Memory and Straw

by Memory

  Everything used to be fields when we were children.

  ‘And there were no houses there – just cows grazing here in the fields and corn growing over there by the river. That car park used to be an orchard. If you stood on your tiptoes on top of the wall, you could pluck any amount. Lovely sweet red apples. Dangerous though. I fell plenty times, and once broke my ankle.’

  He asked me to drive over the bridge and out westwards.

  ‘It’s up there,’ Grampa said, ‘The hospital. Where my brother John was a patient. I was always afraid to go there. The Sanatorium. I’d like to go there now.’

  I turned the car up the hill towards the landscaped gardens. The sun was shining on a new building with signs stating Scottish Natural Heritage. Dualchas Nàdar na h-Alba in Gaelic. I took a photo to make sure I got the spelling right.

  ‘There it is,’ said Grampa pointing towards a derelict property. Workers with safety helmets were moving about.

  ‘It’s a new development,’ one young lad told us. ‘Private flats. Wonderful view, eh?’

  And indeed it was a wonderful view: looking down on the wooded glen beneath, and the city of Inverness itself spread out towards the horizon.

  ‘Used to be a little town in my day,’ Grampa said. ‘A village really. Look at it now.’

  We walked down towards the old gardens and sat side by side on a bench next to the pond.

  ‘At least the ducks are still here,’ Grampa laughed. ‘I grew up in one world, and suddenly it’s another.’

  ‘He was older than me,’ Grampa said. ‘Eleven years older. A lifetime when you’re a child. When I was seven, he was eighteen and already in the Army. He looked splendid in his uniform. I mind that. I mind that well. The regimental tartan of the Seaforths. Bonny blues and greens with a fine red stripe. I would have died to join him. But off he went. John. My brother John. My half-brother John. They took him up here after the war. And I only visited him once. The corridors were long. The wards were painted white. In our culture, we never said ‘I love you’ to one another. That was wrong.’

  He hesitated.

  ‘You can carry on in Gaelic if you like,’ I said to him, and he began again and though I couldn’t understand the words I could make out that his sentences were longer. He would rise and fall and rise and fall and pause after several minutes – not because there was a full stop, I sensed, but simply because he ran out of breath.

  He was an old man running. Occasionally I would make words out. Cogadh was repeated often and the word agus, which seemed to link things together. The most prosaic things can seem marvellous.

  I’d never seen Grampa cry. Even when Granma died. Perhaps that was still to come, or perhaps this was part of it, or perhaps they had been together for so long that not even physical death was able to separate them by grief. He cried now. Mourned. Wept like a child, and I held him close in just the same way as he’d held me close that time I fell down the gully and cut my head when I was a child when we were out fishing. He washed my wound in the river and put a plaster on it from his fishing bag, and I wished he now had a cut like that so that I could soothe and heal it with running water and a patch.

  Afterwards we sat in silence on the bench. The wind was in the trees and enough heat in the sun to make things drowsy. Bees hovered on the nasturtiums and butterflies hovered over the geraniums. If you closed your eyes you could hear other things: a plane somewhere far off, a dog barking, someone shouting. Music leaked from a radio. Reggae, which neither Grampa or I would ever choose to listen to were it not discharging across the skies.

  Grampa rested. An old tennis court lay far below us by the edge of the trees where a man and a woman parried the ball backwards and forwards, forehand and backhand. She would hit short and he would hit long. He would fling the ball high in the air when serving and thump it with a thwack; she would rock backwards and forwards on her toes and move quickly to flash it back. The ball hit the net and they both rested. Everything was still and silent.

  Perhaps it was possible to be and not to be. For the ball to be served and returned. To be in the air and on the ground.

  It was the moment I understood my job in Artificial Intelligence. Working out the arcs and angles of things so that the response to the ball thundering down at you would be perfect for the return. A high forehand required dexterity of feet, and the margins – those forehands or backhands down the lines, or those exquisite lobs just inside the base lines were, of course, where the games were won or lost. For a moment I saw everything as a grid. Little squares and you could step from one to the next. Circles which you could hop.

