Memory and Straw

by Memory

  And indeed the building itself was a chilling place when they entered, with long clean corridors heading off into eternity. And it was quiet. So still. Which was a relief, for they had feared moaning and screaming, and none were to be heard. A lovely grandfather clock stood ticking loudly by the open fire. A white-bearded doctor met them and explained that John would be in the ward upstairs which had tremendous views over the valleys towards the town, and that they could visit him any time.

  ‘We’ll assess his progress daily,’ Doctor Smith said, ‘and it may very well be that he’ll be back home with you in a month or so.’

  They parted quietly from each other, for they were used to parting, and John was also used to going off to places.

  They gave him some pills and he felt as calm as evening. He looked down on the wonderful green world far below. Since the windows were locked and barred it was completely silent, as if all the birds had gone mute, and he watched those three fools endlessly rolling in perfect unison down the slope. They’d stand at the bottom, and then holding hands would slowly climb back up the hill together to repeat the spinning voyage. The lady with the parasol continued to dance round the fountain. Then he heard a scream somewhere and the sound of running feet and some shouts before the silence resumed. A nurse came in to see him and looked into his eyes, asked him to open his mouth wide, checked his heart and his ears, took his temperature and wrote everything down in a book. She asked him how he felt and he said ‘Fine.’ She said morning tea was now being served downstairs and asked him to accompany her.

  Hundreds of people shuffled along various corridors into the dining room for the morning tea, some muttering to themselves, some waving, some laughing and saluting. The tea was weak and tasteless, but the scones were lovely and creamy, with fresh strawberry jam. He ate three of them, sitting at a long wooden table. No-one spoke to him, though one man kept looking at him and winking. After morning tea there was an announcement that it was exercise time and immediately scores of them jumped up and leapt along the corridors to go outside, while others sat groaning and holding their stomachs, claiming that they were ill and unable to move.

  Those who went outside worked through some basic drills, lifting their arms into the air, making circles, touching their knees. Those who could, hopped, first on one leg, then on the other, then on both, while some people laughed and cackled. Because of his gammy leg, John was allowed just to stand and watch. Afterwards he was told to go for a walk and the nurse who had earlier taken his notes joined him. She was called Mary and was from Lewis and asked him if he spoke Gaelic and he said of course he did. So they continued their walk in their own tongue. Mary’s own brother had also been in the war and he too had suffered shell-shock and spent some time here, she said.

  ‘And is he well now?’ John asked.

  ‘Yes. He was one of the lucky ones.’

  For it was true that there were so many folks from the far islands, who spoke another language, or lived a different way, who would be brought there in straitjackets and asked to explain themselves in an alien tongue which they could hardly understand or speak. Mary and some of the doctors were aware of that and went out of their way to make them feel at home, but it was a constant battle against a system and against certain nurses and doctors who believed that their strangeness was the problem, not the solution.

  John realised that his illness was mild compared to many of those around him. Poor old James who would continually strip naked and then have to be restrained and carried away for yet another cold bath. Claire, who sat in the corner plucking out her beautiful dark hair until she was completely bald. They bound padding round her hands to prevent her, but she would chew through it and almost choke, so the staff decided that discretion was indeed the better part of valour. Many of the inmates were troubled by religious mania – the certainty that they had committed some awful sin which deserved continuous punishment, or the opposite certainty that they were Christ reborn with a special message to save the world.

  There were so many secret – or at least unspoken – lives. Emma Christenson, a forty-three-year-old married woman who had been brought all the way down from Shetland in a straitjacket and spent all her time playing an imaginary fiddle and handing out cards inviting people to concerts at which the King himself would preside; and who, in her day, had indeed been one of the best fiddlers amongst thousands in these musical northern isles. Ernest Woodward, who went around saying he was the Emperor of Russia, the strongest and richest man in the world, the finest player of any game you could mention, that he walked two hundred miles every morning to get an appetite for breakfast, could run a mile in five seconds, that he grew four inches in height every day and that his wife, back home, was growing too; and that he knew everything there was to be known by inspiration alone and that whenever he went to a dance all the ladies would fall comatose at his charms. When asked by a nurse what he thought of his surroundings, he replied ‘I never saw such a damned lot of idiots in one place in my life.’ Mr Woodward had advanced syphilis and the doctor’s official report stated: ‘I am inclined to think that his mental derangement is due to excessive sexual intercourse.’ Which made a change from several others whose diagnoses was ‘excessive masturbation’, which led to all kinds of mental health issues sometimes cured by iced baths.

  One day it dawned on John that he was actually already in the secret commonwealth and that Oliver Cromwell had delivered on his promises. He was in the Sìthein, the fairy knoll and all these strange, marvellous, people around him were not just citizens, but citizen members of this new, second commonwealth. They had been taken there by an imaginative leap which removed barriers, so that men could walk five hundred miles before breakfast, women could weep in public and anyone who felt like it could sing or dance or roll on the grass or scream or lie stock still for hours on end unless some earthly being came and wrapped them up in cloths or muffled them or carried them away to silence them with syringes. There were dangers and limits: violence could always be sensed before it happened, you could see it in the eyes of the men, but all you had to do was to be alert and ready for it when it erupted. Like the Reverend Kirk before him, John knew that fairyland was as constrained as the land above. Everywhere had its rituals and rules.

