Red Shift

by Alan Garner

  ALAN GARNER (b. 1934) has lived for most of his life in Cheshire, England. His first book, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen came out in 1960 and since then he has published eight novels for children and adults, as well as opera libretti, plays, and collections of folktales. Among his books are The Owl Service (winner of the Carnegie Medal; 1967), The Stone Book Quartet (comprising The Stone Book, Granny Reardun, Tom Fobble’s Day, and The Aimer Gate; 1983), Strandloper (1996), and Thursbitch (2003). In 2001 Garner was appointed to the Order of the British Empire for services to literature.

  RED SHIFT

  ALAN GARNER

  With a new introduction by the author

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Red Shift

  Dedication

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  Garbage often makes good compost.

  In the 1960s I was rootling among the bins waiting to be emptied, and I came upon a newspaper article, the report on an inquest into the death of a young man. It was the story of a lovers’ quarrel. Both worked in the computing industry, and their relationship was stormy. One evening, in a pub, he threw a punch tape at her and left. A week later he killed himself. Only then did she think to run the program. It was a complete apology for his behaviour; but he said that if she didn’t care enough to read the tape within the week he would know that he had ruined everything and life would not be worth living. With no conscious purpose in mind, I filed the article.

  On a rocky hill, ten miles from where I live, is Mow Cop village. A descendant of an old Mow Cop family told me a story she’d heard from her grandmother, who could neither read nor write. She said that long ago a group of Spanish slaves who were being marched north “to build a wall” had escaped and set up a community on Mow Cop. And that, said the grandmother, was why the inhabitants of Mow Cop are swarthy. It’s true that the local families tend to be dark-skinned and black-haired. But what really startled me about this story was something else. I had been educated as a classicist, and I knew that one of the most enigmatic events in the history of the Roman occupation of Britain is the disappearance, about AD 120, of Legio Nona Hispana, the Ninth “Spanish” Legion, one of the main controlling forces of Northern Britain. Yet about five thousand men vanished and had to be replaced by another legion. The story does not make sense in the context of Roman bureaucratic record keeping.

  The disappearance of the Ninth coincided with a visit to Britain by the emperor Hadrian, at which time he decided to build a stone barrier of seventy-three miles along the northernmost boundary of the province: Hadrian’s Wall; still one of the most impressive feats of engineering in Europe.

  The grandmother could not have known any of this. Yet that is how oral memory works. An historical fact is changed by a process of Chinese whispers into a local anecdote. Spanish slaves were being marched north to build a wall. Legio Nona Hispana was somehow expunged about the time when Hadrian was in Britain and decided to seal off the empire. It was enough for me.

  Below Mow Cop there is the village of Barthomley, and on Christmas eve 1643, the parish church was the scene of one of the cruellest massacres in the cruellest conflict on English soil: the seventeenth-century Civil Wars. There are two accounts of the event, one from each side of the conflict. The first is in the diary of a Puritan vicar, Edward Burghall.

  The enemy now came to Barthomley; as they marched they set upon the church, which had in it about twenty neighbours, that had gone in for safety; but the lord Byron’s troop, and Connought, a major to Colonel Sneyd, set upon them, and won the church; the men fled into the steeple, but the enemy burning the forms, rushes, mats &c, made such a smoke, that being almost stifled, they called for quarter, which was granted by Connought; but when they had them in their power, they stripped them all naked, and most cruelly murdered twelve of them, contrary to the laws of arms, nature, and nations. Connought cut the throat of Mr. John Fowler, a hopeful young man, and only three of them escaped miraculously, the rest being cruelly wounded. Christmas-day, and the day after, they plundered Barthomley of goods and cloaths, and stripped naked both men and women.

  Sir John Byron, the Royalist commander in charge of the attack, wrote a letter to the Marquis of Newcastle, dated 26 December 1643: “I have thought fit to acquaint your Excellency that the rebels had possessed themselves of a church at Bartumley, but wee presently beat them forth of it, and put them all to the sword, which I find to be the best way to proceed with their kind of people, for mercy to them is cruelty.”

  I had known about the massacre of Barthomley for many years, but soon after hearing Grandma’s story of the “Spanish slaves,” the image of Barthomley began to haunt my mind. I can’t say why. There was no obvious connection between the two. But I felt the warmth of compost working.

  Four months after hearing about the “Spanish slaves” I was reading the graffiti on the wall of the waiting room of a local railway station.

  It was the usual stuff, including one record, in chalk, of teenage romance, written in the form of the ubiquitous mantra: “Janet Heathcote + Alan Flask. It is true.” Then the sky fell in on me, and, with it, Red Shift.

  Someone had come back later and had written immediately below the mantra, in silver lipstick, without punctuation or a capital letter, the cramped, single line: “not really now not any more.”

  This is how my novels arrive. I don’t go looking for them. They come looking for me.

  not really now not any more: Why should it bring spontaneously and simultaneously into my consciousness the newspaper cutting, by then years old and forgotten, though still kept, the Ninth Spanish Legion, and the massacre of Barthomley? I have no explanation. But I knew that I was pregnant with a novel, though what it was, or why, remained hidden.

