Wall of Days
Alastair Bruce
In a world all but drowned, a man called Bran has been living on an island for ten years. He was sent there in exile by those whose leader he was, and he tallies on the wall of his cave the days as they pass. Until the day when something happens that kindles in Bran such memories and longing that he persuades himself to return, even if it means execution. His reception is so unexpected, so mystifying that he casts about unsure of what is real and what imaginary. Only the friendship of a child consoles him as he retraces the terrible deeds for which he is answerable, and as he tries to reach back, over his biggest betrayal, to the one he loved. Wall of Days is a moving parable about guilt, loss and remembering.
Alastair Bruce
WALL OF DAYS
For Tabatha and Sophia, with love
1
It has been raining here for ten years. I keep an accurate record of time and can state this with no fear of contradiction. There have been whole days when it hasn’t rained and most days it stops for a few hours. But these are pauses in a relentless fall that promises to one day submerge this island. It is already saturated in places. The marshes have doubled in size since I arrived and the cliffs to the north are falling into the bay, their mud walls no match for the rain. It is a place, this island, that is neither water nor land, an in-between world, a world in transition. When I walk through the grasslands and the marshes to the peat fields in the south I can feel the ground give way beneath my feet as if it were afloat. Sooner or later all that will be left will be the rocky hill on which I have made my home. The cave in the hill is the only place on the island that remains dry, and it is warm. I keep a fire lit and have fashioned a door, using the raft that brought me to this island.
The rain is sometimes so light it is like mist. I can see the mist creeping into the cave from below the door. It rolls in off the ocean and settles over the marshes. It swirls, eddies, faces begin to form.
At the end of each day I make a small mark with a stone on the wall of the cave. The seventh line I draw crosses the previous six. At the end of fifty-two of these plus one extra mark or two extra every fourth year I start a new row. Last night I reached the end of the tenth. Tonight I will start another. Every year with the last of the marks I remember being told why we measure time in this way – with one or two extra days in a year – but every year I realise I have forgotten the reason. I imagine it is something to do with the moon, the moon I have not seen for a decade. So much of what I do, of what we used to do, is for reasons that I cannot remember, that I dare say no one can remember.
Marks on a wall. The second time in my life I have made marks on a wall. They mean more than days. I do not forget that.
There is wood on the island. In the east is a small forest. It is a dark place. Or, darker. The light does not seem to penetrate to the floor, even though the growth is sparse. For some reason the forest has not spread. I have seen no saplings, only mature trees. I allow myself to cut down one every eight weeks. That and the peat I dig out are my sources of fuel.
I have fixed on this period of eight weeks for a simple reason. My calculations prove I have at most twenty years left on this island and at last count there were one hundred and thirty-three trees. That is approximately one every eight weeks. I have been following this practice since the seventeenth week of my arrival. In the beginning I was profligate and cut down more than I should have, before realising that none grew to take their place.
I began in the centre of the trees, in the darkest part of the small forest, and am slowly working my way out.
The peat bogs are located a mile from my cave in the direction of the forest. These too I have measured. These too I have made sure will last twenty years.
The cave, the cliffs, forest, marshlands, peat bogs – islands in a sea of wet grass. Islands within an island. One day I drew a map of the island on the wall of the cave, opposite the wall of days. The cave I marked with an X. This is my world.
I don’t know if I will need twenty years. I am no longer young. In twenty years I will be seventy-three. Very few live to that age. I might well go sooner.
The island is a silent place. There is only the rain, the soft wind.
When I walk through the grasslands, my hands, hanging at my sides, wipe moisture from the blades. I hear the noise of my feet in the mud and the low singing of the grass in the breeze. There are seagulls too, fewer now than in the beginning. Every now and then I find one lying in a puddle. If I find them before the worms they are usually edible. I wash them in seawater, cut off their heads, scrape out the innards. If I wrap the carcass in clay and bake it in the fire, the feathers come off with the hardened clay.
Walking through mud is hard work. It sucks you down, grasping at your ankles. Only by moving do you feel you can escape. It is mostly an illusion. The bog is treacherous if you don’t know what you’re doing. Some pools are deceptively deep and filled with thick mud. But I know where they are. If you didn’t, and if you were weak, you could find yourself slipping into the marsh, gripped by exhaustion and cold, swallowing mouthful after mouthful of mud.
I could have built paths around the island if I had enough wood or enough stones. A path from my cave to the peat bogs, another to the forest. One to my fishing grounds, and to the northern cliffs, one circling the island. So many things I could have built. But I would need more than the island has to offer and perhaps a helper too.
I no longer talk to myself. When I first arrived it was my only way of remaining sane. Now, the sound of my voice would feel alien in the silence. If I were to talk there would be nothing to hear me, nothing save the wind, the rain, the sea. It is not a world for speech. There is no helper. I have not believed that to be a bad thing.
I do not talk also because I would imagine replies. A voice from behind a rock, behind a tree, from the top of the cliff. The speaker hidden, daring me to find him, waiting for me.