  Here, in the gardens where Grand-uncle John had been healed once upon a time, was a grid to be calculated and fathomed. Not for its own sake, but so that the game could be played more marginally, more beautifully. Beauty lies at the edges. For who of us is not fascinated by those slices from Djokovic which whip down the chalk-lines with only millimetres to spare? The real game is played at the extremities of the court where only the most athletic and gifted players excel. Instinct is everything.

  There are margins where knowledge is so acute, the fringes are the only place where what it is to be human can be properly played out. As with the fairies of old who lived on the edges of society and only appeared at twilight, in the margins of the day where unknown destinies lay. Federer and Murray and Nadal and all the rest of them play the game for us.

  Here were Alexander MacKenzie’s gaps between the commandments. The spaces where life was won. I began to realise that fairy-belief and the internet were one and the same thing: ways of filtering the universe. Making sense of strange things out there which were unfathomable and which could overwhelm you at any moment. So you created tunnels and codes and commands and strategies to enter that alien world, and before you knew it you were a regular visitor to the knoll, delighting in all its sudden joys and dangers. And sometimes you were trapped there forever, by accident or design. Algorithms were the new commandments to be decoded like the fairies.

  My dream, born that day on the park bench in Dunain, was of labouring in a field where these possibilities could be examined; where the future could blend with the past; where all the knowledge and wisdom that Grampa and Granma had, and Grand-uncle John and Elizabeth and Calum and all the rest of them, from the Reverend Alexander MacKenzie to Mr Alfred Johnstone, could somehow be harnessed for the good of mankind; where I could feed this language that was hidden inside Grampa into a machine which could then not just analyse or understand or regurgitate or translate it, but transform it into a living tongue.

  My concern wasn’t really with language but with the wisdom of the ages. It was not just unfair, but immoral that the accumulated lessons of mankind would gradually disappear into so many graves and crematoriums. All their joys and sorrows, all the hard lessons earned, the crimes committed by Johnny the Miller’s son and all the rest of them, all the tears shed in hospital beds and on benches in hospital gardens, all the errors made at Sevastopol and all the horrors done at Auschwitz. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. This was more than Wikipedia, or a collective gathering of facts and information and knowledge, however comprehensive and transnational. Surely we could learn from the mistakes and triumphs of history?

  ‘You won’t,’ Emma said, months later. ‘Because you can’t. They’re two completely different things. Mathematics is not a reflection of anything. It’s not a discovery, only a human invention. A game describing nothing. It’s just an endless corridor.’

  Grampa woke.

  ‘Let’s just stay here for the night, Grampa. You look exhausted. I can put you on a flight tomorrow.’

  He was having none of it.

  ‘No. No, Gav. We’ll go on north. This is the time. But we can rest up here for a few days. That’s no problem.’

  We checked into a hotel by the river. Grampa had a front room with a balcony and a view of the water. And he asked for two radios, so that he didn’t have to search between Radios 3 and 4.

  ‘Terrible
signal,’ he said, ‘you end up in no man’s land.’

  So I fixed one radio on 3 and the other on 4, which he could switch on an off as he pleased. ‘Shostakovich and The Archers,’ he said. ‘Paradise.’

  Grampa could be stubborn as an ox. Once he got an idea into his head it was harder to shift than any mountain. His politics, for instance, were a curious mixture of arch Toryism and socialism and – as with all beliefs – you could never convince him that his ideas were full of contradictions. A belief in meritocracy alongside a deep conviction that the old landed gentry knew best, and that if the running of the country had been left to the squires everyone would have been better off.

  ‘They knew the difference between mutton and lamb,’ he’d say, ‘whereas those who own land these days wouldn’t know the difference between a cow and a sheep since they both have four legs. The only use these people have for land is to sell it to developers for more houses and offices. And who are they anyway? Nameless profiteers. Offshore companies and Russian oligarchs and Arabs. We’ll all rue the day when we’ll have no more Lord Berkshires. Squires who knew their tenants by name.’

  And when I’d argue that all land should be in common ownership anyway and that all Berkshire and his kind had done was to steal it in the first place and feed their own fat stomachs Grampa would look at me with disdain and shake his head.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Once you’ve farmed the land, tell me about it.’

