Sightlines

by Kathleen Jamie

  ‘There!’ said Frank. ‘Isn’t that a pastoral scene? They’re grazing!’

  I had it: six or seven very dark oval dots, still tiny, despite the magnification, were ranged across the blue valley, like musk oxen on tundra, seen from far above.

  ‘This is Helicobacter pylori—they’re bacteria. They irritate the stomach, the stomach produces too much acid, and so they cause stomach ulcers. Obvious as anything now, but they just weren’t seen till 1984. It was an Australian pathologist who spotted the association between inflamed stomachs and these things. He was a bit of a crazy. No one took him seriously, no one believed stomach ulcers could be caused by bacteria. But . . . he found another crazy to work with and together they got the Nobel prize. Probably saved thousands and thousands of lives. The thing is, you perceive what you expect, what you’re accustomed to. Sometimes it needs a fresh eye, or a looser mind . . .’

  ‘You can die of stomach ulcers?’

  ‘Yes. You bleed.’

  ‘Grazing’ was the word. Although the landscape was bright blue—a stain called Giemsa, it was an image you might find in a Sunday-night wildlife documentary. Pastoral, but wild, too. So close to home, but people had landed on the moon before these things were discovered, free in the wilderness of our stomachs.

  ‘You wonder what their function is, their purpose . . .’

  ‘No purpose. They’re not conscious. They just are. These things have been co-evolving with us, for millennia and millennia. They’ve adapted to live in acid. There are some people, you know, who take the stomach as evidence of ‘intelligent design’, because it contains its own acid; you walk around with a bag of acid in you, and come to no harm. But it’s evolved that way, and these things have evolved with it.’

  ‘So what will happen?’

  ‘A course of antibiotics should put paid to them.’

  ‘And do you think there are other things, other associations, we’re just not seeing?’

  ‘Oh, certainly. Now, would you like to look at something else?’

  Of course I did. More little journeys to strange new shores. The nature within. Nature we’d rather do without. If I were a pathologist, I think I ought always to have that woman in the room, the one who kept saying, ‘Aw, what a shame’, a one-woman Greek chorus; otherwise I fear I’d be seduced by the bright lights and jewel colours, the topography, flora and fauna, so caught up among the remote and neutral causes I’d forget the effects.

  Again Frank swapped slides, and again the world was pink. We were in the small intestine and this time I had no trouble seeing the beast in question; it was cruising along the indentations of a coastline like a gunship. A pink triangular balloon, with a thin mean tail—though microscopic, it was big enough to be thuggish, and I said so.

  ‘Ah, you see, you’re personalising it. It’s just a one-celled organism, a protozoan.’

  ‘Morally neutral.’

  ‘Morally neutral. This is Giardia. You’ve been to Asia . . . you know, stomach cramps, constant diarrhoea? So debilitating. And chronic. It doesn’t kill you, but it makes you very ill . . . it’s endemic in Asia and Africa, but occasionally it turns up here, in wells and springs. Cattle get it too, and sheep and deer.’

  He studied it for a moment, then leaned back from the microscope, saying with sudden feeling, ‘This thing’s a pest.’

  Pestilence and disease. It’s pretty grim. Who wants the privacy of their body invaded and bits cut out and chopped up and the remnants scraped into a polythene bag? But we’ll go a long way not to die. Who wants their neighbour down the street or round the world to bleed into her stomach when a course of antibiotics will do the trick? We need disease to dance us on our way; we need to halt it if we’re to live morally. Twin truths, like boxing hares.

  I drove home along the river I’d fancied I’d seen in the poor man’s liver cells. The tide was in, no sandbanks. The inner body, plumbing and landscapes and bacteria. The outer world also had flown open like a door, and I wondered as I drove, and I wonder still, what is it that we’re just not seeing?

  * * *

  On my third visit Frank relayed an unsettling invitation. A colleague, Professor Stewart Fleming, whom I had met last time, was that morning conducting a post-mortem.

  We looked at each other.

  ‘Think about it,’ said Frank. I paused for a long moment, then asked: ‘What do you think yourself?’