Of the two fuel sources I prefer gathering peat to chopping down trees. I cut the peat out in pieces almost the size of a man’s chest: a foot long, a foot wide, a foot deep. I use a spade I brought with me to the island. I carry three pieces back with me to the cave to dry out. If they are completely dry when I use them they burn for a long time with little smoke. I use more peat than wood because there is more of it and used together in this ratio they will last twenty years. That is fortunate. It would be wrong to have to go before one’s time, before being ready.
Digging peat is one of the activities on this island in which I take pleasure. There is a satisfying uniformity to the task, a mathematical precision that sits well with me. I do not think of the fact that each harvest is one step closer to the end. Rather I take pride in my work.
If you could look around, you would see that I am working in a rough circle round the edges of the peat bed. At the end the spirals should be clearly visible, though perhaps the edges will have been taken over by grass, or more likely, water. From what I know about peat, this is a small bed. There is a thin layer of grass and mud to clear before you come to it and it doesn’t go much deeper than a foot. Big enough for me though. Besides the neatness and simplicity of the task, I like the sound of the spade cutting through the turf. A visceral sound, more poetic than the sound of axe on wood.
Each square or tree I cut is one step closer to the end. It does not fill me with dread. I hope to be ready to go before then.
Twenty years is not such a long time. I have already been here ten. If I had taken three times as long on every task, on every step, on every axe swing and spade thrust, maybe the time would already be over. I see myself slowed down. It would make this world even quieter.
My nights here are uneventful. There is little to do after eating. By the light of the fire I fix m
y crab nets, mend my clothes, annotate my map. I have two journals and some ink I brought with me and it is in these journals that I record my measurements, my observations, my handwriting growing ever smaller, the rows between lines ever closer.
Where I can, I use charcoal, as I have for the map of the island. For simple sums, such as the keeping of time, I use rock scraped on the walls like a caveman. Or like a convict. Both are apt descriptions of me.
Once these small tasks are done I have nothing to do but go to bed. No wine to drink, no tobacco to smoke. I lead a monk’s life here.
Sometimes I have trouble sleeping. In the beginning it was difficult and lately I have been having more trouble. A sign of age. I have a technique. When it is time I close my eyes and listen. I listen for the sound of the rain, the sound of the wind, the distant waves, the gulls.
I try to put other thoughts and memories to one side. Most often it works but every now and then I see faces, people behind my eyelids and the distant cry of a gull turns into the scream of a child and I am wide awake, chilled to the core.
I repair my nets and do my sums, scratch time on the walls of my cave. I sleep, when I can, from soon after sunset till sunrise and when I am awake I keep myself busy. I cannot do otherwise. I do not have to survey the island to the extent that I have. I do not have to be so meticulous about the peat and the forests. I could gorge myself, build up the fire, dry everything out, heat water for a wash. But I will not let go of certain standards by which I have lived my life. I swim in the sea every morning, eat, usually the remains of the previous night’s meal, and after that collect fuel. The afternoon I spend fishing or gathering food of some variety. There are a few edible leaves and tubers in the forest, seeds from the grasses, fungi. These, along with fish, crabs, seagulls, tubers and worms, are what sustain me.
When I walk on the shoreline I keep my head down, looking for crabs and dead fish. If I see a new species of fish or crustacean and it is relatively fresh, I put it in my bag for closer inspection in the cave.
Once I have examined it I eat it if I think it will not make me ill. So far I have been lucky, aside from the three varieties of fungus that made me nauseous. There is an area where kelp washes ashore. I cut pieces of this to take back as well. You can place shellfish in the tube and put it near a hot fire. The shellfish steams inside and comes out tender and tasting of the ocean. It is one of my few treats on the island.
Cooking in kelp is something I learned years ago. We were in the north-west sailing down the coast of another island in our small boats, returning from a campaign to find fertile land. That is all our world seems to consist of: a few islands separated by vast oceans. Some are deserts, some dead swamps, most are uninhabitable. Only a few are capable of supporting any life. We had found nothing. Most of the force was dead and we were being harried by the enemy. My men were hungry. The shoreline until then had been barren but that night we put to shore near a rocky stretch of beach and I sent a few men to see what they could find. They came back with a feast gleaned from the rocks and proceeded to cook it in kelp. It was unusual to find food like that and it turned out to be the last meal we had for days. As many of us died from starvation and illness as from the spears, arrows and guns of the enemy.
Once I have gathered food I check my fresh-water supply. I have three containers for water. There are no streams on the island but collecting water is easy. In a place where it never stops raining it would be hard to die of thirst. I have built up a circle of stones and hung a cloth over the top. The centre of the cloth is lower than the edges. I place one of the containers under the cloth. Most days it overflows.
When I have enough food and water I turn to my studies of the island. I am categorising the plants and animals here. So far I have counted five varieties of fish, two anemones, seaweed, limpets, two types of crab, seven types of fungus, four edible, three that cause nausea, three different types of grass, one type of tree, eight other plants, one species of gull and one of worm.