  ‘If my views are full of contradictions, so be it,’ he said. ‘The sun often shines when it rains, and I’ve seen the bravest men in the world cry.’

  At heart he didn’t believe that anyone had fixed views in the first place.

  ‘See all these things people say? They’re just saying them. But they do other things.’

  And he’d explain how politicians who waxed lyrical about the rule of law all broke it when they could if it was to their own advantage.

  ‘Look at all those duck ponds.’

  ‘And all those vicars who preach about the sanctity of marriage who are forever jumping in and out of their lovers’ beds.’

  And the thing is he wasn’t accusing any of them of hypocrisy – just of being human.

  ‘For all our beliefs,’ he suggested, ‘are as flexible as the willow branch. It bends this way and that. Folk only state them to appear solid. Inwardly they are melting all over the place. Even iron melts in the furnace.’

  I disagreed with him. Some people did believe what they said. That blacks and gays and women were inferior. That Snow White and the Seven Dwarves are alive and well and living in Trump Towers where there is no global warming.

  ‘But people do believe all kinds of monstrosities,’ I said to him. ‘You watch television, don’t you? Remember that school trip I took once to Paris to see the Louvre and all that?’

  ‘Of course I do. I paid for it.’

  ‘Did I tell you the most astonishing thing I saw there?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t remember.’

  ‘The Resistance Museum.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘There were four big screens there. One showed the occupation of Paris in 1940 by the German troops. The only thing I remember is how young they all were. Kids. Just young shaven-headed boys, their veins bulging with belief and certainty. The future was all theirs. Which ended in ruins in a filthy bunker in Berlin.’

  ‘The folly of youth,’ Grampa said. ‘To think you know anything. The folly of old age too.’

  I went up to Tom na h-Iùbhraich. The Hill of the Yew Trees. There, behind the modern cemetery, is the boat-shaped hill where the Fingalian heroes lie on their elbows, waiting for the horn to blow. And beside them lies the prophet Thomas who got his gift from sleeping with the Queen o’ the Faeries herself. At one time this hill would have been all silent, before the canal was excavated and the bridges built and the traffic came. For environment is everything. You need to have green verdant mounds. Undisturbed places where you can experience things beyond the sound of traffic and human voices. Where you can hear things. Unexpected jazz or reggae spilling into the air. Sounds and noises which you can’t quite fathom, which could be a spider dying or the voice of God. Perhaps no-one lives in isolation now, except the occasional scientist in her lab and the writer in his shed and maybe a lone forester or fisherman, though all of them now have wires in their ears or Mozart in the air as they create. But this silence is something else, where you can hear the beat of your heart, the pulse in your veins, the wind soughing through the trees, the polyglot birds singing in the air. Nature whispers things into existence.

  And the light is crucial. Early morning or twilight is good, though moonlight is best. Only then do you see things which you never see at any other time. The veiling of the day illuminates things which are overshadowed by the sun. Gentle things emerge. Notions of the lost age of ploughing. Moths. Owls. Bats. Flimsy things shine and whirr. The sound of a twig snapping in the wind. That little rag flapping in the breeze. A farmer whistling in his field on the way home. The shadow of a rabbit in the moon. The moon as seen on Fifth Avenue. ‘No wonder they landed on it, for it was so near,’ Elizabeth told me.

  ‘Electricity destroyed the little people,’ Grampa said. ‘The fairies used to dance in the evening light but they scattered and fled when beams shone on them.’

  They were extinguished by the light in the way that silk burns in the flames. Replaced by brighter stars with smarter hokum here on my hand-held console.

  ‘Twilight gave you a chance to prepare for the perils of the night. What happened to twilight?’ Calum asked.

  Quenched out like a candle by the shock of electricity. Though the smoke from the candle lasted a while before the whispering darkness was slowly silenced. There is no darkness any more. Even in the middle of the night a blue console bleeps somewhere. Folk here at Tomnahurich used to hear ghosts chattering in the night until they were crowded out by keener sounds. For sound and silence are like motion and gravity. Gravity always wins.

  ‘Just look over the other side of town to Culloden Moor,’ Ruairidh Bùidseach said to me.