  It was his turn to pause. ‘Why don’t we look in later, in a couple of hours, when he’s finishing up, just for a minute or two?’

  It lay on my mind. Why refuse? Because it felt scary, and like a transgression. My own motives may be impure: idle curiosity, a good dinner-party story—guess what I did on Wednesday! Why attend? Because . . . there were just some things to come to terms with.

  A featureless door, guarded by a keypad. No signs, no notices declaring lock-downs, just a door in the wall. As Frank was tapping in the number, my heart lurched in fear of what it would open to reveal.

  ‘What are we going into?’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Frank. ‘Nothing, here.’

  A narrow flight of stairs, leading (of course) down, and round a corner. At the bottom was another door. This one gave into a small hall, lined with white locker doors, with people’s names handwritten in red pen. Corpses, waiting for the undertakers to arrive and, discreetly, take them away. A porter gave us a jolly hello as we passed and at a further corner Frank did hold out a staying hand, saying, ‘Wait here a moment’, as he went ahead.

  No doubt they were doing some tidying. Concealing this and washing that. I had no lab coat today, and felt suddenly wrongly dressed: it had all gone serious and I was in too bright a skirt, too casual a top. Everything around was clean and metallic. Then Frank reappeared, saying, ‘You can come in now.’

  The scene was composed like a painting, or a ritual: the living, and the concealed dead. In a wide, clean open space the body, shrouded in white, lay on a metal table to the left. At the back wall a figure in green gown and hat glanced toward us, then turned back to the sink where she was occupied. Above her were windows, for observers. Professor Fleming, dressed in green scrubs, was pushing toward me a metal tray on wheels. I couldn’t see what lay on the tray until we met, and I looked down. At that point he said, ‘Okay?’ I think he meant, you’re not about to faint? It happens, sometimes.

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  He pointed. ‘This is the heart, this is the left lung.’ With splayed fingers and a soft scraping motion, he pulled the heart across the tray. It left a smear of blood. ‘I’ve cut it open, see?’ Deftly—this was a substance he was used to handling—he began to fold the opened heart back into shape, like a small bag. The word ‘cutpurse’ came to my mind, an old name for a thief. I nodded, and, though I would have liked to have seen again how the heart was made, more slowly, it seemed improper to ask and already I was aware of the smell, fresh, rude, rising up and summoning some primal response I didn’t really want to acknowledge.

  I looked from the heart, the chubby texture of its walls, its inertness, up to Prof Fleming’s eyes as he spoke, back down to the heart. The quick and the dead. I could sense, rather than see, the shrouded shape of the dead man.

  The lung, smaller than you might imagine, had a smoother texture, but worked through its redness were threads of black.

  ‘That’s just carbon deposit. Every city-dweller has that in their lungs . . .’

  Now the smell was insistent, a blood-red rose.

  ‘And what . . . ?’ I asked.

  ‘This . . . You’ll have heard of thrombosis?’ He pointed to a dark gobbet on the cut-open heart.

  ‘That’s a thrombosis, in the right atrium. Also the heart’s enlarged, 630 grammes, a good third bigger than you’d expect for a man of this size. He had a condition that made him susceptible to this . . .’

  I thought ‘we are just meat’, then called it back. Flesh, bodily substance, colons and livers and hearts, had taken on a new wonder. If you had to design a pump or gas-e
xchange system or device for absorbing nutrients, you would never, ever, think of using meat.

  ‘And his wife asked for a post-mortem. She wanted to know the cause of death. Although he’d been ill a long time, his death was very sudden. She had looked after him. She wants to know if there was anything else she could have done . . .’

  The cold organs laid on the cold tray. They didn’t call out, didn’t suggest any great meanings; they were plain and soft and vulnerable, with their billowing smell of meat. After this one last favour, granting absolution to the man’s wife, they’d be returned to the body for cremation or burial, returned to the elements.

  We all nodded. Enough.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ asked Frank. ‘Let’s go and get a sandwich. That’s the tradition.’

