The Grassling
Page 5
*
I don’t know why we call the deer by their Swahili name (kulungu). Or the tawny owl that visits the apple tree (Shamba Rafiki: garden friend). But I think it may have something to do with friendship. Kikuyu is my mother’s language, and one I never knew. But Swahili was everyone’s in Kenya. I lived there for two years, while my father taught at a university. It was an easy language to pick up and always seemed to me a jolly one. Not least because the first Swahili I learned was the song ‘Jambo Bwana’ (‘Hello Sir!’), which was always referred to by its resounding chorus, ‘Hakuna Matata’ (not the one from The Lion King). I heard it everywhere I went, a sort of unofficial anthem, with lyrics along the lines of: ‘Hello, how are you, I am very well. Visitor, you are welcome to Kenya, no worries! Nobody worry, you’re all welcome!’ ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ it is not. And everyone is welcome in my father’s acre. Since he stopped being a constant presence outside, more and more wildlife has crept through and settled. The deer use the stream at the bottom of the field for cooling off and the rhododendron bushes for afternoon naps. Hares saunter across, happy to have found somewhere where rushing is not required. The tawny owl visits as often as other birds let it; for its presence, if detected, gives rise to a caterwaul of squawking, and even on some occasions, physical assaults.
But one of the first seeds for this writing came from the barn owl. The flush of white, so much purer than any other in the landscape, came first. Then the unnatural craning of the head. Unnatural only to humans, I self-correct before the word is fully out. It is the unexpectedness – when these birds, these animals appear – that shakes us out of our usual scripts. My father, midway through his upstairs walk, had joined me on the landing. Minutes passed. Minimal words, in whispers, though the window and several feet stood between us and it, taking care not to frighten. We tried to establish how long it had been there, how long we had left before it would go. Visitor, you are welcome, no worries! We talked about that owl for some time afterwards. There used to be lots, when they first came here, my father revealed. But increased activity, from the local farms, from us, had drawn them back. Of course, it had been here first. We were the visitors.
Though I have lived here a lifetime, my father’s claim goes back longer, and he has an even longer claim to Ide. There he stretches back generations, as I do, through him. But it is a mixed motion for me. While others see him as belonging, even without knowing his story, they do not see that in me. So while I am pulled towards that place by all that is deeply knotted in me, I am pulled back by those there now, who cannot see into me.
And I felt that, the last time I visited; when I wasn’t recognized, when I wasn’t noticed. When I tried to speak, but was looked over, as you do look over things that do not matter, that bear no connection to you. Just as the bare branches of the hedge I had walked along had given nothing away as to their species, so my skin had seemed unfathomable. And not for the first time I had wondered when we will be able to tell more about each other at a glance than we do now. Perhaps as cyborgs evolve, we’ll be able to download each other’s information at the click of a switch, with the blink of an eye. If we could reveal our histories through our eyes, then perhaps she would have looked at me with more interest, more warmth – that woman in the village I had tried to talk to. Perhaps she would have looked at me the way my father and I had looked at that owl. Nobody worry, you’re all welcome.
12
Layers
From the train, I see the heather’s glow. Valued by Druids as a cleansing agent, many still believe in its protection. As it casts its bright beam over the land I cross, I urge it to tell me of his progress. Is he there? Is he still there? Ferns light up, electric; grass swims in its green; everything switching on; everywhere a heightened significance. Nearing. Our bodies beat across the fields.
This time, I find him slipped a little, yet believe he is still rooted; that the length of what is him stretches still into the horizons; that we are somehow still connected. The room fills with his steady breathing and I follow the air along its course to the open window, telephone wire and pines, out over the fields to the purple moor. There, the land is open. Is he there already? In his measured dreaming – in, out, in, out – breathing with the blackbirds.