There isn’t much life on the island. There are no rats, no rabbits, no moles. The gulls are disappearing and there is no other birdlife. But that is commonplace and it is a small island. Cut off. It has probably been cut off for thousands of years unlike most islands I know, which appear to have been created in a more recent past.
I have trodden every inch of this island from the cliffs through the grasslands, through the forest to the peat beds and then around the island on the rocky and muddy coast, passing the fishing bay and the wilder eastern shore. You can cover a lot of ground in ten years. I have touched every rock, every plant, peered behind every tree and into every rock pool. I have tasted its roots, its water, its life. It holds fewer and fewer surprises for me. We are old companions.
I am measuring the island’s coastline, a difficult task when part of it slips into the sea every day. I am preoccupied with getting my representation of the island to scale and keeping it to scale, rubbing out charcoal outlines when I have to.
To make a complete circuit of the island, which is now around fifteen miles in circumference, takes four hours. I can mostly walk around on the beach or the rocks if the tide is right. If it is in when I reach the northern cliffs I have to climb them and leave the coast for a while. This adds half an hour to the walk. Of course, if I do my measurements it can take longer.
When I arrived the island was larger in circumference, about eighteen miles. I have lost three miles in ten years. If it continues at the same rate the island will last another fifty years. But it won’t. As the island’s circumference decreases, the relative area exposed to the sea and the elements increases, thereby speeding up erosion. The cliffs are disappearing more quickly now than ten years ago, more quickly today than yesterday. When the marshlands are breached by the sea, the process will speed up further and the island will disappear in no time at all. I have toyed with the idea of building a dyke and in fact I spent a month working on it a few years back but I have given up on the idea. The island is not mine to control. It will disappear one day and then I must go too, if I have not gone already. The end of both our histories.
The idea that a circle diminishes in size more quickly the smaller it gets is one that I think about often. I have spent evenings working out the rate of acceleration and so pinpointing the time when the island will disappear. Twenty years is the figure I have come up with. Twenty years from now the island will still be here but of a size no longer able to sustain me. I would spend my last minutes draped across the island, my toes in the southern ocean, my fingers in the northern. At least, that is how it will feel.
In truth, I don’t know whether this is correct. I am not a mathematician and I have no one to check my sums. The more I think about it the less obvious the idea is. You could argue that the smaller the island gets the slower it will disappear. Today it is shrinking less rapidly than yesterday, less than the day before. Perhaps there will come a time when the island will stop shrinking completely and it will go on and on long after I have withered away.
So, I fill my time this way. And it is a good use of my time. When I am gone I will leave a record for future generations, if there are any. It may be a small thing on a small island in a forgotten part of the world but I will leave a legacy, I will leave a history of this place.
There is something else I marked on my map. Somewhere else I visit.
About three years into my time here and for the next two-and-a-half years, every day at dusk I would take a stone about three times the size of my fist and place it in an area of the grasslands where little that is edible grows. The day after I’d place one next to it. After a row of thirty I’d start another. Thirty-one rows, the last with just seventeen stones in it. Each day for nine hundred and seventeen days.
And now each day I go back. It does not look like many. It looks almost insignificant, my stone field. Each day I stand and watch the stones splashed with rain. They reflect the clouds. In the dusk, with my head bowed, eyes half closed, each stone becomes alive, becomes a spi
rit. They swim around me, swallow me, pull me down into the grey water.
A story I have heard tells of a black smoke covering the earth.
People were born in it, breathed it, died in it. It went on for so long people forgot why it was there, if they ever knew in the first place.
Many lived underground, became smaller, nourished by roots and a foul soil. Slowly they started coming out. Some died trapped between the dark air and the suffocating earth. I pictured them with their legs held in soil, their arms lifted to the sky. Others woke and in the grey light the earth began to move. But it is just a story.
I imagine, standing here, the shapes around me, that this is what it must have been like for them. The half light, the not being able to breathe.
This place is on the very edge of the territories called Bran. Some where to the east lies Axum, its only rival and the only other settlement the world knows.
There are rumours, legends of something and somewhere else.
There are measurements for space and time we didn’t determine, there are words for things that no one has experienced, there are things we believe to be true but cannot prove. I write that I lead a monk’s life.
The world does not know monks, yet I know the word and I know, or believe I know it describes a man who lives ascetically. We have plastic, have the word for plastic but do not produce it or know how to produce it. We know the north and south are uninhabitable but cannot remember how they got that way. The story of the smoke.
Scraps of knowledge, scraps of collective memories. There are stories of a time with many more of us, a time of plenty. But they were over long before our story starts and long before I can remember. My role in Bran meant that I have seen more, that I have seen things very few of my people would believe. An enormous ship half buried in a desert. Ruined buildings at the bottom of a lake. All these clues to our past we could not read for fear of what they might mean, for fear of what they might mean we used to be. I have seen so much that hints of a past greater than our present. But we were never ready for the past. The present was struggle enough.
Wall of Days Page 1
