Memory and Straw

by Memory

  Over the past two years I’ve been the lead engineer on masking for the care industry. The franchise is owned by a Japanese company, but they’ve subcontracted the work out to our branch here in New York. It’s a growing industry simply because people get older by the day.

  I won’t tire you with the statistics, but the demographics look good. In the next decade alone the number of over eighties is due to quadruple throughout the world, with the biggest market developing in the far east itself. My job is to put a human face on the robots who will care for that generation. As a mark of respect for the great man, we call the central machine Albert.

  Despite all our technology, humans cling on to their traditions. Old people especially like the familiar. They like routine, a safe process which keeps death at bay for a while longer. Even though our robots can run every care home far more efficiently that any nurse or carer, the residents still want to see a human face in the morning serving them breakfast, and last thing at night tucking them into bed. So we’ve made our robots human; have developed lifelike masks which have deceived even the young in experiments. If something looks human, it is human.

  My line manager Hiroaki Nagano put it straight to me the very first day.

  ‘We’re doing these guys a favour. It’s dangerous out there in the world for them, so far better they never leave their homes. Most of them don’t want to anyway, and the rest would be better not to. Safe from muggings, assault, robberies, terrorism. They’re old, and will never need to leave their houses again. We’ll provide them with the tireless companion who will meet their every need. A cyborg friend who won’t complain, demand better wages or conditions, speak back or abuse them. A win-win for everyone, Gavin.’

  It’s not just an engineering problem. The real challenge is aesthetic. Creating mask-bots which are not only lifelike, but lifelike in a familiar, flawed way. For beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Apart from a few perverts and perfectionists, most of the old people we cater for prefer carers as fragile as themselves. If you really study the human face you’ll discover that it’s perfectly imbalanced. Most folk imagine that the nose is halfway down the face: in fact the eyes are the halfway point. What comforts us is human imperfection. A face is nothing without its history.

  As a team, we spent some considerable time studying facial characteristics across the world, because the market is now multicultural and global. You’d be surprised how racist many old people still are. Here in the United States, many of the older residents feel more comfortable being cared for by masks of their own colour, though they are happy enough to see black or Mexican faces making their beds or cleaning the floors. Old habits die hard. Our target is to make a composite face which will be universally acceptable.

  I stumbled across my own genealogy while doing this research. Because there’s such a big Irish diaspora over here I was tasked with the job of studying Celtic features. I resisted for a while because I knew the word was meaningless – where would I begin or end? In 200BC in Thrace or in 2000AD in Scotland? I recognised the moral uncertainty that ran through the whole project, filtering individual human characteristics and histories down to general traits. But I wasn’t Mengele. At the end of the day, the project was designed to help people, and if some generic features made old vulnerable people feel safe, then surely all to the good? The ends always justify the means.

  The clearest lesson I learned during my research was that features on faces are earned, not given. The age lines, the wrinkles, the curve of the mouth, the light – or darkness – in the eyes. These are the consequences of lived lives, not just the DNA. Hurt, pain and joy experienced are all etched there, as if Rembrandt had suddenly caught the moment when joy or sorrow had called.

  I stripped naked and looked at myself in the mirror: the slight middle-aged paunch, the stoop of the shoulders, the face that reminded me of a boy I knew once upon a time.

  I probably broke some unwritten rule that you never complicate your research with your personal life, but one day as I was idling at the computer I entered my father and my mother’s name, and the day disappeared leafing through their history. Or at least the history that was recorded there, for like all histories, most lay unrecorded. Like those gaps which Emma saw between the leaves, I suppose.

  The internet is such a recent phenomenon, but nevertheless it has already harvested the work of centuries, so it wasn’t that difficult to scour genealogical and historic sites. The photographs were particularly fascinating: the further back I went the more difficult it was to find images of my own ancestors, but there were so many historical society sites that it was easy enough to get a sense of the times and places they lived in.