Where does he go when he’s not here? He tells me that his dreams are fast and fevered. That they take him back to Kenya, on safari, out across the bush, under the snow-capped mountain. To Oman, where we lived when I was two, golden sands stretched imperceptibly into sea. To the river Exe, plunging, churning, on the brink of some approaching catastrophe. That is where he goes when he is still mostly here. But when he slips further, where then?
As the soil sinks with a century’s rain, so his bones shift; though he remains, just sunk a little lower. A buried person indicates that something has changed, that deep processes have been occurring. Beneath his acre’s topsoil – silt loam – is organic matter, fine fibrous roots. Is that where he is? Beneath the organic matter, siltstone. Is that where he is? Beneath the siltstone: lime, loam, stone.
Transformation is a dominant process in the lower horizons, as clay may undergo chemical changes to its structure; or, lower down, soil may be turning from fibric to sapric as organic matter decomposes. But I do not want his transformation. I want a return, to the level days of everything knowing its place. Or can his change be so gradual that none of us notice, even him? One of those moves you look back on and see for what they were, though at the time they seemed nothing more than the natural bend of warping wood.
In this place of slippage; calcium, memories leach out. Older events stay the longest, lying more deeply ingrained, as more recent moments trickle further away. He sits quiet in the shift of natural events. Where the thick-bedded siltstone lies under water. Where mountains fell, flung and fanned into rock. Is that where he is? In the deserts? In the mudstones? In gravel? In sea?
He says the business of a historian is not just to record what life was like in his youth, fascinating and valuable as this will always be, but to get back beyond what is there now, and beyond what is remembered by the oldest inhabitants, to what was there before that. There is no end. Always we ask the same question. What came before that? How far back must I go to find him?
Even in the hospital, I still feel that he is here. That I just need to find the right tools to reach him. I clutch the heather in my pocket, rubbing its springing leaf between thumb and forefinger. I’m not sure what I’m releasing, what flavour of earth, flower or field, or whether hope has a fragrance. I read to him. Words spill as sounded breath to his pores, to aerate. As reading becomes a form of respiration, I scan his book for words containing ‘air’. None come. I look for ‘eir’, and read aloud again.
SOIL MEMOIR FOR DRUID’S HILL1
The first words to come, you may not hear. They may be too low or too high. Too fast or too slow. The next words will crawl underground, scraping at stone, trailing their claws along rock. Then they will be wooden, scratched in, or flapping in sap. Then they will be planted, filling with sun and sugar. The next words will be fur, damp and trammelled, riding on the back of an animal. The next words will be flutters, softly lettered beatings. It does not matter which you hear, only that you hear something. For the grass that dies back may not come again.
Horizons:
ins.
0–9
A
9–14
(B)
(B)/C The next words will worm. They’ll say: The cut of the grass is not its end. The cut of the grass is not its end and the end of a leaf is a blade. The cut of the grass is not its end and the end of a leaf is a blade and the end of a blade is a sheath. The cut of the grass is not its end and the end of a leaf is a blade and the end of a blade is a sheath and the end of a sheath is a node. The cut of the grass is not its end and the end of a leaf is a blade and the end of a blade is a sheath and the end of a sheath is a node and the end of a node is a signal. The cut of the grass is not its end and the end of a leaf is a bla
de and the end of a blade is a sheath and the end of a sheath is a node and the end of a node is a signal and the end of a signal is a new leaf.
24+
C It only takes one voice to bring you back.
13
Michaelmas Daisies
She remembers
She remembers our colour rise
She remembers our colour rise, in violet lace, a bride
She remembers our colour rise, in violet lace, a bride who never married.
Michaelmas daisies Havisham the lawn, stoop purple over grass, mapping everywhere with a crusting lace. Inside, my father does his morning walk. From kitchen to living room, twenty-six paces – a marathon in miniature. The scale is made to my measure, not his. His stuttering steps triple mine. Relentless, he trudges through monotonous domestic scenery. In place of elderberries, spots in the paintwork; frayed carpet for lemon balm; light bulbs for acorns. He doesn’t much care to hear of the outside. I tell him about the daisies. He doesn’t reply.