  * * *

  ‘The natural evidence of our mortality,’ Professor Fleming called it. Hearts and lungs, a colon that could be a pig’s. That’s the deal: if we are to be alive and available for joy and discovery, then it’s as an animal body, available for cancer and infection and pain. Not a deal anyone remembers having struck—we just got here—but it’s not as though we don’t negotiate.

  In the staff common room there were low upholstered benches and a water cooler. The windows gave views of car parks and newly built houses beyond. A leaf, swirled up in the breeze, flattened itself against the window, a gull wheeled in the air. God knows, someone has to plead for the non-human, and cry halt to our rapacity, like the speakers at the conference, even if he has antibiotics and antiseptics in his rucksack. Or maybe that’s the beginning of a truce.

  The doctors’ conversation soon turned to hospital politics and the dread hand of management. Enough, indeed. Enough bodily marvels for one day. I left them to their work just as visiting hour was beginning, and the foyer filled with people. That heart smell haunted me: for a while it was unshakable, as though, like a wolf, I could sense it everywhere; in the old and middle-aged and babes in arms, all seeking their way towards their relatives and friends. It felt surprisingly good to be part of that rough tribe of the mortal, and good to be well, able to stride outside again, back into the cool March breeze.

  THE WOMAN IN THE FIELD

  BECAUSE OF THE EARTHFAST NOTION that time is deep, that memories are buried, the Neolithic and Bronze Age artefacts occupy the windowless basement level of the National Museum. To visit the prehistoric, one must descend turnpike stairs, or travel down in a lift—either way, down—until the pressure of the building, of thousands of years of subsequent history, is piled on top.

  Down there, a diorama shows how the land was then. Two stuffed wolves slink through a forest, pursuing a wild boar. A tape plays wolf-howls and the yaffle of a woodpecker. Opposite that, mounted in a glass box, is the massive bovine skull of the now extinct aurochs. It looks like something cast in a foundry, like it ought to belong upstairs, under ‘Industrial Revolution’. This skull was found, as it happens, in the small town where I now live, with its single main street and primary school, and where, last year, a log boat was carefully pulled out of the river mud, where it had lain since the Bronze Age.

  I’d come to the museum to visit something in particular, but I’m distracted; first by the wolves and aurochs, and now by a gleaming bronze dagger with a pommel of whalebone, which the label says is a replica of one found in a bog. It shows how new and desirable such objects were, before they spent four thousand years corroding in the earth. But at last I find what I’m looking for.

  It’s a clay bowl, that’s all; what the archaeologists, with imaginative flair, call a ‘food vessel’. It’s displayed in a tall glass case with a number of other bowls small and large, artfully arranged on glass shelves. A load of old pots, the epitome of museum dullness, unless you like that sort of thing.

  The bowl I want to see has been placed together with another at the front of the case slightly apart from the rest, as though these two had things to discuss, which they well might. They are both reddish brown, and about seven inches tall, though one is fatter than the other. The fatter one is a bit lopsided, so it inclines toward its neighbour. Both are decorated all over with bands of grooves and half-moon-shaped jabs and it’s this—the near-matching decoration—which announces them as siblings. It’s remarkable, but though they’re nigh on 4000 years old and were discovered a century apart in different corners of the country, these two Bronze Age bowls were almost certainly made by the same potter. One was discovered on the south banks of the Forth, the other farther north in Perthshire, in a place close to the River Earn. Those places (‘findspots,’ the archaeologists say) are only twenty miles apart as the crow flies, but the vessels must have been transported to their destinations, possibly from the potter’s workshop in a third place, by a route much longer on the ground. They must have been taken by boat through a complex of rivers, or been carried on foot over hill-passes and through wooded valleys, where wolves may well have pursued the wild boar.

  They had lain a long time in the earth, but both are clean now in their glass case, and contain nothing but shadows. If they were indeed the work of a craft potter, they might have been fired to order, perhaps at the behest of a messenger. So, despite difficulties, people and news and goods must have spread through the country more quickly than we might suppose.