  Old men with beards and old women with long black skirts outside stone houses. Sometimes children playing in black and white, with toy wooden boats or prams. Horses and dogs and carts carrying luggage. Hundreds of faces looking down as the ship left the quay.

  I showed some of the material to Emma that evening. She didn’t seem greatly interested.

  ‘Isn’t that what people of a certain age do for a hobby? Start finding their roots?’

  ‘Well, I never really fancied stamp-collecting.’

  I told her a bit about my family tree.

  ‘You should go to a séance. You could meet them there,’ she said.

  What fascinated me immediately were the objects my ancestors had. Ploughs and hand-made saws, clay pots and spindles: things you could see in such fine detail once you digitised the old photographs. Sometime later, on one of Grandfather Magnus’s shelves I found a family photograph of my great-grandmother’s cottage with a bogle leaning against the thatched roof. The bogle was the slim stem of a dead fir, devoid of branches except at the top which was dressed, like a scarecrow, with a white cap and an old jacket. It was set on the ground leaning against the wall and roof overnight, and shifted every morning from one side of the doorway to the other to protect the house and the inmates from harm by the witch.

  It was magic. Images were totems which brought blessings or curses. You could sail to success or starvation. I studied the photograph of the people on the emigrant ship. There were of all ages, from babes on the breast to old women in shawls. None of the faces wore masks – fear and hope, sadness and joy were etched on all the faces. I realised that making masks for care work was essentially about tracing these emotions into the contours. The more I understood these emotions, the more effective these masks would be. More people would buy and use them.

  I decided to make a test case of myself. To discover how my face worked – what had left it the shape it was, with all the anxieties and hopes that made it more than a fixed mask. The face that I was, beyond DNA, uniquely sprung from all the faces that had been. I travelled. Read. Remembered. Visited ruins and homes. Talked to relatives. Found Grampa’s notes in his old shed, studied the local papers in the Inverness Library Archive, met Ruairidh on the old bridge that takes you to Tomnahurich. Borrowed, plagiarised, and invented things.

  ‘Will you come with me?’ I asked Emma. But she had her reasons.

  ‘I’m working on a new composition. And there’s a deadline, Gav. You know that.’

  ‘The real answer is that you don’t want to go.’

  These are the stories I rescued out of the infinity that opened up before me, beginning with my great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth.

  3

  SHE LAY THERE. The first twenty minutes always gave her a chance. To listen. To the sound of the night fading away, or to the river outside. Time to put things in order. First the fire, then the porridge, then the milking and the children. For once he turned over, that was it, and some sweet sleep would come.

  Strange how you could see things with your eyes closed. There was Maisie the cow grazing, and when you stood on the distant headland at Rubh’ an Òrdaig you could watch the porpoises dancing far out in the bay. They were there even when she was not. She could conjure them up with a thought. Even things that she’d never seen or heard. Gorgeous plumed bir
ds and spokes that moved and children that grew fat on laughter. You didn’t need to see things to know they were there. They were inside you, like clouds becoming sudden shapes in a dark blue sky.

  Sometimes Elizabeth dreamt. Of silk and white brocade and a brooch like Lady MacLeod wore the day she came to the funeral service. Everyone was surprised to see her, but the minister pointed out it was a great honour to the deceased that Her Ladyship was in attendance. Old Morag had, after all, attended to her every need since she’d been a child, and she was now returning the compliment at the last. The brooch was silver and glinted in the pale afternoon sun which shone in over and across the coffin through the church window. Morag’s husband John had made the coffin himself out of driftwood saved for this inevitable moment.

  These were daydreams. At night it was just the deep dreamless sleep of exhaustion, until one of the cockerels woke her. There were three of them. Old Thomas, who crawed at the most unlikely hours, having lost all sense of day and night. And the two younger ones, Red and Flash, at the peak of their powers crowing just as the sun rose, summer and winter, spring and autumn. They had instinctive precision, as if the sun rose at their behest and not the other way round. Every morning they heralded the dawn of a new day into this rolling world divided into quarters. For there was east and west and north and south, spring and summer and autumn and winter. Each morning – each season – was like a fresh loaf of bread out of the oven. You couldn’t eat it all at once. You had to keep some for the afternoon. For supper. For tomorrow, just in case. You never knew. Anything could happen, even as the sun shone and while the crops grew.