The first night he’d returned from hospital I’d brought flowers to his room. An hour I’d scoured the field for just the right balance of colour, memory and hope. Hydrangea, thyme and periwinkle: nothing too dark, nothing too loud. ‘He won’t see them.’ Mum had plenty to think about besides flowers. ‘His head – he can’t see that high.’ I’d searched for a table low enough to place them on, but soon had to make way for more practical matters: tablets and shoes; railings and frames. Little by little the house had adjusted to its owner, while the earth outside made no such allowances. For the earth has its own speed, slower than the eye. As you look at it, nothing seems to change. It has been that way always. The hills through the window. The slope of the wood, the same scattering of trees; even the sheep seem glued down.
But the landscape is a vast network of work: animal and plant, mineral and soil, and language too. The slope of the word, the same scattering of vowels, even the sense seems glued down. But it is a vast network and it is moving all the time. So that when I say ‘the daisies were beautiful’, I mean their shade matches the colour I brought you your first day out of hospital. You didn’t see them, but I brought them. ‘The daisies were beautiful’ means the outside came inside to show you what you couldn’t see. ‘The daisies were beautiful’ is running through the vase on the piano, down the walls you scrape past, nestling in the corner in the cobwebs. You don’t catch it. Like a little wild thing it haunts the house, and only I can see it.
‘They’re on their way out,’ Mum says, passing us both in the hall, ‘nearly gone over.’ And it’s true, they are more fur than flower. ‘St Michael; the day for moving,’ she mutters.
‘What?’ I follow her into the kitchen, checked by her knowledge of English flowers. Bougainvillea, yes; coffee, yes; but daisies? ‘Michaelmas, it’s the day for moving.’
But the thought of coffee has pulled me back twenty-five years and I’m in Embu, in the coffee plantation, racing my cousins down to the river where the sugar cane grew. Little cousin Kinjo (actual name Njoki but she preferred it the other way around) broke it off and handed it to me. The adults used to laugh at us: me speaking only English, she only Kikuyu. It didn’t matter, we always got each other’s gist; lost each other in coffee, found again in sugar.
‘What’s Kinjo doing now?’ I interrupt.
‘She passed away. Hadn’t you heard?’ Her eyes roam back over years, continents. ‘That’s when we thought you’d be a doctor,’ she remembers, ‘running around the plantation picking plants, making potions.’ I return the conversation to St Michael.
‘That time of year, the nuns would take us out to look at the stars.’ Every sentence of my mother’s is its own story.
‘That’s what I look forward to when I come here – seeing the stars properly.’
‘You don’t get stars in Birmingham?’
‘You don’t see them so much in cities,’ I sigh – it’s the same conversation we have every time I come back. ‘They’re much clearer here.’
She snorts. ‘Kenya’s the place to see the stars. The nuns taught us all their names: the Plough, the Bear …’
‘WHAT’S THAT?’ My father enters the room.
‘Nothing,’ she says.
‘Did you see the hawk?’ I ask, pulling us back to our shared territory of birds.
‘WHAT’S THAT?’ he repeats.
‘SHE’S TALKING ABOUT THE HAWK,’ Mum screams back. ‘The one that comes to the lawn.’
‘Oh yes. Did he say anything of interest?’ he asks.
‘Yes, he was asking after you,’ she returns. He chuckles, shuffles back out.
This time of year I love to watch the kestrel. When leaves fall, opening the woods to the sight of its white, the sky dances with it. I follow it down from the lawn to the copse, where it wheels above the willows before winging further off. The stream below has grown heavy and sedate. It knows its own worth and strikes a lazy pose on the land. The urge to be in it is immense. I fling myself downhill before I can convince myself not to. Up close the water is quick and brown. What looked easy from above is urgent at the root. It rushes down, gathering earth pigments, rocketing over rock in a rush of mud, a swirling dirty foam. It is murky and bleak and all desire to be in it is gone. But as I brace myself for the long ascent back, something catches me in the tight corner of an eye. A flash of white and a turn. I rotate towards it and find a feather breaking the surface. It rises like a dancer in a musical box, its circuit perfectly poised. Time slows and the movement seems to gather everything in; leaves and tongues soak through it, memory too.