  John found a copy of Kirk’s book on a shelf in a cupboard and stored it away inside his jersey. He smuggled it out down to the disused beehives at the bottom of the garden where he read it while nurse Mary looked the other way pretending not to see. He knew Kirk had written this part especially for him. ‘Some say that the continual sadness is because of their pendulous state and that these subterraneans have controversies, doubts, disputes, feuds and sidings of parties; there being some ignorance in all creatures and the vastest created intelligences not encompassing all things. For how much is written of pygmies, fairies, nymphs, sirens and apparitions, which though not the tenth part true, yet could not spring of nothing? For every age hath left some secrets of its discovery, as some men do to fishes, which are in another element, when we plunge and dive into the bottom of the seas, their native regions. And how long can one remain there, and still see? What is it to have the second-sight? The sight, you see, is of no long duration, only continuing as long as they can keep their eyes steady without twinkling. The hardy therefore fix their look that they may see the longest. But the timorous see only glances, their eyes always twinkle at the first sight of the object.’ And in answer to the question ‘Doth the acquiring of this second sight make any change on the acquirer’s body, mind, or actions?’, the Reverend Kirk reported ‘All uncouth sights enfeebles the seer’, and John twinkled, either saved from, or unable or unwilling to enter the hurricane. He was really only a shadow-boxer, not a proper one.

  Those who would never be released from hospital were disappointed and angry with the world, which had frustrated their dreams. So they tried to adjust the world rather than their dreams. Who could forsake these hopes that infancy would return, that father would not die, that they had
done no wrong? But they had, apparently. Mother had died. The corn fields were no more, and the old open field where the horses used to gallop had been sold and an ugly factory built on it which pumped out black smoke day and night, and that moment of half-wakening half-sleeping before dawn could never be recaptured. For when you woke, there you were again, back in the foul-smelling slum with a baby coughing, or alone, abandoned in the silence of your room.

  You had every reason to be angry. So many disappointments. It was all very unfair. Mother should never have said these things. And father should never have done that. It hurt. It was beyond understanding. Things happened over which you had no control. That bastard with the white coat over there pretending he was a doctor when he was the one who had put the pillow over your mother’s face and choked her, and the wicked police out there who spied on you day and night, and those newspaper people who peddled gossip and made the world what they wanted it to be. Why were they praised and rewarded for doing that while you were branded as ‘mad’ for doing the same? While they sat drinking in their clubs, men would come for you and certify you, sign papers in your name and bring you to this prison where they injected you with all kinds of drugs. But they wouldn’t get you. Oh no. You were too smart for them, for when they came for you, you hid under the bed, or called for mother and – see – there she is coming running to save you, and if all else failed you could call on Christ Himself who would descend from the skies with wide open arms to save the righteous and even the damned, as long as they repented.

  In the end, Mary saved him. One of her jobs was to give him hyoscine, but instead she would eject the bromide down the sink and just listen to him. For hours on end, both on duty and off, if such a distinction applied. He went back a long way: to that time his mother met the fairy lover that wasn’t; and to the gentleness of his stepfather, Andrew MacDonell, who gave him his name and the move south; to the sergeant-major at Fort George, how he would walk along the inspection line as if he were inspecting flies; and then the long hot journey south, how the sea off the west coast of Africa bubbled and boiled.

  The African campaign was the worst. To have survived it was like a secret triumph. John was in the Highland Brigade, which lost seven hundred men in the first seven minutes of firing. Not that the boys knew any of that, until the statisticians and historians wrote it down from the surviving officers’ records much later.

  What John remembered was the journey home. How blue the sea was. So blue that it was green and the sunsets so red that they were orange. There was hardly any room on the ship. You had to claim your spot early and hang on to it because your life depended on it. As soon as he boarded John found a shaded spot on the aft deck of the ship where he was protected from the mid-day sun by an awning. He made a deal with a fellow soldier, Tommy Griffiths, to share the space so that they could protect it from others. If either needed to go for food or to relieve himself the other would guard his space with his honour.

  The only danger was from an English officer who was under medical supervision, but who was permitted to always carry a small stick. He believed himself to be the great W.G. Grace, and every morning and evening would come up on to deck and line himself up against the railings and hit imaginary fours and sixes high and wide into the Southern Ocean. John and Tommy took turns along with all the other time-served men to bowl for him, throwing invisible balls over and under arm for hours on end while the officer squinted into the sun to see where they’d landed. The danger was when he missed a ball and would come running at you with his stick, but the solution was to stand stock still and salute and say ‘Mr Grace! Sir, your honour!’ and he would immediately calm down and return to the wicket rails and take up position again.

  The voyage to Southampton took fifteen days. As the officer was leaving the ship, with the doctor guiding him by the arm, he paused at the bottom of the gangway and turned to John and Tommy and all those watching him and solemnly said, ‘In any case, you mustn’t confuse a single failure with a final defeat.’