  Calum built the bed so that it was easier for her to slide out first, nearest the door. She could do it all noiselessly, almost invisibly. In one movement, pulling on the woollens before her stockinged feet hit the sandy floor. The latch raised and lowered quietly so that he could sleep on, and the bairns all piled together in the other room. Even the cows at the other end of the house had learned to slumber until everything was ready, warming the whole house with their rich slow breath.

  A winter’s morning. She kindled the fire and added the peat and boiled the pan. Outside, the stars twinkled in the frost. She did her morning’s business in the hollow down by the back of the byre. She could hear him coughing as he rose. The damp would be the death of him. He was a good man, though as light-headed as the lark. If it wasn’t for providence they would all have died years ago. As she strained, she minded the day he came to ask for her, going through the ritual of asking for her sisters first, before she was given as the finest filly in the parish.

  ‘I’m looking for a big horse,’ was Calum’s opening line, and her father told him that the biggest horse was already given to the young minister.

  ‘Well, in that case, the chestnut mare will do,’ and again how her father told him that Morag, with the beautiful red hair, was already promised to Seonaidh the Miller, and how they eventually agreed on her as the bride.

  ‘I suppose, then, that the pony will do.’

  You never married beneath yourself.

  He was sitting by the fire stirring the porridge pot when she came back in.

  ‘There you are,’ he said.

  ‘Aye.’

  They ate the porridge silently, then Calum put on his big woollen coat and bunnet as she poured out another six plates for the children. The ones who had survived: Donald and Iain and Neil and Mary and Catrìona and Joan. Angus was in the Crimea.

  They entered in twos. The eldest, Donald, with the youngest, Joan. Iain with Catrìona. Mary leading Neil by the hand. Poor Neil who’d fallen in the rock pool and damaged his leg. As always, they gave him the warmest stool nearest the fire. They ate quickly and noisily, except for Neil who ate slowly and silently.

  Their father was gone. They could hear him coughing outside in the chill of the morning as he tied the cart to the little pony. And then the soft thuds of the pony’s hooves and the thumps of the wheels as father led the horse and cart across the stones by the midden’s edge. The sun would rise shortly. Already, the eastern sky was pink and the stars beginning to fade. Where did they go when the light came and they stopped blinking at one another? One by one they petered out like tallow candles.

  He walked westwards, leading the pony by the old heather and marram-grass rope he’d made the year they’d married. One strand of grass to every three of heather, bound so tight that it would last as long as he lived. The animal wanted to graze, but Calum dragged it along. It would get enough grazing later on, once he started on the kelp. Even though it was just after St Bride’s, it was surprising how much the pony would find to eat. Especially if he spoke the charm on the way. Mathas mara dhuit, mathas talamh dhuit, càl is iasg, connlach is feur dhuit. Goodness of sea be thine, goodness of earth be thine, kale and fish, straw and grass be thine. He left the pony and cart in a sandy hollow where there was some grazing and carried the creel on his back down to the shoreline for the day’s work – cutting the kelp and gathering the tangle which would fertilise his small patch of ground.

  Inside, Elizabeth was nursing Neil. She prepared the daily poultice to set on his crippled leg. It was basically a cabbage and oatmeal mixture she boiled every morning and then wrapped in an old nightshirt that Angus had brought back from Egypt. It eased the swelling and brought some colour to his cheeks, though the real healing for him was in her touch. For there was so little contact in winter, everyone swaddled in layers of wool all day and all night as the bitter winds swept in from the east. You couldn’t expose yourself to the devouring world. And the miracle of seeing in the smoky dark. You were born into it, accustomed to hearing things before seeing them, so that by the time you were two you could see things before they happened. You acquired second sight. The horse neighing outside was a stranger on the horizon; a thunderstorm the wrath of God. That cough was your father dying.