  * * *

  I was a teenager when I first became aware of the past, manifest as relics in the land. A teenage antiquarian, thrilled by standing stones, tumuli, ley lines and all that; what their aficionados grandly called ‘earth mysteries’. Questing after a well or earthworks was what got me out of my parents’ overheated living room and off into the local byways and hills. I had a duffel coat, suede boots and flared jeans that soaked up the wet; hopeless attire, but near to our modern housing scheme on the outskirts of the city were the remnants of two, three, five thousand years of occupation. I cycled to visit a long-barrow, which is now a roundabout at a motorway intersection near the airport; I hiked up onto the Pentland hills to examine a few ditches and banks which the map announced as an ‘earthworks’, and one Boxing Day, just to get out of the house, I walked miles to visit a stone pocked with cup-marks. It stood where it had been raised thousands of years before but an estate of 1930s bungalows swirled around it now. It was snowing lightly. What I saw wasn’t a standing stone overwhelmed by bungalows but, rather, I fancied I could feel the pulse of ancient energy in the land, quietly persistent even in the slushy suburban sprawl.

  Then, one day in May 1979, it may even have been my seventeenth birthday, I sat my last, lacklustre exam and left school without ceremony or much notion of a personal future. A day or two later, my mother drove me the thirty miles from our house into rural Perthshire. She had suggested librarianship, which was the stock idea for a kid who read books. I did read books: the paperback stuffed into my haversack on the back seat was by Tom Wolfe—The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. She suggested secretarial college. When she said these things, tears of belligerent dismay pricked at my eyes. No one suggested university.

  The route we followed in the family VW Passat was almost the same, I now realise, to that which separates the sites where the two decorated food vessels were found. We, too, travelled by river valley and hill-pass. We followed the motorway upriver to Stirling, skirted the edge of the Ochil Hills, dipped into Strathallan and crossed the Allan Water, and continued through farmland and old villages. It was an alien land. We drove narrow roads shaded by huge trees, passing the driveways and gates to secluded private houses larger than either of us had ever entered. Blue election posters were still nailed to roadside trees, but they would soon be removed. They’d done their work—ten days before, Margaret Thatcher had been voted into office.

  There must have been an exchange of letters and directions. I must have seen an advert recruiting volunteers, applied, and been told to turn up at this mid-May date. I remember nothing of that except that I had to bring a trowel, ‘cast not welded’. I had no idea what that meant, except that it seemed suggestive of the ancient magic of
metalwork. It meant only that cast trowels were stronger, and there would be a lot of trowel work.

  We crossed the Earn by a lovely old four-arched bridge, then took the right turn under a road lined with tall pines. On the right, the river; on the left, after half a mile, an unremarkable farm track began. We turned in, the track at once sloped uphill, and led quickly onto a level terrace of farmland. Suddenly, when we crested the rise, there appeared the long ridge of the Ochils, five miles away and blocking any view further south. This low but determined range of hills formed the entire horizon. To the north, more hills, higher and jagged, the beginning of the Highlands. All of this—the crossing of rivers, the terrace of land, the encircling raised horizon was relevant, but I didn’t know it then.

  We’d arrived at something which seemed part wartime billet, part hippy commune, and no one was around. The track led to the back yard of a substantial old-fashioned farmhouse, derelict-looking but obviously in use. It was L-shaped, built of grey stone, with pitched roofs. At its eastern gable stood a few trees. At its west side, an arched barn. A couple of caravans were parked up nearby, and a lived-in ex-army ambulance painted yellow, with a stovepipe emerging from its roof. A field away, beyond a line of sycamores, were low heaps of freshly dug earth.

  The farmhouse door was open, but a deep puddle had formed at the threshold, and hessian sandbags were piled up to keep the water out of the house. We negotiated the puddle and entered a dim kitchen with a long table flanked by benches and a sink in the window. A woman dressed in shorts and a T-shirt was stirring a pot. She turned and gave me and my mother a cursory look. To me she seemed old, and senior—twenty-eight or so. I explained myself, but didn’t understand at first when she spoke; many of the people here were itinerants with accents I’d simply never heard before, not for real: London or Devonian, or, like this woman, a clipped, old-fashioned English public school. My mother said, brightly, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not staying!’ She didn’t, either.