  That’s where I went that afternoon. Walked the neat footpaths between the graves of the clans. Chisholms. Frasers. MacKenzies. The Memorial Cairn. The Field of the English. The Well of the Dead. The Cumberland Stone. Old Leanach Cottage. Wonderful audio-visuals in the exhibition centre. I went into the café for a coffee. I saw her in the mirror. She was reading a book. She had auburn hair, cropped short, and could have been the future, except her phone rang.

  I texted Grampa to make sure he was fine. Of course I am, he texted back. Writing it out in full, the old fool. Not even a lol or a smiley. I caught a bus back to town and walked through the High Street back to the hotel. Bought some fries at McDonalds and while I walked eating them over the bridge I heard a small bell ringing. A man on a bicycle caught up with me and said something.

  ‘You’re a visitor,’ he then said, ‘because I know everyone here, and I go out of my way to introduce strangers to the delights of the capital of the Highlands.’

  He jumped off his bike and walked with me over the bridge. Once I’d finished my fries he stretched out his hand and said, ‘I’m Seonaidh Treoncaidh – pleased to meet you.’

  ‘Gav MacDonell,’ I told him. ‘Good to see you.’

  He talked to me all the way back to the hotel, telling me that the Red Shoe Soul Shuffle was the real deal.

  ‘Do you have a card?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Email?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘It’s only dictators who try to change the story,’ he said.

  Unfortunately I made a mistake and gave him my work email rather than my personal one, though it would have made no difference as I’m certain the company access all my electronic communication anyway. I should have just given him my earthly address.

  Some weeks later I received an email from Jo, a new intern at HQ, thanking me for the new feed into the neural networ
k. Under the Subject FW: ‘The Northern Red Shoe Soul Shuffle’ she wrote: ‘Hi Gav. Hope you’re well. Delighted to receive this memoir from your fieldwork. It will make Albert ever more human! J’.

  ‘Here’s hoping,’ I replied.

  A long time ago in Elgin, Morayshire – after Kennedy got shot and about the ‘Rubber Soul’ beat period – there lived a dance promoter called Albert Bonici who had a firm of ferocious but gentlemanly bouncers, a connect to the pop charts and substantial control over all the dance halls and ‘variety!’ events from Dundee in the south, to Wick and Thurso in the north.

  This geezer-impresario had a little cafe in Park St, Elgin and the back of it was the Two Red Shoes Ballroom. Albert was known to enjoy Dolly Mixtures, American cars, and chicken legs as he negotiated with a string of visiting musicians fascinatingly from London, Texas, Leeds Sheffield and Manchester, as the music of Detroit blasted from the Juke Box in the background.

  Mrs McBean’s guest house was round the corner which was visited by many ‘stars’ including The Beatles, Roy Orbison, a very young Jimmy Page, The Hollies and Wayne Fontana & The Mindbenders.

  A young Alan Mair (bass player) now ‘Only One’ and Jeff Allen (drums) now ‘Mick Taylor’ played in the ‘Beat stalkers’ and remember Albert’s Chevrolet overturned on account of ‘A Headless Badger’ on the road to Rothes one dark night with the radio still playing ‘Heat wave!’ by Martha And The Vandellas!

  Mrs McBean should not be confused with BABY FACE Beenz McBean, then bass player with fabulous Inverness combo, The Flock!

  So here’s the story – soulful, sad but true – about some fascinating faeries (people) l once knew, got ‘nowhere to run!’. Later there was Liverpool Tommy and the other Swansea Pete and a Hidden place of Northern Archaeology, the Red Shoes Soul Shuffle.

  Whether it was the first night I heard Johnny & The Copycats doing ‘lt’s AIright’ by Curtis Mayfield or the Nashville Teens doing ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah’ in Craigellachie Town Hall... Those were the days when wearing ‘Beatle Boots’ could have got you beaten up. I and other musicians found solace in the 45s of Garnett Mims, Lee Dorsey – not to mention The Supremes – and The Four Tops. For us, the USA and the cities of Detroit and New York were millions and trillions of light years away. It was 1965 in the far north-east of Scotland – there wasn’t even a motorway to Edinburgh then!