  The blacksmith could see the future, though he said it was just the past.

  ‘I see time differently,’ he once claimed. ‘You all see it going forward. The only difference is that I see it going backwards. It’s just a different way of looking at things. It’s like sailing from Seal Point to the Stac, instead of sailing from the Stac to Seal Point. You see the same things, but the other way round.’

  The children went about their daily tasks. Donald and Joan milking the cow. Iain carrying the water home from the well. Catrìona already sewing in the corner. Mary had gone out to herd the goats. The whey from goats’ milk was the secret to eternal life. They drank it every day.

  Elizabeth raked the fire, adding a few bits of peat. She had two kinds of peat: the small hard black stuff from the hill, which burned hot, and the larger softer turf from the corner of the field. That lasted longer, but gave less heat. At this morning time she was economical. The pots merely needed to cook slowly. One filled with clothes, the other with broth and the ever-present kettle on at the back.

  The responsibilities were hers. These dear children she’d brought into the world with no real thought of the future but that God would provide from the bounty of the sun and sea and earth. She earned grace with the sweat of her brow.

  Donald and Joan returned with the milk and the making of crowdie and cheese began. It began to snow. Neil crouched by the tiny window, absorbed by the silence of the fall. He watched it closely. The flakes tumbled down, twirled, then piled on top of each other like little children. So, that’s how snow was made: one flake on top of the other. If things clung together they made a crowd. He’d once placed a stone on top of a stone next to a stone and before he knew it he’d built a small wall. Everything turned white outside: the byre, the hens’ midden, the rocks, the hill and the distant sky. A blackbird sat on the small stone wall that separated the byre from the house. Its yellow beak opened and closed, as if trying to catch the falling snowflakes. What kept him on that stone wall and not on the birch tree next to it?

  ‘And isn’t it strange,’ said Neil, though no-one answered him, ‘that when Donald and Joan and
Iain and Mary and Catrìona and I all stood round the tree in a circle looking at it, we all saw a different tree?’

  He knew birds in all their fragility. Their diminishing evening vespers and their glorious morning angelus, and the idea behind their ever-repeating songs. The idea that to be alive was to sing and that by the time the second song was sung the first had been utterly forgotten.

  And then the sky darkened, there was a flash of lightning and they all held their breath waiting for the thunderclap which came at the count of seven, deep and strong from the north-west. The heavens opened and it began to pour, and in moments little rivers began to stream down the open chimney and through the closed door and mother asked everyone to heap the sand from the kist into all the little crevices.

  What fascinating things crevices were. Secret little beasts lived there, whispering and scratching in their own occult language. Insects no bigger than dust and odd occasional noises which reminded you that everything was alive and spoke. The wind rose, first like a child whimpering, then like a woman crying, and finally like an angry man. He shouted and hit and thumped and uprooted things, but mother stirred the broth and sang and despite all his yelling and he caused them no harm. He remained outside.

  Down on the shore Calum found shelter underground. Where the little people lived. The horse with the small cart was sheltered in a cave. Calum crouched beneath the earth in the old broch, hearing nothing of the hurricane outside. He heard no voices. Nothing stirred. There was no point in speaking, for no-one would listen. The wind could be sold to mariners: it was enclosed in three knots. Undoing the first brought a moderate wind, the second half a gale, the third a hurricane. Calum loosened the thong that tied his boots together. Would it work in reverse? He tied two knots and left the third undone.

  Up above, the gale quietened. The pony gazed out at the softening sea and whinnied, but remained where she was inside the cave. Calum sat in the dark, in the silence. Fairyland was a noiseless environment. Free from all human strife and racket. The din of women and children, the clamour of the horse-fair and the sheep-market, the rising tide of the sermon. It was a place of condensed air, a pendulous state. Time was suspended there.