  9

  INVISIBILITY IS A magic thing. When John first left hospital, he believed no-one could see him. And because he believed it, no-one could. Though sometimes he thought it was the other way round: that he was actually invisible because no-one saw him. When he went for a walk, folk he’d once known would pass by without seeing him, and when he’d occasionally walk out in front of a horse, the horse would carry on trotting as if he wasn’t there.

  He remembered fakirs in India who would make things appear and disappear. And magic-men he’d seen in the Transvaal who could conjure up snakes and clouds and make the stone you were holding in your hand dissolve while you held it. They shouldn’t have done it, but one night John and his pal Fred crept out of the camp and followed the drum-beats. Afterwards, vainly trying to avoid time in the guardhouse, they claimed they were hypnotised. In the clearing, scores of men and women and children were dancing and when they joined them they entered a world that was strangely familiar. In many ways it was like the war itself: the music of the pipes leading you through the dust, then flashes of light and the swirling thump of bodies as you moved. The women wore gorgeous coloured dresses and the men were painted blue and red and yellow, and in the very centre a man was on his knees beating the ground with the palms of his hands. Dust was everywhere.

  The man in the centre then rose and swept round the company several times in silence. A young girl ran over and gave him a bird, which he plucked to the beat of the music. Everyone in the congregation moved forward and picked up a feather for themselves. The feathers were all bright blue. The five men who were beating the drums slowed down to a slow march and everyone sat. The man in the centre beckoned John forward. He motioned that John should give him his feather. As soon as he received the feather, the magic man twirled it three times round his head and gave John the live bird back in its place. John released the bird into the air and watched it fly into the darkness.

  The magic man then gave him a small rounded stone. It was painted in seven circles. Purple. Blue. Red. Green. Yellow. White. Black. He indicated to John that he should look at the stone. All the colours disappeared, one after the other, until it was pure stone colour. As John held the stone, it began to weep. Little drops appeared in the centre of the stone until they made two eyes. Then more dripped out of the stone eyes, slowly, one by one. As the stone wept, John wept, until the stone completely dissolved, leaving John sitting there in an empty clearing, his face and hands soaking wet with tears. Fred was lying on the ground beside him, fast asleep. Everyone else had disappeared.

  He wondered if he could make them disappear now. Here, in Inverness. But maybe he needed the right conditions. Dusk. Darkness. Drums beating. Blue-feathered birds and pounding dancing and an alien air. The fakir and the magic man had been so precise and certain, knowing what they were doing. Sure of themselves and their audience. But John was a bit unsure that he was truly invisible, for sometimes he suspected he caught folk glancing at him. Better to start small and work up towards complete invisibility.

  It was like sin. Or love. There was no halfway house. You couldn’t be selective about it. You were either invisible or you were not. Like invisibility itself, sin was an amazing thing. He knew the word. Knew it well, intimately, like a victim knows a crime. Had heard the word since he was a child. And when he was in Dunain, he heard a new word that he’d never heard before. It began with a K. What was it again? K. There was a woman there. Elsie was her name. And she stole things. Anything she could lay her hands on: gloves, bits of wood, bedding, thimbles, toys, coal. Any old rubbish she came across. Except she wasn’t really stealing. Only gathering. Collecting things which had been left. Discarded. Abandoned. That folk didn’t like or use or treasure or value. Or if they did, not enough. And the word came to him, was made flesh. Kleptomania. That was it: that word he’d heard amidst all the other manias that had been named in the corridors.

  It meant taking things. And John wondered – if he was invisible – whether he could
take things without anyone noticing. Without being seen. For if no-one saw the thing, maybe the thing didn’t happen. Like when he was a child, and would shut his ears to the taunts of the other children, and shut his eyes when he passed the old mill and the loch where the water-horse lived. Shame didn’t exist. Nothing existed.

  It gnawed away at you however. Rotted you from the inside, like a rat eating the thatch. So. Better to start small. And he began picking up leaves from the ground and stuffing his pockets full of them. But no-one noticed. Or if they did, no-one bothered. And then he saw a trowel lying on a wall and he put it into his pocket, and again no-one noticed, or followed him, or chased him down the street. But he knew these were insignificant, trivial things. He sensed that the real test would come when he entered merchants’ premises, where people bought and sold things, where money changed hands. Where things mattered. Had value.

  Best to start small. The sweetie shop, where Gum Drops were in one jar, Peppermints in another. Nougats on the shelf. Toffees in wrappers. Black Jacks, the best of all. And Barley Sugar Soldiers. He started with them. And no-one noticed. By the end of the week he had the whole collection – a Life Guard, a Grenadier Guard, a Royal Scot, a Scots Guard, a Dragoon Guard and a Hussar.

  But being invisible also meant having no substance. No praise or condemnation. No-one seemed to take a blind bit of notice of him. For no-one knew that he had the Barley Sugar Soldiers. No-one acknowledged the craft and art behind the acquisitions – the careful planning it took to stake out the premises, to make sure that no-one was looking at the time, the sewing-in of extra hidden pockets into his coat, the quick sleight-of-hand it took to reach out and find the right sweet at just the right time when old Mr MacGregor was looking the other way or serving another customer.