘A map? Boy’s Own stuff. Everything’s a map. Don’t fudge things, Gav. What is it?’

  What is it? We have settled here, that’s all. After all that. In this beautiful weekend port on Martha’s Vineyard, where the sea is so blue, the sky so clear. It was like coming up for air after holding your breath underwater for days. Like emerging into a sunlit meadow after being trapped in the undergrowth for years. It was a necessary heaven, gifted to us by Fitzgerald.

  We’d always dreamed of it. This place beyond chaos, where the headland erases memory, where the permanent lapping of the sea reassures you that everything is in order. Things which seemed miraculous have become commonplace, while the things which were commonplace are now miraculous. We listen, and sometimes hear each other speak.

  I remember the first time we flew into the Vineyard with Cape Cod glittering below, so near that you could almost touch it. Like everyone else, I suppose we’d brought our dream with us, but despite that foolishness it did not disappoint. We played Joni Mitchell tracks and danced. It may just be the million to one chance, but I think it was more. I think it was that inevitable thing, where the dream fitted the reality, rather than the other way round. Like when as a child the bit of wood found down by the stream really became the cricket bat which scored all those sixes. Aoife would bowl and I would always ask her to throw the ball gently so that I could hit it over the other side of the river.

  It’s always so difficult to cross the river. So damn difficult. For how do you get the fox and the goat and the hay all across safely? The ferryman can only take one across at a time. And, if left alone, the fox will eat the goat, and the goat will eat the hay.

  ‘So how did he manage it?’

  Emma looked at me.

  ‘He took the goat over first, and left the fox with the hay.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And then he returned for the fox.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And, having ferried it across, he then took the goa
t back, and left it.’

  ‘And he then ferried the hay across, which he left with the fox, and returned for the goat.’

  ‘And took him across?’

  ‘Correct.’

  There was always a solution.

  ‘What’s higher than mountains, deeper than sea, sharper than blackthorn and sweeter than honey?’ she asked in return.

  ‘Love.’

  2

  IT STARTED SIMPLY as part of my work. Technology has developed so rapidly that it’s difficult to remember we grew up without any of this assistance. My dad used to take me fishing, and the best thing was simply making the rods: gathering fallen bits of branches from the forest, then whittling them down by the stove on the Friday evening.

  ‘Splice forwards,’ he’d say, holding my hand steady as I cut the knife through the wood. ‘And always go with the grain.’

  Hazel was best. It was pliable, yet firm. After a while it moulded into the shape of your hand.

  I now know that my ancestors had other means of moving through time and space, and the more I visit there the simpler it becomes. For who would not want to fly across the world on a wisp of straw, and make love to a fairy woman with hair as red as the sunset?

  The more I discover, the more I like the precision of their world: to dream of your future husband, you pluck a few ears of corn with the stalk and place them with your right hand under the left side of your pillow. Threshed corn will not do. Exactitude is important. Otherwise, the magic won’t work. If you made a clay corpse it had to be in the image of the person you wanted to harm. You pierced the body exactly where you wanted the ailment to strike. Curses, just like blessings, were specific. Once extracted from their native heath and time they don’t work.

  I work in nanotechnology, which is where my drive for precision found its home. There is no room here for approximation. As the old divines would have put it, things are either right or wrong. One binary digit equals the value of zero or one, and so eight bits equal one byte and one thousand and twenty-four bytes equal one kilobyte and so on up to my good friend the petabyte which equals 1,125,899,906,842,624. None of it ever varies or hesitates with doubt. It is perfect music.