He came down wrong and something snapped. Came out of its socket. Crunched the bone where he hung. The kestrel that fell and lay there for days, feathers splayed at sickening angles.
He keeps falling. Slowly gains momentum to move again, little by little, edging out. How many wounds the body takes, how many violences. And it heals. And it heals.
14
Nutrients
‘What is an ecopoet?’ he asks.
‘Well, they write about the environment but … perhaps from the perspective of highlighting its issues and wanting to help … maybe with activism,’ I stutter.
‘But what’s your activism? You haven’t done anything!’ My father sums up the angst of every environmental writer in two sentences.
‘Well, you can lobby your MP, you can support charities; it could even just be the choices you make with products, you know, decisions you make on a daily basis.’
‘What’s the most harmful product for the environment?’
I’ve really just looked in to see how he’s doing and was not expecting Question Time. ‘Well, we need to be careful of anything adding carbon dioxide right now, contributing to climate change.’ Please don’t ask me anything about climate change.
‘Oh.’
I skulk back out.
The wood is showing signs of a big night out: upturned apples strewn like beer cans, magpies, pigeons whose hair has fallen out, leaving fluffy little Mohawks in the grass. Late revellers lie back in the branches, resentful at my disturbance, poke faces around branches; hop closer than usual – heads too full of sleep to quite make me out. A feathered face plays Peepo: branch left; branch right; thinks me a hallucination. It chuckles to itself with a tic-tic-tic before heading back to bed. It has a face you would never tire of stroking. Wooded velvet.
Today I bring him roses. The subtle climbing dog rose and the Wild Rover rose’s loud flare of wellness, of triumph against the dark. The Rover has a scent so intense you cannot run from it. There is no hiding from its blast of health. Fresh from the raspberries and the deer sidling past it on its way to cool by the stream, oak leaves in its fur, lemon mint through its hooves. The rose is picked from the dew that pools above this, that drips onto the nettles, through the long grass that catches it in cobwebs. This I bring to him, and leave in the side of the room, where he will not see but absorb it. It sits there like a toast: to the purpled red days in the veins, pumping flaring jumping.
Farmers can help the micro-organisms in the soil, as they help us – through mulching, using cover crops and no-till farming practices. Here, in the field, we’ve used our own mulch, grown our own vegetables, fruit, flowers, trees. But I can’t remember doing much in the years I lived in gardenless flats in London. Now, in Birmingham, although there’s a garden, as a rented property I don’t have free rein over it. I wonder what the figures are on this; people disconnected from the soil because of lives too transient to grow attached to it.
As I let the soil sprinkle through my fingers, I long to be able to transport its calcium up the field to my father, its phosphorus along skin to my own nerve endings. I think of his question of how to help the environment and of the carbon present in my answer. The soil holds around twice the amount of carbon found in the atmosphere and in plants. Storing it here reduces the amount present in the atmosphere and is the basis of soil fertility, releasing nutrients for plant growth and filtering harmful substances. The red dust speckling my capillaries, glowing brightly in the cold, means so much to me and yet, I wonder how I can care so much for one patch but so little for another. My Birmingham land stings with neglect, like a friend I have been too busy to call. For however long it is mine to move over, there are still billions of lives inside it, relying on me for succour, as I rely on them. A spoonful of soil holds more organisms than there are people on the planet. How many more still in the disused, untended plots around the city. I think about urban farms, cropping up wherever there are cracks; about seasonality and the month that I am in. And as I smooth the last touches of soil from my skin, I think once more of my grandfather and his favourite vegetable, which also happens to be mine.