  I opened a file and a notebook and began by collating the three main images. All they had in common, it seemed, was brutality, death, and mindlessness, to which was soon added insanity. Why enter into such a nightmare world? I have no answer. I can only speak of my experience.

  The way I write is to make connections between disparate images, which then draw in more images unsought, making more connections.

  The intellect plays two parts in this: at the start, when I have to learn everything I can about the primary “sources“; and at the end, when the novel is finished and needs to be edited and honed. But the story is the province of the unconscious mind. Here the conscious is called upon to be no more than the occasional drudge. All this requires a rigorous self-discipline: the discipline not to write but to wait, watch, dream, record. This goes on for years, as pictures float and congeal of their own volition; and then I begin to see characters and to hear them speak in the theatre of the head. I write down what I see and hear. It is exhausting, but I don’t think it is mysterious.

  The final paragraph or sentence of the novel always appears first, without context or meaning, but with a hard edge around it that I’ve come to know. I set it down at once, in a different part of the manuscript, then leave it and let the rest of the story write me.

  Eventually the book starts to cohere, and the writing accelerates. From being a few words at infrequent intervals it becomes an unstoppable torrent, over which I have no control. Day and night lose their meaning, and I still don’t know what is going to happen, or how it will be resolved.

  Then there comes the moment when that final paragraph or sentence appears over the horizon. What if the story misses? Will it take me on an endless journey out of the galaxy? But, so far, the docking has always been a smooth click. It is done. Till the next time.

  With Red Shift, from the moment of “
not really now not any more” to the docking manoeuvre was seven years, of which the last eighteen months were the writing, and the rest waiting; but the waiting was the real work, preceding the composition, and the book was complete at last with the reappearance of the appointed final words. The pattern has been the same with every novel. All the other words too are there from the beginning, but they have to mature, until, through an alchemy I do not understand but must accept, the violence of the seed is transmuted to the consummation of the flower.

  —ALAN GARNER

  RED SHIFT

  For Billy

  “Shall I tell you?”

  “What?”

  “Shall I?”

  “Tell me what?” said Jan.

  “What do you want to know?”

  Jan picked up a fistful of earth and trickled it down the neck of his shirt.

  “Hey!”

  “Stop fooling, then.”

  Tom shook his trouser legs. “That’s rotten. I’m all gritty.”

  Jan hung her arms over the motorway fence. Cars went by like brush marks. “Where are they going? They look so serious.”

  “Well,” said Tom. “Let’s work it out. That one there is travelling south at, say, one hundred and twenty kilometres per hour, on a continental shelf drifting east at about five centimetres per year—”

  “I might’ve guessed—!”

  “—on a planet rotating at about nine hundred and ninety kilometres per hour at this degree of latitude, at a mean orbital velocity of thirty kilometres per second—”

  “Really?”

  “—in a solar system travelling at a mean galactic velocity of twenty-five kilometres per second, in a galaxy that probably has a random motion—”

  “Knickers.”

  “—random knickers of about one hundred kilometres per second, in a universe that appears to be expanding at about one hundred and sixteen kilometres per second per megaparsec.”

  Jan scooped up more earth.

  “The short answer’s Birmingham,” he said, and ducked.

  Jan looked across the flooded sand quarry behind them towards the Rudheath caravan site among the birch trees. “Come on.” The earth was still in her hand.

  “Where?”

  “What were you going to tell me?”

  “Oh, that.” He took his shoe off and turned it upside down. “It really is grotty being gritty. I was going to tell you when I first saw you.”

  “When was it?”

  “When you came back from Germany.”

  “Germany?” The earth ran through her fingers. “Germany? We’ve known each other longer than that.”

  “But I didn’t see you until you got out of the car: and then I—saw you.”

  “I wasn’t away more than a fortnight.”

  “What was it like?”

  “Anywhere.”

  “The people you stayed with?”

  “Ordinary.”

  “So why go?”

  “To see what it was like.”

  “And she found that the ground was as hard, that a yard was as long— No. She found that a metre was neater—”

  “Tom—”

  “Yes?”

  “Lay off.”

  He put his head on her shoulder. “I couldn’t stand it if you went now,” he said. They walked from the motorway fence along a spit of sand between the lakes.

  “ ‘Grotty’ is excessively ugly,” said Tom. “A corruption of ‘grotesque.’ It won’t last.”

  “I love you.”

  “I’m not sure about the mean galactic velocity. We’re with M31, M32, M33 and a couple of dozen other galaxies. They’re the nearest. What did you say?”

  “I love you.”

  “Yes.” He stopped walking. “That’s all we can be sure of. We are, at this moment, somewhere between the M6 going to Birmingham and M33 going nowhere. Don’t leave me.”

  “Hush,” said Jan. “It’s all right.”

  “It’s not. How did we meet? How could we? Between the M6 and M33. Think of the odds. In all space and time. I’m scared.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “Scared of losing—”

  “You’re not—”

  “I always win.”

  She pressed the back of her hand against his cheek.

  “Tell me,” he said. “I’ve been waiting all afternoon.”

  The motorway roared silently. Birds skittered the water in flight to more distant reeds, and the iron water lay again, flat light reflecting no sky. The caravans and the birches. Tom.

  “Next week,” said Jan. “Right?” Her knuckles were comfortless between his. “Next week. I go next week.” She tried to reach the pain, but his eyes would not let her in.

  “London?”

  “Yes.” Teeth showing through lips drawn: lines from sides of nostrils: frown and pain lines. “And my parents—”

  “It’s a pretty mean galaxy.”

  She pulled him to her. “You’re just a baby.”

  “Yes.”

  “Upset.”

  “I’m not upset. I’m panicking. Love me.”

  “I do. I do love you.”

  “For ever.”

  “How—”

  “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.”

  “Quote.”

  “More know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows. And that’s another.” He stood back from her and bent down to skim a stone across the lake. “On one side lay the M6, and on one lay a great water, and the site was full. Seven bounces! Bet you can’t do more than three!”

  “Which of you am I supposed to believe?” said Jan.

  “Both.”

  “When will you grow up?”

  “We were born grown up.”

  “I love you: you idiots.”

  They went round the caravan site by the sand washer. It was a tower, with chutes that fed sand into a piled cone. There was a catwalk to the top, over the chutes. The top was a very small steel plate.

  Tom ran up and climbed to the plate. He stood slowly, feeling for his balance. The sand pile was a perfect gradient, one in one. Tom spread his arms, thirty feet above the ground.

  “If you drop,” he called to Jan, “it doesn’t half rattle your teeth. But if you jump out as far as you can, it’s flying, and you hit the sand at the same angle right at the bottom, no trouble. It’s the first time that grips. You have to trust.”

  He leapt through the air clear of everything and ploughed the sand with his heels.

  “Coming?” He looked up at her.

  “No thanks.”

  “It’s not what it seems. Or aren’t you good on heights?”

  “I don’t like being gritty.”

  They crossed the road to the houses where Jan lived.

  “That was fairly stupid,” said Tom.

  “I was impressed.”

  “Not the jump. That was stupid, but the other was worse.”

  “It’s happened before.”

  “And it’ll happen again.”

  “I know.”

  “Stupid and infantile.”

  They were clear of the birch wood, by open fields. Television screens in the caravans flickered among the white bark.

  “Corpse candles,” said Tom.

  “Snob. They look cosy.”

  “They are. Togetherness!”

  “Don’t take it out on them. I’d rather not live in London; but I do want to nurse. It’s as simple as that.”

  “I wasn’t stopping you.”

  “You weren’t?”

  “We’ll adapt,” he said. “You’ll get a fair bit of time off, even in training, and you can come home. It’s quick from London. I’m used to you every day, that’s all, knowing I’ll see you— Oh my God.”

  Two men were putting up a For Sale notice in Jan’s garden.

  “I was trying to tell you,” she said.

  “No one does this to me.”

  “No one’s doing anything to anybody.”

  “What’s that, then?
”

  “I was trying to tell you. Mum and Dad have been given a unit in Portsmouth. We’re all moving. We’ve never stayed long anywhere.”

  “I reckon it’s a pretty mean galaxy.”

  He took a key out of his pocket and unlocked the door. They went inside the house. There was a red light on the telephone-answering machine. Jan pulled a face.

  “What’s the matter?” said Tom.

  “Mum has a patient who rings every day. It’s rubbish.”

  “Not to him at the other end.”

  “Precisely.”

  “How can they stay sane, doing that work?”

  “They never let themselves be involved. It’s in the training.”

  “But they’re always on call, especially with that thing.”

  “What, the Tam? There are some patients who’d rather talk to a phone than to Mum or Dad.”

  “Get away.”

  “They would. They feel safer. A tape recorder doesn’t want things from them.”

  “A cassette confessor.”

  “If you like.”

  “An automatic answering divine. God in the machine.”

  “Don’t be daft,” said Jan. “It’s only something that helps two people help a lot of others. It means they’re never out of touch.”

  “Or never in.”

  “They’re busy.” She switched the tape on and spoke into the telephone. “This is Jan. I’m going to the caravan for tea, then Tom’s coming back to work.”

  “Do you ever meet?” said Tom.

  “I didn’t ask for that.”

  “Sorry.”

  “OK. But it wasn’t funny.”

  “No.”

  They sat by the fire; landscapes were in the coals.

  “Are you sulking?” said Jan.

  “Thinking.”

  “What?”

  “Plans.”

  “Secret?”

  “No.” Tom fingered the stonework of the hearth. “I’ll miss this nonentity box.”

  “I shan’t,” said Jan. “All our houses are bland, wherever we go. Dad has to buy and sell quickly.”

  “It’s better than a caravan. It gives you room. Every way. Plenty of space for ducks on these walls.”